Month: January 2020

There’s some debate about who actually created the 5 hour work day but most people (Forbes, Money etc) cite Lasse Rheingans – CEO of Rheingans Digital Enabler as one of the first companies to start a 5 hour work day.

Most of the 5 hour work day stories seem to have similar outcomes. Happier staff and increased productivity without a reduction in holiday or staff benefits, everyone wins. Amazing, so why doesn’t it work for everyone and why do we hear so many stories of people trying to implement it failing?

It’s all about focus

Working a 5 hour day requires real discipline, removing all the extraneous things we do on an average workday. Think about it:

• Coffee, tea (whatever we don’t judge)
• Snacks, see above
• Chatting with colleagues
• Irrelevant emails, phone calls texts
• Day dreaming
• MEETINGS, or most importantly pointless meetings

Losing all these things from our workday takes time, effort and discipline and it’s a struggle for most of us. Meetings (well they had to be didn’t they) are probably the biggest culprit, we know they’re a problem. In most cases it hovers between 35% and 50% of our work week spent in meetings, that’s a whopping amount of time! Image what life would be like with better meetings?

Let’s put that into context if you work a 45 hour week that’s 22.5 hours in meetings. Let’s be optimistic and say 50% of that meeting time is wasted, that’s about 11 hours a week. So there’s 2 hours a day saved!!

The rest just requires focus. I’ve been trying this for myself I recently decided to try an approach that focused 100% on tasks. I split this into 2-3 chunks each day of similar tasks and shut off every distraction and non-related activity. It works really well. I’ve found myself rattling through my tasks, making very few errors. More importantly though it’s de-cluttered my brain. My attention is spent working on the tasks at hand, thinking time is built in but it’s not off topic. I’d love to also say I’ve cut down pointless meetings, but we don’t really have those given what we do. I’m drinking less coffee and having breaks when I need them, win.

Taking the first step

Try a few things yourself. Turn your phone off for periods during the day, if you plan this well it will coincide with the times when you’re on your phone for non-work stuff. Try not to use chat during certain times, similar to the phone it’s a distraction. Turn your email off and only open it at set times during the day to check and reply.

It all sounds easy but it’s these things we use to break up the day and grab a mental rest, try it for yourself and see how you get on. Let us know we’d love to hear the outcome?

The biggy of course is meetings, try saying no to meetings! Ask yourself the question will I add value? If the answer is no then tell the organiser, they’ll likely thank you for it. When you organise meetings yourself, be disciplined, set an agenda, ask attendees if they feel they can contribute and be disciplined with the follow up.

If you can get close to the calculations we highlighted above you could be saving a whole day in time, that’s massive. The upside is obvious, less stress, more time with family, more time spent doing the things you want to do and more productivity for your company.

Good luck!!

Take the easy option, try Amazemeet to help make your meetings better

So who’s benefiting from Amazemeet? Sometimes is easy to lose sight. But, we’re all about people, after all people have meetings!

So who’s benefiting from Amazemeet?
After all Amazemeet is a broad church, that’s certainly true of our user base, and so it should be as everyone deserves to have better, effective meetings. We speak to the Amazemeet community regularly so we thought we’d share the story of three people in very different roles and how they have used Amazemeet to free up time and make the meetings they do have better.

Johnny, large IT firm.

Johnny works at one of the big global IT companies. He’s got a hybrid role where he travels extensively and when he’s not he’s on video calls and conferences regularly. Because his time is often taken up travelling he wanted a way to make the meetings he does have more efficient. Amazemeet ticks that box perfectly. Using the platform Johnny can tailor each meeting so the attendees, timings, timescale and outcomes are all clearly laid out and defined. Shareable notes make it easy for him to catch up and keep everyone informed, especially around tasks and next steps.

Like a lot of people he’s found that using Amazemeet has really streamlined his meetings he and allows him to spend more time “doing” his job. This is essential because his role demands a lot of meetings. He’s now in a place where he spends far less of his evening’s catching up on actual work.

Kat, freelance strategist

Like a lot of people Kat left her role in a large consulting firm for the more flexible world of freelancing. Or so she thought. As she took on more clients she found herself having more and more meetings and spending more time account managing than actually delivering. Her goal was twofold, get her client contact under control and get her life back. Amazemeet helped with both. All Kat’s client meetings are run on Amazemeet and the client feedback is impressive.

Amazemeet has allowed her to structure her client meetings with clear goals and all invitees can be kept up to date with follow-ons. Much like Johnny getting the time back from meandering meetings has freed up time for work and her home life. Maybe the 5 hour working day is insight!

Peter, co-founder scale up

This is a familiar story. Start-up gets funded and grows, does well, has round two investment, grows some more. Somebody then realises that process and management haven’t grown, meetings take forever, there are too many with too many attendees. We’ve been there!

Peter was desperate to find a way to get out of the bad meeting cycle that had taken hold. In fact many companies are experiencing this they just don’t recognise it. So as they say recognition of a problem is the first step to solving it. Pete started by trialling the free version, he liked it and soon all the companies meetings were being run via the platform. Time saved, he estimates, is up to 25% of the working week across the whole company, OK there’s only 35 people but that’s a hell of a lot of time.

So the next time you ask the question, who’s benefitting from Amazemeet, think of Johnny, Kat and Pete. I’m sure their stories are familiar. Better still why not tell us your story we’d love to hear it and share with the Amazemeet community. More importantly if you’re stuck in a cycle of bad meetings let us know, we can help.

Everyone should have great meetings, but not everyone does. Amazemeet is here to help try it FREE.

The response to our Christmas Giving campaign has been amazing, so many of you have voted for the cause you support the most.

I had the most amazing thing happen to me today. Totally unexpected but turned out to be one of the best feelings of the day.

Today was the the day I had penned in my calendar to make the donations that we promised to make as our Christmas gift – the one that we asked you to help direct.

I checked our counter and the results were humbling – and close!

Over 900 of you – Amazemeeters – responded to our Christmas Giving email and selected where you would like us to donate our $500 gift. The results were close, in 1st place was Climate Change and tied in 2nd place were Refugees and Children focused causes. In the end we decided to split the donation 250/125/125 so that each of these really important causes got something of our gift.

As I made the donation on each site and received the notifications of gratitude, I felt such a profound sense of contributing to something that otherwise seems so insurmountable. I felt proud that in a small way, we could help make a difference and for that I am incredibly grateful to each one of the Amazemeet users who engaged in this campaign.

There are Amazemeet users all over the world, so it was fitting that we picked some organisations that addressed climate change, refugee and child welfare on a global scale.

For climate change we selected the Coalition for Rainforest Nations (CfRN) – a truly international partnership of governments and organisations , communities that together have 90% of the world’s remaining rainforests under their management. They have an incredible duty and burden to protect this for all of Earth’s inhabitants.

To support refugees, we chose the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) – the arm of the UN that is first on the scene when refugee crises happen, deploying vital aid and logistics to help those affected to get through it. In recent years – through conflict, environmental disaster, economic meltdown – they have been stretched to the limits and still they are there.

Finally to help the cause of welfare of children, we selected UNICEF – the United Nations Children’s Fund – a UN agency that operates in 190 nations helping to uphold the rights of children to education, nutrition, health, equality and other incredibly important needs that many in the world take for granted. Unicef does this both at strategic levels with governments and in the field – for example leading childhood immunisation against nasty diseases like cholera, measles and others.

Whilst you’re here did you know we’ve just launched a new version of Amazemeet. Try it free.