Last week I cut my one-on-ones with my sales reps. I cut the team huddle. I cut standing meetings I’ve held for months, because I was presenting at a conference, hosting a pitch stage, and preparing for the board meeting that’s happening as this goes out. Something had to come off the calendar, and those were what came off.
What didn’t come off was the training, the water, the eating, or the watch on my wrist tracking all of it. I’ve been trying to work out why those held when better-defended things didn’t, and I don’t think the answer is discipline. I had less of that last week than usual.
What I think actually happened is that the things which survived were all doing more than one job.
The conference was in Kansas City, and the first night I took a prospect to dinner. Kansas City is a barbecue town and that’s where I assumed we’d end up, but he’s vegetarian, so we found a Mediterranean place instead and I ate what was on the table, which happened to be plant-based and happened to be exactly what I’d have chosen for myself. That dinner was a business meeting and a good meal in the same hour. I didn’t have to summon anything to make the healthy version happen. Somebody else’s dietary preference did it for me.
The same thing kept happening all week once I started noticing it. Before I hosted the pitch stage I had twenty-five minutes and a hotel gym, so I pulled up a trainer on YouTube and got a sweat going, which was a workout and also how I got my head right before standing in front of a room. Conference floors put the steps in whether you plan for them or not. One block of time, two returns, over and over.
The things I cut had only one return each. A one-on-one is a one-on-one. A standing meeting is a standing meeting. All of them valuable, none of them doing double duty, and when the week compressed those went first. I don’t remember deciding that.
What the cuts actually cost.
No deals went sideways. Nothing I needed to know went unknown. But the one-on-ones didn’t disappear, they got compressed into Monday morning as quick text-based check-ins, which ate the prep time I normally use to start the week.
More to the point, I was transactional this morning in a way I don’t like being. Short answers, straight to the status, on to the next one. My reps were understanding about it and I think the week justified it. But a one-on-one isn’t only an information exchange, and the part that got cut was the part where somebody gets to say the thing they’ve been sitting on. If one of them needed that yesterday, they didn’t get it from me.
Some things double. Some things compress. The one-on-ones compressed, and what came out the other side was most of the function with the worst of the tone.
The part I extended the trip for.
I grew up in St. Louis. My parents live in Kansas City now, which meant the conference put me a few hours from both, so I paid my own way to stay through the weekend instead of flying home Friday.
Saturday morning I walked to the gym near my parents’ house with my dad. The walk was the steps, the gym had a heavy squat rack so the training stayed on schedule, and the whole thing was an hour with my father that I would not otherwise have had. We also did a grocery run at Whole Foods, which was family time and also me nudging my parents toward food I’d want them eating.
Then my mom and I drove across the state to St. Louis.
We’re selling the house I grew up in. That’s been in motion for a while and it’s the kind of thing that gets handled over text and short phone calls when you live in California. Four hours in a car with no way out of the conversation is different. She unpacked all of it, and my only job was to listen, which is a job I’m not often available for.
Kansas City to St. Louis. Four hours and no way out of the conversation.
At the other end of that drive were my grandmothers. I’d been carrying around a list of questions to ask your grandparents for a while without ever sitting down to use them, and this time I did, and I recorded it. Some of what they said was advice meant for my kids rather than for me.
So that recording is time with my grandmothers now, and it’s something my children will hear when they’re old enough to want it, possibly when the women speaking are no longer here. One weekend, paying out across three generations.
My wife and the kids were home in California through all of it. We FaceTimed, and across time zones we sent videos back and forth so they could see me and I could see them, which filled my cup more than I expected it to. It still isn’t the same as being there and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
What couldn’t double.
Sleep.
My sleep score usually runs 96 to 99, and last week it sat in the low 90s, bottoming out at 92. That’s not a disaster, and it’s the clearest number I have on what the week actually cost.
The fall off. The week showed up there.
Sleep is the one input that can’t be combined with anything. You can’t take a meeting during it, you can’t walk to the gym during it, and it doesn’t give its hours to anything else. Which is exactly why it goes first when a week gets tight, and why I’m going into a board meeting today on a deficit I built myself.
Try this week.
Open next week’s calendar and look at the blocks that are already locked in. Don’t add anything. For each one, write down the second job it could do.
The 3pm call that could be a walk. The dinner that’s already on the books where the food is as much of a decision as the conversation. The drive you’re already taking, with someone you’ve been meaning to actually talk to.
Then look at what’s left, because the single-purpose blocks are the ones you’ll lose when the week goes sideways. You may as well pick which ones now rather than letting a Tuesday pick for you.
What’s one advantage you could compound from here?
Hit reply and tell me. I read everything, and what you send shapes what I write next.
— Austin
Austin Stevenson is CRO at ACT Global Lab Services and a co-founder of Vertosa.