mattharvey72

Making Meetings Better

Many people come away from their meetings with the ‘well that’s 2 hours of my life I’ll never get back’ feeling. So how do we make meetings better and a good use of time?

In a busy life we get tasks which have to be done. Successfully prioritising these tasks will free up time and mean the right tasks are completed first, leaving other tasks for later. Many approaches to prioritising tasks have been developed over time. The level of sophistication of how to prioritise your tasks will dependContinue reading “Task Prioritisation”

Time Management

Time Management, when done well, will make you better prepared, organised and ready to succeed, rather than barely keeping up.

Plan to Plan

When most people start a task they jump straight in and commence the task. This gets the ball rolling and they start their research or even commence developing the product – especially if they have a template to use or something someone else has used previously which was successful. However, the downside of this isContinue reading “Plan to Plan”

The Fundamentals

What are the Fundamentals? The fundamentals are those aspects or behaviours which underpin everything you do. They are not a list of ‘what’ to do, more the ‘how’ or ‘why’ which you should take into consideration. Think of them as the framework. What I have listed here are some things to think about and inContinue reading “The Fundamentals”

The Staff Officer Program – An Overview

What’s this? This group of articles is the distillation of the things I have learned over my career, which so far has spanned 30 years. I have been very fortunate with the experiences I have had and the people with whom I’ve worked. I have tried to take a lesson away from each interaction –Continue reading “The Staff Officer Program – An Overview”

Professional Development – The Staff Officer

One thing I have noticed is that we don’t develop good staff officers – we don’t prepare them for staff positions in a headquarters supporting a senior commender. I plan to address that issue with a number of Blog posts in the coming months. Partly to share my own experience, but really to clarify myContinue reading “Professional Development – The Staff Officer”

Administrative Support

Introduction I had the opportunity recently of travelling to the United States as part of a group for work. We had a task to do while we were there, more than just attending a conference and with people within the group doing a variety of different tasks and working different shift times. All staying inContinue reading “Administrative Support”

Strategic Planning

Strategic planning – an essential skill that is not well understood. Most people bumble their way through life’s experiences, making decisions on the fly based on emotions at that particular time. But that isn’t how successful entities do it. A strategic plan allows the individual or organisation to pre-decide how to act (or react) inContinue reading “Strategic Planning”