Listening Awareness

Still more good stuff from the HBR article, "Listening to People," by Nichols and Stevens. This time it's an exercise they recommend for increasing your awareness of listening. It goes like this:

"[Create] a simple form divided into spaces for each hour of the day. Each space should be further divided to allow [you] to keep track of the amount of time spent in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. "

Then, spend a little time thinking through your answers to the following questions:

• What percentage of the time do you spend listening?
• Is it more or less than you expected?
• What might increasing the frequency and/or duration of your listening do to improve your effectiveness?
• What might it do to improve the effectiveness of the people you listen to?
• How might you listen better? How might you get people to better listen to you?

Hear what I'm saying?!