Pause
I can’t think of something that is harder for me (besides physical feats like a 9.58 second 100m sprint) than pausing. Once my work day is started, I’m going at 100mhp (faster than Ussain Bolt could even dream) and that’s good. It can be bad too. Do you ever finish your day and you’re thinking “wow, that was super productive, I got it fuckin’ done”? But if you had to recap everything you did during those 8-12 hours, at 100mhp, could you? If you can’t recap it at the end of the day, was it really important? Did you work on things that were urgent and important1? Just urgent? Did you work on anything that wasn’t important?
Reflecting, at one point this morning, I had a few minutes and I stopped at AT&T to switch to paperless billing. Um. Is that the highest and best use of my time? Does that go in the “productive” category? What other nonsense slipped into my schedule that I didn’t even consciously contemplate? It’s cool to get that done, but that stuff should be done end-of-day, or at home or on a weekend, or by an assistant; not during my peak cognitive hours (in my case, between around 6am and 1PM).
There’s value in pausing to think. A quick re-asses. When I reflect in the daily asynchronous checkin I do with my team on what I accomplished today, I want to be able to list accomplishments. I often write a few things I achieved and then write “all the other stuff too.” How can I get more of that stuff to be more meaningful, and memorable?
Anyway, right now, I always:
prioritize
delegate
defer (or abandon)
… and of course, do. In the beginning of the day I setup my plan, remove stuff, assign stuff, and get my focus honed. But what if I did a reset like that in the middle of the day too? Checking if I’m on the right path. Admittedly I do keep my “3 things” to do in front of me at all times as well as my highest priority. But maybe priorities shift in the day and maybe a 5 minute pause like this, for reflection, is worthwhile. Maybe I end up enrolling in paperless billing for 15 minutes instead of nurturing a relationship with a strategic partnership or planning next quarter’s capital allocation strategy.
Who doesn’t have 5 minutes to reflect?
This is a reference to the Eisenhower Matrix which deserves a deep dive.