Podcast Ep 56 | Fill Your Week with Strategic Meetings

Many peo­ple find them­selves ​“being busy” and hav­ing a cal­en­dar that’s always full. They fill their week with meet­ings that are not impor­tant at the expense of pri­or­i­ties. Instead, it’s bet­ter to start by pop­u­lat­ing your cal­en­dar with strate­gic meet­ings and calls that align with the com­pa­ny quar­ter, annu­al, and 3‑year goals. That way you are always work­ing on the right things.

This week we dis­cuss the prob­lem with hav­ing a full cal­en­dar that’s miss­ing impor­tant strate­gic pri­or­i­ties and what you should do about it.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:13

Wel­come to the growth whis­pers where every­thing we talk about is build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies, not fast com­pa­nies, not growth com­pa­nies, but endur­ing com­pa­nies. Maybe it encap­su­lates those oth­er things. But over­all, it’s endur­ing com­pa­nies, com­pa­nies that will last. My name is Brad Giles. And always, as always, I’m joined today by Kevin Lawrence, my co-host. Hel­lo, Kevin. And how are you doing today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:40

Doing great Brad Yeah, it’s awe­some. We’re com­ing into sum­mer here. Van­cou­ver had a pret­ty good week last week. Real­ly good. And I’m excit­ed actu­al­ly, what we’re talk­ing about today, it was trig­gered by a con­ver­sa­tion with anoth­er client, and talk­ing about some of the headaches they’re hav­ing. And we’re hop­ing to pro­vide a lit­tle bit of anti­dote to some of the headaches that some peo­ple feel today, which we’ll get into in a few minutes.

Brad Giles 01:05

Oh, yes. It’s an inter­est­ing sub­ject. But as always, before we start, we’d like to begin with a sim­ple word or phrase to kick us off, as we advo­cate peo­ple do in their meet­ings. So Kevin, what is your word or phrase for today?

Kevin Lawrence 01:21

Mine is inspired. You know, it’s inter­est­ing, as I think back over the past week, there’s been a bunch of dif­fer­ent peo­ple that have real­ly inspired me. You know, whether it’s action that they’re tak­ing my daugh­ter, you know, I think, may have got her first employ­ee in her busi­ness. And she’s 15. Also, yeah, so that’s kind of cool. And you know, and, my son and I were hav­ing just a ton of fun. Father, Son dri­ving around, we got we’re both into sports cars and rac­ing. So we’re hav­ing some awe­some father son dri­ves around, and a friend that I got togeth­er with haven’t seen for a while we did some inspir­ing stuff got a lit­tle bit sketchy. We’re up doing some off-road­ing up in the moun­tains, we got into some pret­ty steep moun­tains with my new vehi­cle, which was, it was, it was actu­al­ly a ton of fun, but just, you know, being back and old mem­o­ries and, and some oth­er friends this week, because we’re kind of, we’re kind of going into a bit of a lock­down. So we have to be very care­ful about what we do. And when we see peo­ple, you know, obvi­ous­ly keep­ing appro­pri­ate dis­tance and stuff, but it’s inspired by some real­ly amaz­ing peo­ple are in my team just inspires me con­stant­ly with the stuff that they’re doing. And, you know, the feed­back I get is this com­bi­na­tion, I need to make a new word, which is a com­bi­na­tion of inspired and grate­ful all mixed togeth­er. But I’m insane­ly impressed by these awe­some peo­ple I’m sur­round­ed by. It’s both in, in work and in life. It’s awe­some. And you’re one of them, Brad, you inspire me with the way you think. And the way you make stuff hap­pen. you’re one of those peo­ple that I’m also was on that list of awe­some­ness around me.

Brad Giles 03:04

Very grate­ful for your kind words, thank you. And I return the vol­ley my word, my phrase is growth ver­sus momen­tum. We spoke about that before this pod­cast, I was in a strat­e­gy plan­ning work­shop with a team last week. I’ve been work­ing with them for about eight years. And it real­ly felt like we tran­si­tioned from growth to momen­tum, mean­ing that they’re, you know, we’re going around the team. And they’re just awe­some lit­tle things that are hap­pen­ing in all sorts of parts of the busi­ness. And we’ve got this great iner­tia, this great momen­tum, and it feels so dif­fer­ent. So growth is nice. But momen­tum is awe­some. Just that sense that you get in the busi­ness when you’re get­ting it when you’ve worked so hard for so long, and you’re get­ting it right and there is just this self iner­tia that is grow­ing all parts of the business.

