Hey There!

When you read this I'll be on the road to a family reunion in Kentucky. I am an introvert, so my internal stress levels have been increasing as the day draws near.

One guaranteed stressor for me in these situations is coordinating mealtimes. Quite regularly the family will declare they want to do dinner, but then get into whatever they're doing for hours and forget that they said they were going to do dinner. So when everyone is hangry they then try to scramble and figure out how to feed 20+ people.

Why I'm bringing this up isn't just to share the screams that go unheard in my head, but rather to share two ways I combat this, and it's the same thing I do for meetings at work.

The situation is that you are going to go into a meeting and you know historically the meeting rambles and nobody is quite sure what the results were or who was supposed to do what.

The first thing you can do is try to clarify the purpose of what the meeting is about. All to often meetings start with an assumption that everyone knows why they are meeting. A simple, "Real quick, what is the purpose of this meeting again," or, "Just to confirm, the purpose of the meeting is..."

Taking this step helps create a lot more focus in the meeting and is the set-up for the second step which is to re-affirm what you will or will not do after the meeting. Unless you're the facilitator, you can simply affirm your steps, timing, etc, and leave. If you are the facilitator, you might need to prompt people to summarize their own agreements.

I've been in so many meetings and at different clients where just doing these two things made a huge difference. It's also how I corral 20+ family members to eat meals.

I put this Twitter thread together on how to approach a question people are getting asked in interviews.

@recursivefaults

I've seen some stuff going on about weird interviews happening now that the "Pandemic is over"So I'm gonna do what I do and turn this into a potential opportunity that would get me through interviews.

1:06 AM · Jun 09, 2021

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Enjoy,

Ryan Latta