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!