A time management observation

Have you ever noticed how critical decision meetings have a tendency to be scheduled at the end of the day? I have noticed this as a trend recently in several of the streams that I am working on.

My first thought was that this was due to the need to work through the day to get the information together in preparation for that meeting. Anecdotally (meaning stuff I have seen, done or messed up myself but may not be statistically significant to the world at large) this seems to be the case in 20-40% of the high criticality meetings that get scheduled. This leaves a gap of 60-80% that could happen at other times in the day.

At the end of the day you are tired. At least (anecdotally) I am since the day has been spent making decisions, digging into problems and hopefully doing real work. So my next thought was why do we push these important meetings to late in the day if we are actually going to be less well equipped to handle them?

The answer (or at least my version of it) came to me as I thought about the tasks list and task list management that I do. Each day I follow the process below.

1. Review a list of tasks. I assign each one an A, B, or C. This roughly amounts to A - MUST DO, B - Good to do, C - No chance I am getting to this, I could schedule it forward now but then that would take time from getting to the A and B stuff.
2. Assign a number to each task starting at 1 for each letter category. (Yes, I never even bother with C)

Now when I do this I can say A1 is more important and I should work on it first. Great! Only my human nature kicks in (chances are if you are reading this you have one of those as well. We tend to keep them in closets and they can get dusty but they do peak out at the worst of times) and suddenly I find myself drifting down the list to item A4 or (say it isn't so) a B1... because it's easier. My little human nature side lives for that little endorphin rush of the check mark so... hmmm... off I go.

With meetings I think we do the same thing. We schedule some simple meetings up front. Easy discussions, standing team meetings etc etc. Then we postpone some of those really important, hard meetings and conversations to later in the day.

So I am going to try to move my important meetings earlier. When I find myself setting up one of these meetings I will catch myself and ask the question "would this be better in the AM? Or now?"

Am I nuts? Is this just how business is supposed to work? Have you seen this? In a global economy with companies getting more global in audience as well as employee base these types of behaviors become not only self-pain inflicting but they don't even make sense given global time zones and the fact that the sunlight moves.

Pay attention!

A while ago I read a post by Seth Godin on how to be a great audience. I thought it was a great post and provided some very good tips on what to do and how to listen and be (as the post says) a great audience. The context was a presentation to a group of eighth graders and how he could see who would be the good audience and who would not. The students who leaned forward, engaged and asked questions and drew out a better presentation.

Over the following months I have seen this over and over again in meetings. It's amazing the number of people who don't pay attention in a meeting. They drift off to their blackberry (assuming that the network is still working) while someone else is making a point. People bring laptops to meetings and proceed to answer email, read news (and if it's not an RSS feed of my blog that's just rude) or otherwise ignore why they are there in the first place.

Now I will admit that many meetings that get called seem to be meetings for the sake of meetings rather than meetings with a mission. This can be addressed separately. Be direct in meetings and don't be shy about making sure that there is a focused purpose and when that purpose has been achieved... don't feel that the meeting needs to go on just because it has been scheduled for an hour and fifteen minutes of discussion handled it. Give people the gift of time.

So, in your next meeting, make an effort to pay attention. Listen, lean in, ask questions, be a good audience and for goodness sakes PAY ATTENTION!!