Do you take time to think?

I’m fully back into the swing of working and you know what that means. Meetings, meetings, more meetings, DMs, IMs, pings, meetings about meetings, meetings and more DMs and IMs. Everything and at times, everyone, demands our attention or something from us. But are you looking out for you?

Many of us are victims of other people’s calendars and schedules. There’s always going to be someone more important, someone whose calendar supersedes ours. As much as we’d like to be like “My time is MY time and I’m the boss!” - we aren’t always. That’s just business and its fine but you still need to make business work for you.

I’m a self admitted non morning person and I don’t mind working past “working hours”. No matter what, each day I try to spend 45 minutes of my time thinking, getting my ducks in a row. Sometimes these are outside of working hours and I’m good with that. Sometimes it’s during working hours and I feel lucky about that. But that’s always super intentional.

My thinking time is usually me reflecting on something I heard in a meeting, writing a question I need an answer to. A lot of times it’s “I need clarification this question and I need to ask X about it”. During my thinking time, I' only do the first part. The “I need clarification on this question” because my thinking time is just that - thinking time. It’s not action time. I realized usually when we think of something, that feels like we must do it NOW. If we don’t do it NOW we’ll forget. Spoiler alert: if you write it down you don’t forget.

I used to do both: thought of something and immediately wrote that email or IMed that person because it had to get done NOW. I realized I was only getting half of my “NOWs” done and forgetting my other “NOWs”. So now (ha), I just write it down and do the action later.

So my thinking time is usually generating a list, writing down questions to myself, jotting down notes. It is never pinging someone, it is never drafting an email because my thinking time is for me to think. It’s definitely made me sharper and more organized. It’s not easy. You’ll want to email or IM that person NOW but I guarantee you’ll forget to do something else just as important.

So do yourself a favor and give yourself some thinking time every day! Report back when you can!

PS I had to write this post 2x because the whole draft got deleted so extra special thanks if you read this whole thing!

Tactics: More Effective 1:1s

1:1 meetings. If you’re up and reading this, you’ve probably taken a gander at your calendar for this first full work week of 2019 and are feeling very “FML”. You’ve got tons of meetings - some group meetings and some 1:1s and maybe no idea WTH any of the meetings are for. If you’re a participant in a group meeting- you can skip this post. If you’re going to be in a 1:1 - you should read this post.

1:1s are a whole different ballgame and you can control a lot of it. And you should. Go through right now and list out your 1:1s and take a few minutes to ask yourself: What do I need to get out of this meeting with this person. That’s the beginning of your agenda.

If you’re driving the agenda, this is how I typically structure mine. I also always send over an agenda 24 hours in advance.

• Two parts: FYI/Inform and Discuss

• For discuss, try to write the topic and question you want answered

  • ex. Performance Reviews - How will the calibration process look?

• By listing out the questions, maybe the person can answer them in the email without needed to discuss them during the 1:1

• Ask the other participant for any adds and to add them in a different color

• During the meeting, I strikethrough each topic so I know it’s been discussed

• All uncovered topics get moved to the following week and/or I follow up in an email

If your workplace works on collaborative documents like Quip or Google Docs, it’s really easy to keep all the agendas in the same doc and link to the agenda in calendar invite.

A bonus of taking this approach is that you might be able to condition other people to this format so that when they’re making agendas with you - they use the same format! Try it out and let me know how it works.

As always, share your tips in the comments!