“Work simply. Live fully.” This week CMLE focuses on the following work productivity tip from Work Simply, Carson Tate’s popular book. At CMLE, we’ve boiled down Tate’s wealth of knowledge from Work Simply to a few key points; please see the book for more detail and resources. At the bottom, see links to earlier tips in the series! Let’s all be our best selves….
This week’s activity: Change the way you handle meetings
When done correctly, meetings can be a powerful way to communicate, share ideas, and delegate work. They can lead to more productive teams. Unfortunately, as Carson Tate shares in her bookWork Simply, “Too often, meetings are ineffective, irrelevant, wasteful, and costly.” In order to rectify this, she suggests a few fixes to try: examine the value of each meeting you are invited to, explore the alternatives available to an in-person meeting, require an agenda be used in each meeting, and assign accountability for any tasks delegated during the meeting.
At CMLE, we are dedicated to connecting our members with each other, in order to share resources, experiences, and library enthusiasm! As we make our way to each member library and hear about all the great things that happen at each one, we write up a blog post and put it on our website for everyone to access.
But, just in case you happen to miss a Library Visit post, we have created a page specifically for them! Check it out and admire all the great work your colleagues are doing! We will continue to update the page as we continue to visit more libraries.
We will be taking a short break from visiting libraries, as the holiday time is crazy for everyone, but in the New Year we will be back at it! So, if we haven’t been to see your library yet, keep an eye on your email! 🙂
You probably already know that at CMLE, we offer a service called “Notable Dates for your Noggin” which feature special holidays and birthdays of authors, as well as publications of well-known books. In an effort to help you get more from this service, we’ve decided to select one “Notable Date” each month to feature. We will include a few fun programming and activity ideas too, all for you to use!
November 29th is C.S. Lewis’ birthday. Lewis is well known for his series The Chronicles of Narnia and also for his many Christian texts. According to Biography.com, even as a very young boy Lewis had an active imagination that contributed to his love of fantasy.
Or bring Narnia to life, by making your own forest of snow globes or test your culinary skills by making some Turkish Delight! And here’s a link to a site that has tons of Narnia-related learning resources, like lesson plans, worksheets, and coloring pages.
Videos can be a great way to demonstrate your services, and to advocate for your library! Check out these library videos, to see what kinds of things other libraries are trying.
Does your library make videos? Would you like to?? At CMLE Headquarters, we want to encourage video creation and sharing, so tell us about your work!
2016 Livonia Public Library Summer Reading Program … Parkour!
“Do you need a book recommendation? Have you ever seen a librarian stunt double? Check out our 2016 Livonia Library Summer Reading video featuring Phoenix Freerunning Academy and our very limber librarians. Jump into action on June 4, 2016 by grabbing a reading log at any of the Livonia Public Libraries! Visit our website for more info: http://livoniapubliclibrary.org. And for the Children’s summer reading log, visit our Children’s Programs page: http://livoniapubliclibrary.org/kids/…. Library Parkour!”
Save the Troy Library “Adventures In Reverse Psychology”
“The city of Troy, Michigan was facing a budget shortfall, and was considering closing the Troy Public Library for lack of funds. Even though the necessary revenues could be raised through a miniscule tax increase, powerful anti-tax groups in the area were organized against it. A vote was scheduled amongst the city’s residents, to shut the library or accept the tax increase, and Leo Burnett Detroit decided to support the library by creating a reverse psychology campaign. Yard signs began appearing that read: “Vote to Close Troy Library on August 2nd – Book Burning Party on August 5th.” No one wants to be a part of a town that burns books, and the outraged citizens of Troy pushed back against the “idiotic book burners” and ultimately supported the tax increase, thus ensuring the library’s survival.”
A Vision Shared: School Board/District Planning for
School Library Advocacy
“This short film provides pointers for creating a school board/district wide vision statement for school libraries and emphasizes the importance of advocating for school libraries.”
Librarians Do Gaga
“Students and faculty from the University of Washington’s Information School get their groove on.”
Librarian Rhapsody- Shoalhaven Library Staff
This is the most unusual annual report from a library that I’ve ever seen – but combining telling their community about the things they have been doing over the past year with a strong message advocating for the library is a great touch! (Keep watching to the end for the final couple of sentences!)
“Work simply. Live fully.” This week CMLE focuses on the following work productivity tip from Work Simply, Carson Tate’s popular book. At CMLE, we’ve boiled down Tate’s wealth of knowledge from Work Simply to a few key points; please see the book for more detail and resources. At the bottom, see links to earlier tips in the series! Let’s all be our best selves….
This week’s activity: Learn effective ways to work together
Working as part of a team can be both rewarding and at times, frustrating. According to Carson Tate’s book Work Simply, this frustration is often the result of conflicting Productivity Styles. In order to overcome these conflicts and the resulting misunderstandings, it is necessary to take into account the different strengths and blind spots of each Productivity Style.
Recently, you discovered your Productivity Style with a simple assessment. Encourage your co-workers to take the assessment to determine their Productivity Style.
Find your team members’ Productivity Style(s) to gain further awareness about their strengths and potential blind spots:
Prioritizer: Strengths include having a clear purpose, understanding budgets, maintaining focus, and meeting deadlines. Blind spots: Tendency to be controlling, too much competitiveness, and valuing speed over excellence.
Planner: Strengths include strong organization, finishing work ahead of schedule, staying focused, and locating necessary resources. Blind spots: May be inflexible, lacks spur-of-the-moment thinking, may lose opportunities from being unwilling to change procedures.
Arranger: Strengths include following a daily plan of tasks, inclusive and interpersonal working style, and experienced at delegating. Blind spots: Takes on the problems and concerns of others, misses details, and can get distracted from the end goal.
Visualizer: Strengths include being able to complete large amounts of work quickly, thrives under pressure and deadlines, experienced multitasker, and open to taking risks. Blind spots: May miss details, be reckless, and may miss deadlines due to lack of planning.