Kevin Lawrence 04:06

You’re get­ting, there’s a lot of wind at your back with that momen­tum and it feels you’ll grow this kind of like, you know if you’re on a bicy­cle, and you’re rid­ing up the hill, and you’re and you’re climb­ing, and you’re and it’s work­ing and you’re get­ting there. And same with your moun­tain bik­ing and your moun­tain bike, it’s your trails and you’re ped­al­ing and you’re get­ting where you want to go. And I was watch­ing a video today of a run in Whistler Moun­tain called a line. It’s a moun­tain bike run. I remem­ber doing this I used to down­hill moun­tain bike, but you get momen­tum you start fly­ing down and the and the grav­i­ty is push­ing you and you’re going you’re fly­ing. It’s spec­tac­u­lar run. Those of you that have been on a line. It’s an amaz­ing, amaz­ing ride. But it’s almost like it’s that feel­ing of going down­hill ver­sus appeal. In both cas­es. You’ve got awe­some move­ment. It’s just about what the grav­i­ty is doing for you and the grav­i­ty is at your back. The best way when you’ve got that momen­tum, it’s a great, great feel­ing. It is.

Brad Giles 05:05

Okay, so cool onto today’s episode. Oh, I do love this one. It is who’s in charge you? Or your cal­en­dar? Who’s in charge? who’s run­ning this show? So often we see peo­ple, and let’s be fair, we’ve both been a vic­tim of this right? But so often we see peo­ple and their cal­en­dar does­n’t align with the most impor­tant things. Some­one says, I can. I’m won­der­ing if I could pick your brain about some­thing? Have you got any time next week? I don’t know, like maybe for an hour or some­thing like that. We could just catch up. And then you look at your cal­en­dar, and you go, yeah, okay, I got time on Tues­day at 11. Now, you mul­ti­ply that by 20, over and over and over and over again, and you’re not in con­trol of your calendar.

Kevin Lawrence 06:00

Now, yeah, that’s easy, and it’s easy to feel it. And I I do feel vic­tim to my cal­en­dar some­times. Because it’s full, I like to do a lot of things and help a lot of peo­ple. And, you know, it’s very easy if you’re not care­ful to get dragged through the week by your cal­en­dar, ver­sus you being in charge and lead­ing. And that’s what we’re dig­ging into today. And it’s not just time man­age­ment. This is about being strate­gic about your time ver­sus reac­tionary about your time. And it’s, it’s some­thing that we need to con­tin­ue to do in front of me, I have my goals for the quar­ter for work, self and life, I keep them in front of me to remind me on a post it note in front of me, I have my three key out­comes that I need to pay atten­tion to this month that we’re in that’s com­ing to a close soon. And I’ve got those three things I got to get done to remind me because you know, as you and I’ve talked many times, Bri­an is that we do lots of work on strate­gic plan­ning for com­pa­nies. And we do goal set­ting for lead­ers and exec­u­tives and CEOs around work self in life so that they can live a great life and obvi­ous­ly take care of them­selves. So they can stay resilient, like, like we talked about in your oxy­gen mask. But you got to then bring that to life because you can have this per­fect plan. But if your pri­or­i­ties on your plan, don’t look like the stuff that’s in your cal­en­dar, you got your­self prob­lem, like it’s not going to work, you’re not going to achieve what you want. And you’re going to be busy with a whole bunch of extra stuff, which might might seem real­ly impor­tant, but maybe not rel­e­vant. so impor­tant. rel­e­vant to your strat­e­gy is an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion. So, Brad, any­thing you’d like to add to this?

Brad Giles 07:49

Well, not real­ly, I think you’ve cov­ered it pret­ty well. But I think that we jumped straight into it again, who’s in charge you or your cal­en­dar? So the first thing that we’re talk­ing about here is the think do ratio. That’s fas­ci­nat­ing. Kevin, tell us a lit­tle bit about the think do ratio.

Kevin Lawrence 08:07

Yeah, well real­ly as a leader, and this is for lead­ers, not for peo­ple in the very very front­lines as lead­ers, you’re sup­posed to spend time think­ing and plan­ning how to make things bet­ter, and what are the win­ning moves? And how do you change the role of your team, but what hap­pens with a lot of peo­ple, and when we do strap plan­ning ses­sions, and peo­ple lay out their strate­gic goals, they’re like, I don’t have any time to do them. I’m so busy in my day job, I don’t have time to work on those projects. And we’re taught to answer is like, Oh, well, that means you prob­a­bly are so busy doing, you don’t have any time to do any think­ing or plan­ning. You’re too much of a Dewar real­ly not hav­ing enough time to be a leader. And I under­stand that I fall into that some­times myself, please, I’m not judg­ing you. We’re all in this togeth­er. But it’s this thing to do ratio, what should it be right, for a CEO they’re doing should be very tiny, like tiny, tiny, tiny, and a lot of think­ing and dis­cussing and, you know, work­ing with oth­er peo­ple, or, you know, a front­line tech­ni­cian should be doing a ton of doing what hap­pens though is, as exec­u­tives grow through the rolls, their think drew do ratio does­n’t tran­si­tion. And it’s just look at their cal­en­dar, as their cal­en­dar is often full of a lot of doing.

