The second-most important timebox
Never feel or be unprepared for a meeting, ever again
If you’re committed to timeboxing, the most important timebox of your day is, of course, ‘Timebox today’. For me, this is 15 minutes of planning how my day should pan out. Occasionally, when the day is complex and fraught, I might need 30 minutes for it. I call the process 15/15: 15 minutes planning to provide 15 hours of peace and productivity.
The second-most important timebox is one I usually label ‘Mtgs prep’.
It’s important because:
Knowledge workers (and there are a billion of us) spend 25-50% of their work life in meetings. (Source: Muse)
71% believe that most meetings are inefficient and unproductive. (Source: HBR)
The primary culprit is insufficient preparation by participants. (Source: Otta)
Insufficient preparation doesn’t just lead to lower performance and productivity. Unprepared meeting attendees tend to go into the many meetings they have with more apprehension and less confidence. There’s also a soft edge to the negative effects of poor meeting preparation.
Yet it’s so easy to solve. You can do it in three steps.
Step 1: A 'Meetings Prep' timebox. Set a 30-minute daily appointment in the morning. Note that it’s Meetings - plural! This is for all your meetings that day.
Step 2: Do the 'Meetings Prep' timebox. Use this window to briefly prep for each of your meetings that day. You’ll be ensuring you're always a step ahead.
Step 3: Enjoy the shift in perspective. You’ll anticipate meetings with eagerness, and excel when you’re in each of them.
This isn't just a good habit; it's a transformative ritual. As someone fed back to me recently, ‘I feel lighter, thanks to this single daily timebox’.
For example…
Today, in my ‘Mtgs prep’ timebox I had:
A 9am meeting with an existing partner. So I checked with the team what the latest was. I looked up a recent email which told me when we’d last met and which prospects we’d be focusing on together. And I thought about an additional question I wanted to ask this person.
A 10am meeting with a potential partner. I looked up my contact’s work project and made a couple of notes. I looked up my last meeting with him (from January) and took a couple of notes from that too. And I thought up a possible collaboration to propose.
A 2pm podcast in the US. I looked up the brief from my US publishers, St Martin’s Press. This told me that: it’s just audio, a full hour, the podcast host has read all of Timeboxing, and that he likes to ask a specific kind of question at the end. So I thought about what my answer might be.
An 3:30pm internal 1-1 meeting. I went to our joint Notion page, updated a couple of items and added a few more.
Like I said above, the purpose of doing this is to feel and do better in meetings. I think it also serves as a sign of respect to the person / people you’re meeting. It signals that you have deemed your interaction with them worthy of a little extra work. And that contributes to a productive harmony.
'Meetings Prep' is one of my most valuable timeboxes. Consider making it one of yours too. Why not add it, right now, to your calendar for tomorrow morning…and see what happens?
