Being timely, and the importance of time and timing has been on my mind a lot lately. If you choose to read on – you will be sorely tempted to believe that what follows doesn’t apply to you. After all – you’re smart right? I mean – you’re here reading this 😉 Please – try not to rush to exclude yourself from what follows. If not for your sake – then for others. You are influential and the way you behave influences others. No man is an island.
Meetings
The way we schedule meetings at work is bonkers, back to back to back to back. And unless one of you has invented time travel (pause….nope, OK let’s carry on then), you know the impossibility of back to back to back meetings and let you let people delude you into having them all the time. A cram packed diary is the diary of a madman (note – ladies the same applies to you also but there’s no Ozzy Osbourne album title reference available to use for you…yet).
Then – we cram these ‘important’ meetings full of ‘important’ stuff and either rush it, or don’t cover everything. As a result we often make bad decisions based on bad meetings. Sound familiar? To my mind, if that meeting is both necessary and important, then why not ensure it’s meaningful too? Take at least half the crap, I mean important stuff, off the agenda.
Focus
aka presence, aka be here now.
Presentations
If you are afforded the privilege of talking at a conference or some other live event, please, finish on time. Unless you want to run the risk of being remembered as ‘the guy who overran’. You don’t want that – do you?
Mealtimes
It is half past eight in the morning here in New Orleans, and I’m hungry. Breakfast time, in fact any mealtime, matters. I try not to skip them too often and I try, wherever possible, to enjoy my food in the company of others. I hope you do too. For example, last night I met up with Tommy Talley (we’d first met the day before at the Louisiana State HR Conference in Baton Rouge) and we went out and shared oysters and crawfish. We got talking with Jean and Alyssa and it turned out Jean really didn’t like dining alone either. After our meal we went to a funky cocktail joint and over a Side Car we looked up fear of dining alone. It’s called Solomangarephobia. Who knew?
Wishing you a super day.