Brad Giles 09:25

So how long should you pre­pare for a meet­ing in think­ing? That’s what I asked in my book, your oxy­gen mask first is your book. My book is called mind to thrive. But yeah, that’s what I asked there. And, and, you know, it’s you can’t real­ly be pre­scrip­tive, but it’s prob­a­bly a bit more than most peo­ple are doing now. So, what I asked is, if you had a one hour meet­ing with some­one, should you pre­pare for five min­utes? Well, that’s prob­a­bly not enough. If you want to To be mean­ing­ful, you know, peo­ple say that meet­ings are one of the worst things that they do. And I reck­on one of the rea­sons is that peo­ple just don’t pre­pare. And it’s not just the per­son who’s run­ning the meet­ing, so many of the oth­er peo­ple, if every­body’s pre­pared and came togeth­er, it would be an amaz­ing meet­ing. It’s the absence of prepa­ra­tion, because peo­ple over­cook their cal­en­dar, but they put too much stuff in the cal­en­dar that makes it horrible,

Kevin Lawrence 10:28

right, which is the think­ing part ver­sus the doing of show­ing up and it’s, you know, even and I sug­gest there’s some meet­ings where five min­utes is mag­ic, to think about what is my intent? What do I got make, but if you’re nego­ti­at­ing a $7.8 mil­lion, you know, dis­count with a big ven­dor, we know you’ll spend more than five min­utes or you’re sure as heck bet­ter if you’re going to be suc­cess­ful, you know, favor Good luck goes to the pre­pared. So it’s about that time in your sched­ule to do that, but most peo­ple get so bogged down and did they don’t have the time for think­ing and I think, you know, I think Haha, they’re work­ing with half their capa­bil­i­ty, because they don’t get time to act. And again, I fall vic­tim to this some­times too, or no, it’s I’m respon­si­ble, but it hap­pens in my world some­times to where not enough think­ing too much doing and then you end up just exe­cut­ing and things grad­u­al­ly fade into the think­ing to pop the qual­i­ty or the strat­e­gy back­up every once in a while.

Brad Giles 11:32

I have a I have a rule. I have a cou­ple of rules around meet­ings. Num­ber one is no agen­da. No attender.

Kevin Lawrence 11:40

I like that, I haven’t heard that before.

Brad Giles 11:42

Yeah. So if you don’t have an agen­da for this meet­ing, that you’re ask­ing me to come to that you’ve sent to me so that I can think about that you’re not going to have an atten­dance in terms of me, right, because I need to think about it. The sec­ond one is, I have meet­ings with clients that have stand­ing agen­das, so we would­n’t need every sin­gle month, right. And so then I will always email them the day before. And so for exam­ple, so Kevin, in prepa­ra­tion for our meet­ing at 2pm. Tomor­row, please let me know if there’s any­thing out of the ordi­nary that you would like to dis­cuss, and every sin­gle one client, every sin­gle meet­ing, I will email them that, because num­ber one, you know, the worst thing in the world is when some­one for­gets about a meet­ing, or it’s not on their cal­en­dar. So it’s remind­ing them that it’s on num­ber one. And then num­ber two, I’d say about 40 or 50% of the time they say some­thing out of the ordi­nary that we’re going to dis­cuss or that’s going to become a key agen­da item that I can pre­pare for. I’ve already got for my meet­ing tomor­row, I’ve already got a response today. And that’s begin­ning to percolate

