How to plan productive meetings; Restoring your good name in the face of identity theft

Another meeting? How to avoid wasting company time

TIME FOR ANOTHER MEETING: Do your weekly meetings feel like a waste of time? More importantly, does your company have that kind of time to waste?

“In these tough economic times, every second of the work day is valuable,” says Kimberly Douglas, author of the recently published book “The Firefly Effect: Build Teams That Capture Creativity and Catapult Results.”

Boring, unproductive meetings are commonplace at many companies that “simply go through the motions,” she said.

“If a new initiative is being implemented or new product ideas are needed, the feeling from management is often, ‘Well, let’s have a meeting. At least it will seem like we are doing something,’” she said. “Unfortunately, not enough thought goes into how to conduct those meetings.”

Douglas offers these common meeting pitfalls and how they can be avoided or fixed:

—What’s the point? It’s important to run through a pre-meeting checklist before putting it on everyone’s schedule, making sure the meeting is even necessary. Could the information you want to provide be just as easily presented in an e-mail? What do you want to accomplish with the meeting? Will reaching that goal really require a group decision?

—Where’s the agenda? Having a plan in hand can ensure the quality of the meeting and make clear what needs to be done in advance. List three to six items, accompanied by how long they will take to discuss and who the discussion leaders will be.

—Conference room overcrowding. Keep the number of required attendees as small as possible, and if critical members can’t attend, consider postponing the meeting until they can. Having a meeting without them can cause just as many delays and productivity problems as postponing the meeting a couple of days.

—The meeting will seemingly go on forever. Eyes may start wandering to watches, BlackBerrys and wall clocks as those attending wonder when they’ll be able to get back to their long to-do lists. But if they know exactly when a meeting will be over, they won’t spend their time internally speculating about when they can leave.

—The meeting becomes a free-for-all. Set conversational ground rules right away, like requiring everyone to participate or “speak in headlines” to avoid rambling.

—No decisions, commitments or next steps are identified. There is no simpler way to record what went on than by writing on a flip chart the who, what and by when.

WHAT’S THIS CHARGE?: It might just be an unexplained charge on your credit card statement that you don’t recall making or have a receipt for. But it’s important to look into these small transactions as they may be part of a larger problem: stolen credit.

Quick action can save you a lot of time later. The average victim of identity theft will spend close to 200 hours and $1,200 repairing the damage, according to Atlanta-based Consumer Credit Counseling Service.

So how do you restore your good name?

—File a police report. You may need to submit this report to creditors and others to prove the theft.

—Notify the credit bureaus: TransUnion, Equifax and Experian. Once there is a fraud alert in place on your file, you are entitled to a free copy of your credit report from each. Review them carefully.

—Close the accounts that you know or believe have been tampered with or opened fraudulently, and speak to someone in the security or fraud department for each company. Be sure to document each conversation, including dates, times and who you spoke to, and keep copies of all supporting documents.

—When you open new accounts, use new passwords and personal identification numbers. Avoid easy-to-crack codes such as birth dates, phone numbers, your mother’s maiden name or your house number.

—File a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. The information can help law enforcement officials across the nation track down identity thieves and stop them.