Meetings, Minefields and Mindfields
Today I will elaborate on why it is necessary to have a strategy for focused work. In case you don't have a clear strategy for how you can finish complicated, demanding tasks on a regular basis, you should start to think up a solution for this problem immediately. How and why I do this is revealed in the next lines.
This will hopefully stay an exception, but let's start with a rant: it often strikes me with what level of ease and with what level of total disregard for people's time and schedule some colleagues invite to meetings of questionable purpose on short notice. By 'questionable purpose' I mean those meetings, where you don't have any agenda, you don't get any info on your expected input or why you're being invited in the first place and of course -the classic- : no documentation of the outcome. My impression is that as I proceed through my work-week those spontaneously created 'alignment-meetings' keep popping up to a point where my schedule is cluttered with invitations I get little to no value out of - just like a minefield. My standard procedure is to be polite and to decline with a well meant hint like 'Please define my expected input.' or 'Could you assign a slot in the meeting where I deliver my input?' or something like that. It's not only the potential waste of time that bothers me most though. Rather it is the blatant mindlessness of people who obviously assume their time and topics to be more important than everyone else's. It's really bad and I have to restrain myself to keep my cool and mind my own business.
My tip for you is to regularly remind yourself to be even more mindful when setting up your own meetings in that you consider whose time and input is required, what preparation is necessary and what the expected outcome is supposed to look like. Now for something different:
Hard Work Requires Focus
The type of work I am doing can be separated in four basic categories: easy and hard as well as high value and not high value tasks. The neither high value nor hard tasks are my optional idle capacity fillers - at the end of each week I unclutter my tasklist and these tasks are usually the number one victims. Priority no 3 are low value and complicated tasks. These don't compete with the rest, since working on them takes some significant effort and renders little value in outcome. I value them nevertheless because of the potential challenge they represent. The only tasks that really compete for my focus time are high value tasks: I prioritize the complicated higher than the easy ones, because I am fully aware that I have a limited amount of focus capacity over the day. Once it is depleted, I am no longer able to focus over sufficient long stretches of time and working on hard tasks becomes futile. This is the reason why I usually start my work day with a hard task. My concentration peaks in the morning hours. Subsequently the more easy tasks are shifted to the afternoon.
Focus Requires Lone Time
Because of the density of meetings and because of the fact that a significant amount of meetings are scheduled on short notice I created a strategy: To be able to do focused work and to be able to think focused without being disrupted I blocked some time slots in my schedule in the morning. These are usually buckets of 90 minutes, where I do conceptual work, conduct research and analyses, create solutions and so on. During this period I don't respond to email, instant messages, phone calls or any kind of distraction. This has been a very successful method over the past years. Some colleagues don't see the point of this strategy because they distribute work differently in that they squeeze work between their appointments. I tried that strategy but I am not the multitasker at all. In order to focus I require an uninterrupted time bucket. Otherwise my results are just not going to achieve the level of excellence that I aspire to.
This is not to say that my strategy is the only way to enlightment. I am sure different sorts of focus types exist and require different strategies. However I am absolutely 100% convinced that without any strategy to plan and execute focused work a person can and will not succeed in any modern day work environment. There's just too many distractions and eventually the level of fragmentation of your work schedule will prevent you from focused work.
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