Juliet Funt

TOO MUCH WORK AND TOO FEW PEOPLE | Solving the simple but painful equation of work
The American worker needs a witness. Two and a half years ago, there was a crisis. Like most good people do in a crisis, they dug in. Then, the sprint theysigned up for changed. The race became a marathon in duration yet  maintained the intensity of that sprint for months and eventually years.
Now, as burnout has become latent and ingrained—where employees’ tanks are empty, the fumes are faint—it’s time for a recession-wary lockdown on headcount and resources. It’s no wonder people are quitting and disengaged; leaders are sandwiched between the teams they love and the goals they’re given.
The solution is to aggressively increase team prioritization skills; learn models and formulas for eliminating projects that don’t have direct benefits; and reduce wasteful work, emails, and meetings so that 10 workers can go back to doing thework of 10. In this session jam-packed with tools, techniques, and usable frameworks, Juliet will show you how.

Outcomes:

Adopt the powerful tool of the Reductive Mindset
De-crapify your workflow by reducing emails and meetings
Reallocate expensive talent time to high-value work
Learn models and techniques that keep quality work out in front

DE-CRAPIFY YOUR WORKFLOW | | Solving the Equation of Too Much Work and Too Few People
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.

FEED THE FIRE | Going Upstream from Mental Health at Work
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 periods
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.

YOU'RE ON MUTE | Strategies for Communicating in a Hybrid World
Hybrid work is here to stay, and so are the communication challenges that
accompany it. As teams spread geographically, the dynamics of interpersonal
communication morph, necessitating a transformation in our traditional strategies
to maintain connection and efficacy. This session delves into the fundamental
aspects of communication crucial for hybrid work success. It provides insights into
our virtual presence, expressing ideas clearly and persuasively across various
mediums and on strategies to foster a cohesive team dynamic that transcends
geographical dispersion. The session also outlines the perfect balance between
synchronous and asynchronous communication, optimizing productivity while
mitigating the risks of communication overload in a hybrid work environment.

WOW THEM | How to Build a Presentation from Start to Finish (Also
available: General Presentation Skills and Storytelling
Many professionals, even those with ample experience, either don’t have a system
in place to plan a presentation or skip planning entirely, diving headfirst into
assembling their elements without foresight. This approach rarely leads to
success. Instead, this session will show them how to take a comprehensive, step-by-step approach to transform their presentations into persuasive and inspiring
stories that command attention. The process is segmented into five critical stages:
Material Gathering, Emotional Arc, Vivid Illustration, Honing, and Slide Creation.
Each stage is a stepping stone in your journey to master the art of presentations,
giving you the confidence and expertise to captivate any audience.

HOW TAKING A MINUTE TO THINK CHANGES THE NATURE OF WORK
Do you wish you could stop the mayhem of work and life for a brief moment and just take a minute? Do you sense you could contribute more if there was a little more room in the day? Many people feel this way, but taking a restorative pause has felt impossible—until now.

You’re not alone in yearning for freedom from constant reactivity. Today’s global workforce is so fried that it belongs in the food court of a county fair. We’re relentlessly behind the curve, dousing fires everywhere, and our 3 a.m. insomnia provides the day’s only unscheduled time to think.

What we need again in our lives is the missing element of white space—short periods of open, unscheduled time that, when recaptured, change the very nature of work. White space is the stepping back, the strategic pause, and the oxygen that allows the sparks of our efforts to catch fire. It’s yours to reclaim, and this session will show you how.

In this lively session based on Juliet Funt’s new book, A Minute to Think, you’ll receive the permission, framework, and direction you need to regain control of your overloaded, caffeinated, inbox-worshiping workday and find a precious minute. Using memorable stories and razor-sharp instruction, Juliet will help you rediscover the meaning of your work, the way out of burnout and the liberty of your time.

Activity is Not Productivity: Raising Engagement Through Reclaiming WhiteSpace

Many wonderful companies are trapped in a thread of common denial. They believe pressure and incentives are enough to support workers who live perennially on the leading edge of burnout. That equation cannot be sustained. But with one vital new ingredient, WhiteSpace, organizations can free their talented teams to deliver their most engaged work — and sustain that commitment far into the future.

In this high-energy session, we examine the critical difference between activity and true productivity, between cramming in more tasks and selectively choosing to dive into the right ones with thoughtfulness. We also meet and arm ourselves against The Thieves of Productivity, a group of positive assets that often run amuck and trap us into low-value tasks. By examining the surprising downside of these attributes, we create a customized road map toward more WhiteSpace at the individual, team and organizational level.

Lastly, we explore The WhiteSpace Simplification Questions — four simple inquiries that provide endless insight and positive reframing around even the toughest individual and organizational hurdles.

The Reductive Mindset: Achieving Optimal Results Using the Tools of WhiteSpace

Employees today face many pressures in the Age of Overload: doing more with less, accelerating the speed and the global 24/7 demands of always being ON. They’re fooled into thinking they’re more productive than ever. But is that true?

Overloaded populations are used to their discomfort. But upon further investigation, it’s clear that their companies are suffering from one or more deficits. Sometimes it’s a quantity problem; you hear complaints about headcount and bandwidth. Sometimes it’s a quality issue; work level is slipping, and there’s no time to think high-altitude thoughts. Or it’s a sustainability issue; folks are surviving but asking, “How long can we keep this up?”

In this program, we consider a different path, one where a reductive lens helps pare back busyness and make room to reclaim and effectively use WhiteSpace. Also featured is actionable content that combats The Tools that Turn on You. These are support systems and devices that promise to improve our work style. In reality, they tend to defy boundaries, hijacking time and resources — think email, meetings, decks and more.

Igniting the Thoughtful Mind: How to Use WhiteSpace to Turbocharge Creativity

Is your company tasking you to be creative and innovative without providing the time to do it? You are not alone. Exertion has replaced thought. Innovation and creativity wither before an ever-increasing culture of complexity. But what if game-changing, breakthrough ideas are not inclined to battle through your crowded schedule and buzzing brain? What if they require WhiteSpace, or open fluid time, in order to grace us with their presence?

In this presentation, Juliet Funt asks critical questions behind the creative process: Is there a dial that can be adjusted back and forth from activity to creative receptivity? How would an adjustment of that dial affect the output of you and your teams?

This journey also chronicles tactics of the greatest creative thinkers in both business and other media, shining a light on the frameworks and processes they employ. Lastly, we’ll broaden our discussion to explore the Invisible Habits of Excellence, a constellation of internal behaviors related to many varieties of inward and outward thought.