When I create architecture diagrams or slide decks, I often rely on color coding to highlight recurring concepts or distinct domains. It helps the audience recognize patterns quickly without having to re-read every label. However, finding the right palette is surprisingly difficult. The colors need to be distinct enough that everyone can tell them apart…
Risk management is often treated as a one-off exercise: risks are identified at the beginning of a project, documented, and then quietly forgotten. In reality, risks evolve. Probabilities change, impacts shift, new risks emerge, and others disappear entirely. Effective risk management is therefore not a static artifact but a continuous practice that needs to be…
I give presentations regularly, and not all of them come with the luxury of generous preparation time. Still, I want them to be engaging—and, ideally, remembered by the participants after the last slide has passed. Over time, I have learned that memorability is not primarily a function of polish or complexity. It is often about…
In my current project, we have multiple different companies and public authorities work together. This creates the challenge of how to schedule meetings across all involved parties so that people actually have time for the meeting. This is especially difficult because of two things: There are several ways to address this challenge, but I want…
In previous posts I mentioned that humans are not very good at multi-tasking and that you should probably leave boring meetings because they are a waste of time. But even better than that is not to have boring meetings in the first place, but rather meetings that feel so important and productive to you that…
The topic of too many, too inefficient meetings is definitely not a new one. But when we agreed on our most important team values in my current project recently, the uncontested number one value was efficient meetings. Our team felt that we have too many meetings with too many participants and too little remaining time…
Context switches are expensive for human brains and even though many managers (other people too, but managers definitely) have convinced themselves that they can easily handle a multitude of tasks at the same time (e.g. take a second call and answer emails while in a meeting) the truth is they will underperform at all of…
Managers often get a lot of meeting invitations and I am no exception. And when it comes to meetings with many busy participants they sometimes tend to be scheduled very early in the morning, very late in the evening, during lunch breaks or on Fridays. So if you don’t enforce any rules on your calendar,…
Writing a thesis is a big undertaking that takes alot of time, motivation and self-organization to complete. Dedicated supervisors can help accomplish that, but ultimately it is up to the author of the thesis to get it done. In this post, I want to share experiences how to help the students from my point of…