Schedule a conference with yourself.

January 12th, 2009

One of the simplest productivity tips in the world — one you probably already know — is well worth repeating:

When work HAS to get done, book a conference room just for yourself.

Make it even better: go in without your phone or your laptop. Don’t use the computer or anything else that’s more complicated than a whiteboard.

Seems like I’ve known this trick forever, yet for days now I’ve wrestled with getting several big things organized. I just couldn’t seem to get a handle on them . . . until I sequestered myself in a quiet conference room, spread out all my papers, and spent one hour getting my act together.

That hour was worth three, or maybe ten. It achieved all of these good things:

  • broke conceptual logjams;
  • eliminated a wad of paper notes that I boiled down into one whiteboard diagram;
  • left the remaining notes arranged in better categories; and
  • gave me a simple set of marching orders — tasks I can do immediately.

You can guess the bigger umbrella outcome: it energized me. And in my experience, if you can keep your energy up, you can take a crack at just about anything.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a stack of marching orders to attend to . . .

~

Do you use the conference-room trick?
What other methods do you use to break your logjams?

~

Photo by James Long.
Category: Productivity

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to the RSS feed so you can receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

4 Comments so far

Ed Illig January 12th, 2009 7:39 pm

Oddly, I’ve long been an advocate of renting a hotel room outfitted with a white board, coffee and ice water – with or without colleagues in tow.

The modicum amount of money spent on the room lends a sense of value, a desire to produce to an end, sans pressure.

I find unpacking or defining broad initiatives in unfamiliar surroundings, devoid of familiar distractions, promotes a more acute focus and resolve in me.

Tim Walker January 14th, 2009 1:53 pm

Ed — I *love* the hotel room idea. If memory serves, young Bill Gates used a remote hotel room (in Arizona, maybe?) to write his first version of MS-DOS.

Brian Reed January 29th, 2009 8:53 pm

Conference room + Fresh pad of sticky notes = Successful projects (even complicated ones with lots of moving parts)

10 MORE top productivity tips. -- Hoover’s Business Insight Zone July 10th, 2009 5:14 am

[...] Schedule a conference with yourself. [...]

Leave A Comment