Close with Power

Near end of a speech, slip this into your presentation: "This is the only March 16, 2010 there will ever be. We will never meet again as a group just as we are meeting today. Someone will be absent, someone will have moved on, someone new will be here; we will never have this same assembly of people again. This gathering is a singularity in the universe."

Keeping Meeting Notes Organized

If you're overwhelmed by what crosses your desk, it's worth considering the benefits of having a file folder for each month of the year and a file folder for each day of the month. This idea, the "tickler file," sytem has been in practice for years.

Create a file for days 1-31 of the month, and place it at the front of one of your file drawers. Behind that, have a file for each month of the year. If it's the second day of the month, for example, but you receive something that you won't need to deal with until the 15th, then put it in the file for, say, the 13th to allow yourself some slack. If anything comes in that you don't need to handle now, put it in your tickler file. This yields some immediate benefits. It keeps your desk clear and eliminates a lot of worry about where things go.

As the days and months go by, you continually take files that were in front and put them in the back. Once you get this system in place, you'll find that many of the things you file may not need to be acted on later. The benefits of this system are immediate.

Keep Them on Time

Strive to be the one speaker at their meeting or convention who gets the meeting back on schedule. If you were scheduled for 60 minutes and you're given 42, still end at the original time, on the button.

It's an old saw that few speakers are ever penalized for speaking too little. Many are penalized in the minds of their listeners for speaking too long. You can become a hero to the host or meeting planner and possibly the larger group, by getting them back on track.

Offering Your Sharp Attention

Science has shown that your brain works best when it gives sharp attention in one direction, so such as when you practice doing only one thing at a time. If you doubt that this is sound advice, then you can set up a very easy test in your own home.

Take any three tasks, such as drawing stars on a piece of paper, linking paper clips, and stacking pennies. Now play against someone in your family. Each of you has to do the same number of tasks, perhaps it is to draw twenty stars, link twenty paper clips, and stack twenty pennies.

One person proceeds doing each task individually, by drawing all twenty stars on a piece of paper, linking all twenty paper clips together, and stacking all twenty pennies. The other person has to rotate between the three tasks, doing three or four stars, two or three paperclips, three or four pennies. All other things being equal, who is going to win every time? The person who doesn't switch tasks frequently will be the winner.

Arriving Well in Advance

It might be semi-comforting to retain a speaker who's very busy. After all, if many other groups are hiring this speaker, he or she must be good, right?

If the speaker doesn't arrive the night before, or at least two to three hours in advance of the presentation, watch out. Professional speakers arrive in advance, work out the room logistics, meet with the production and audio-visual personnel, walk the room, give equipment a test run, and in general make themselves thoroughly familiar with the meeting venue.

No matter how good the speaker may be, if he or she expects to get off a plane, jump into a taxi, and make it to your site with moments to spare, be on guard, for you may get a performance that is not quite up to par or doesn't fit the needs of your audience.

Hopefully not During Meetings

Workers waste more than two hours a day on average by surfing the Web, conducting personal business, chatting with co-workers, and just zoning out, according to an online survey conducted by AOL and Salary.com.

The Wisdom of Staying on Time

Here a few ideas from EffectiveMeetings.com on the topic of staying on time:

* State that the meeting will begin promptly at the scheduled time and that all participants should be on time.

* Send a reminder e-mail thirty minutes before the meeting begins and encourage meeting participants to arrive on time.

* Ensure that you begin the meeting at the scheduled time. If you've encouraged others to be prompt, don't embarrass yourself by showing up late.

* Close the meeting room doors at the scheduled time.

* If your meeting starts a little late, still finish the meeting at the scheduled time. It's inconsiderate to assume the participants' schedules revolve around your meeting, so wrap up the meeting when you promised.

* Consider creating a "latecomer jar" to which meeting participants must contribute one dollar for each minute they arrive late to meetings. At the end of the week, you can buy muffins or donuts for everyone who attended the meeting… courtesy of the latecomers!

A Frequent Conference Query

In seminars and workshops I offer on having more Breathing Space, invariably someone poses a personal dilemma: "No matter how conscious I am of saving time throughout the day, I still find myself racing the clock. What, if anything, am I doing wrong?"

My answer, consider that any one-hour activity you undertake in the course of the day, each day, will consume one solid year out of the next 24 years of your life. One hour is to 24 hours as one year is to 24 years. With this realization, consider the cumulative effects of reading junk
mail for only 30 minutes a day or spending 15 minutes a day in line at the bank -- both of which could and should be avoided if you used mail, phone, or email services.