Time + Monday Matters.
Issue 1: Changing Your Relationship with Time
The Net-Net: Our calendars are the visible manifestation of what matters to us, like it or not. The easiest place to fight burnout, find more meaning at work, or increase our impact is to change our relationship with time and spend more of it in more moments that matter. Getting in a healthier relationship with time can be a game-changer.
Cool and Scary Data
Over 59% of 500 managers spent 3 hours or more a day on administrative tasks.
1/3 of our meetings are deemed unnecessary.
Companies waste (on average) $25m for every 1000 people in unnecessary meetings.
Human brains only have roughly 4 hours of deep, focused thinking work in them per day.
CEO’s work an average of 62.5 hours and sleep on average 6.7 hours a night.
Practical Tips
Make Meetings the Last Resort: Every time you seek to put a meeting on the calendar, ask yourself if there is another option. Could you work on a shared doc? Could you send a simple update? Could you make a phone call?
If You Have to Meet, Cut the Time in 1/2: We lose a lot of time in meetings because we aren’t well organized. When we have less time, we naturally are clearer about our intent and our needs.
Put Buffers (15 minutes) Before Every Meeting: Humans don’t context shift all that well. When we hop off one meeting and onto the next, we will spend a ton of time simply getting settled. When you have time to get ready, you get more out of the moment.
Practice 3-2-1-0 Calendar Management: Look 3 weeks out and block the time you think you will need to do work and make your productivity priority #1. Look two weeks out and make sure you are an essential member of every meeting, if not gracefully decline. Look one week out and ensure every one of your meetings has a clear agenda (especially those you called) or if there is another way to do the work another way. In your current week (Week 0), follow #5 below.
Put in a 30-minute Meeting in at the Start of Every Day with Yourself: Spend the first 30 minutes of your day preparing all the materials you need for your meetings throughout the day. Print them out or put them on your desktop. Read them. Then, get super clear on the 1-2 points you want to make in each.
Avoid Meetings In the “Prime-time” of Your Day: You should seek to avoid meetings in the times of day when you are most productive, especially reoccurring meetings that are not about key decisions.
Inspiration Doses
Six Strategies CEO’s Use to Manage Their Time. (Inc. Magazine, 2019)
No More Excuses: Conquer Busyness and Your Own Time (YouTube, 2023)
Book Review In Haiku
Righting Our Wrongs* -by André Martin We all will have fails. Fear not, our wrongs can be right, filling us with might.
*Inspired by Amy Edmondson’s The Right Kind of Wrong. The book does a beautiful job of reframing the idea of failure and providing us all a framework and practical ideas about how maximize what we gain from our flubs and missteps. This book is rock solid, fun to read, and allows us to look back at our lives with a new outlook and insight. Pick it up. Do it now.
“GIF”-ffirmations
Great tips! The meeting one is a killer. Meetings should have a distinct purpose/outcome and should be for making action happen.