Yesterday I tried a little experiment with my schedule: I switched all of my regular on-one-one meetings for the week to Tuesday, a single day with nine meetings in a row, no break.
The idea for this actually occurred on February 5 of this year, at our Q1 board meeting. I’m a little embarrassed that it took me this long to try. You see, somehow I found myself complaining to the board that I wasn’t able to find enough time to work on a few big projects that I knew I needed to be working on. This is not the typical stuff of board meetings. Anyway, I explained how for the last couple of years I’ve kept Wednesdays clear on my calendar, usually worked from home, and used it as design/writing/solo-thinking time because the other four days get consumed with collaboration: one-on-one and group meetings with the eight people I work most closely with at modbot. But lately, the collaboration days had gotten so busy, that Wednesdays had turned to email and administrivia catchup days and I needed more time in the week…
Brad made a suggestion: what if I were to completely flip the ratio, stack up all of my one-on-one meetings in a single weekday, and have four days to do my own work. I remember my head starting to explode a little bit and looking over at Mark and Mike who were nodding reasonably at me as if to say, “seems like a perfectly smart idea.”
While it might seem scary to stack up that many meetings in a row, I wasn’t too fazed by the idea: I like everyone on my team and the conversations are usually flowing and genuine. The part that gave me pause was wondering, all in an instant, what I might do if I had four-ish days a week to move things forward with my own projects, instead of less than one. Would I head to Japan and see what kind of cool tiny robots are happening there? Would I play around in our lab with electromagnetic bits and plastic? Check in with some of the robot labs at CU Boulder, right down the street? Finally build those little wooden robots we’ve been sketching for years? Look through a recent set of conference proceedings? Visit the Bay Area for a few days to catch up with my hardware startup friends? Read a few books about leadership, management, and inspiration and work on the parts of being a CEO that I suck at?
The idea was almost too much for me to process, but sounded tremendously tempting all the same, so I vacillated for a while before finally trying it yesterday. I’m happy to report that it was a great success! I learned some things!
Sometimes I do a little journaling in the morning. You know, Artist’s Way style or Jerry Colonna style. Previously, on meeting-heavy days, I’d think and write about the big important things that I needed to get done. Then I’d have a busy day of meetings and spontaneous business stuff, and in the evening I’d feel stressed and annoyed about not making progress on any of my big important things. Yesterday, though, I told myself in the morning that I wasn’t going to make progress on my stuff during the day, but that I was going to meet with a bunch of individuals, be present, listen, and see how I could help them. And that that might have compounding returns, and that it was valuable for modbot and an important part of my job. I think I did pretty well at that, so at the end of the day, I felt fulfilled and not exhausted. That sort of surprised me a little bit.
Another thing surprised me throughout the day. Having all of those meetings back-to-back made it easier for me to see a few trends. If the meetings had been spread throughout the week, I might not have noticed that multiple people were worried or nervous or thinking about a couple of problems that we should probably address directly and together. So we’ll try to, and that gives me a little bit of the great “we’re getting better at getting better!” feeling.
I’m not sure if today has been a great first result of having a clear meeting calendar. I went to the dentist and got a cavity filled, played with a test version of a new Cubelets operating system, and wrote this. But it’s a start. I’m definitely going to continue trying this meeting rhythm for a few more weeks.
