Juliet Funt

Are your talented teams drowning in meetings, emails, decks, and to-dos without the foggiest clue about how to reduce the pile? Today’s organizations are aggressive in their goals, and workers often lack the skills to choose the right focus for their energies. Eventually, they can’t bear the workload anymore and leave, fail, or quietly disengage. The solution, however, isn’t as simple as hiring more hands. Instead, it requires a significant paradigm shift in how we perceive activity vs. true productivity. This session offers a roadmap to this shift, providing practical tools, strategies, and frameworks to reevaluate, prioritize, and streamline your team’s workload. It champions the adoption of a Reductive Mindset, which emphasizes efficiency and effectiveness by ruthlessly eliminating unnecessary and non-value-adding touchpoints of the day.

Organizations are providing resources for mental health, and that’s good. But despite all of the yoga, therapists, and puppy parties (yes, really), there’s a problem. Rarely are these solutions going upstream to address the chronic, predictable, and solvable conditions and norms that make folks so stressed in the first place. Healthcare costs soar, and people remain unhappy. As a remedy, this session shines a light on the concept of ‘white space’ – unscheduled, open sips of time that offer a much-needed breather and a platform for restoration. Drawing inspiration from Juliet Funt’s acclaimed book A Minute to Think, the session explores strategies to reclaim and make effective use of this margin. It also offers tools to alleviate burnout and exhaustion, simplify work, curb the flow of digital pestering, and reduce the weight of meetings.

Rarely does one encounter a professional team that isn’t overwhelmed with responsibilities. Driven by ambition and pressure, leaders often take on more than is necessary and then pass this overload on to their teams, exacting a heavy toll. Teams don’t just need to prioritize tasks; they need to strategically reduce them and allocate time where it matters most—to the essential actions that drive the business forward. This skill is what we call Strategic Choice. Many think of Strategic Choice as plastic surgery—a painful operation that nips and tucks and leaves things looking better forever. More accurate is the model of a haircut—an ongoing maintenance activity that keeps things trimmed as they grow. The corporation will always be adding, so we must always be cutting. In this session, Juliet guides participants through a series of targeted exercises to identify and eliminate the tasks, or task subsets, that consume unnecessary time and resources.