Kevin Lawrence 12:48

in the best rate, and you know, the impor­tance of that, for exam­ple, I have a client where we have this sim­i­lar sys­tem. I don’t tell peo­ple to respond, I just tell him to think about it. And and and come I like that ques­tion. No, it’s a great ques­tion, Brad. Thanks for shar­ing that. But we’re we send and we now don’t have to send we put in the meet­ing invite the agen­da for the meet­ing. And we fol­low the same agen­da. We have a stand­ing for­mat, we go through inter­est­ing, a new, awe­some CEO I’m work­ing with. He was get­ting frus­trat­ed in the ses­sions. He did­n’t even know there was an agen­da. So we mis­com­mu­ni­cat­ed and because we weren’t email­ing them, they were an invite, I’m going through the agen­da, and he’s not with me. And he’s won­der­ing what’s going on? I’m like, why aren’t you fol­low­ing the agen­da? He goes, What agen­da I go well, in the meet­ing way. He was. So now we’re actu­al­ly going to get him up to speed we’re email­ing. It’s damn impor­tant. Because the agen­da is how, you know, we said sim­i­lar clients to help them pre­pare for the meet­ing. Yeah, and he was­n’t show­ing up pre­pared. But he did­n’t real­ize that it was an invite, and he had­n’t looked at it. So it’s our fault. We should have let him know. But it’s super impor­tant. And I will tell you, you know, in com­pa­nies time and time again, you know, meet­ings are a night­mare. And often because there’s no agen­da and I say the same thing. If there’s no agen­da don’t go even when peo­ple want to talk to me, Well, what do you want? You know, if it’s one of my clients, I said, I need five min­utes. I’m gonna say, Okay, fine. I don’t need an agen­da. Because I know they have a spe­cif­ic today I was talk­ing to a CEO I work with, and they were had some­thing impor­tant and said, Hey, can I talk for a few min­utes? I said, Sure, fine. That’s dif­fer­ent. But if you want to, you know, set I mean, what what is it we’re gonna cov­er and for exam­ple, we ran a two day strat­e­gy last week with a group. We had three meet­ings in advance for two days with three meet­ings of at least an hour each to sculpt just the agen­da points. Nev­er mind the prepa­ra­tion. Yeah, we had an awe­some meet­ing. But we put it We did a lot of home­work just to get the agen­da right. But we should it’s two days.

Brad Giles 14:53

That’s that’s effec­tive­ness. I what comes to mind. I had a per­son Who we both know who I won’t men­tion, who asked me for a meet­ing? And they were just like, Hey, can we love to catch up? Can we meet on this date? And this time? And I’m like, what’s the agen­da? What do we what do we wait?

Kevin Lawrence 15:15

You know, I have to catch up. It’s not a catch up. If there’s some­thing, let me know. And I catch up, like, I don’t want to catch up. No I don’t want I did, you’re gonna be my one of my friends. And we’re gonna go have a beer or some­thing. So get­ting back to the root of it, you know, go even in think to ratio, like, num­ber one is it your time for think­ing is crit­i­cal, but it’ll get it’ll, it won’t hap­pen if you don’t have the dis­ci­pline around oth­er meet­ings, and not allow­ing them to take your crit­i­cal time. So one of the first things, you know, the sec­ond thing is, you know, num­ber two, there’s your cal­en­dar, set your pri­ors or do you set your calendar,

Brad Giles 15:51

if you set your cal­en­dar, we need to, we need to, we need to build up the ten­sion on that one, we need to make this we need to make the audi­ence real­ly under­stand the weight of what you’ve just said, let them roll or some­thing close

Kevin Lawrence 16:07

to it. Like I can do a drum roll. That’s not real­ly work­ing. Very good. That’s not mak­ing that for us here. I got drunk, I could do come over here.

Brad Giles 16:15

Thank you very much. Thank you very much, because that’s so impor­tant. Right? Does your cal­en­dar set your prod­uct bet­ter? Is that bet­ter? That’s much bet­ter. If you’ve got a pen, this is the one thing you’re going to write down out of this episode, right? Does your cal­en­dar set your pri­or­i­ties? Or do your pri­or­i­ties set your cal­en­dar? Why is that impor­tant? Because pri­or­i­ties is work­ing broad­ly, in our def­i­n­i­tion, work­ing on the busi­ness. Okay. So what is the most impor­tant thing that you’ve got to do to work on the busi­ness broad­ly, what is the most impor­tant thing that you decide that has to be done? As opposed to as we said ear­li­er, some­one ring­ing up and say, Hey, Kevin, you want to catch up?

Kevin Lawrence 17:01

Just want­ed to catch up, and let’s be proac­tive­ly putting in the things that mat­ter most first. Yeah. And again, it’s not rock­et sci­ence, it’s just hard to do. And what that looks like, is you have to pre block things in. So for as an exam­ple, you know, with, with my team and our quar­ter­ly goals, I’ve got stuff pre blocked in like, I know, I have in my cal­en­dar this week, a half a day ses­sion. On on our strat­e­gy on the peo­ple side of the busi­ness, it was booked a cou­ple months ago. And we’ve got time to go through and work on some of the stuff you were talk­ing about. We’re talk­ing about before the show, yeah, but it’s in there. Right. And it’s pre sched­uled before oth­er things go in. And same and same with my one on ones with my team. I’ve got a one on one on my team, where we go through all the stuff that’s work­ing in, and it’s in there to help because that’s, that’s a key part of suc­cess as our firm as my team­mates. And, again, it’s not rock­et sci­ence. And same thing with us, you and I doing this pod­cast, you got to block in these things, because all the oth­er stuff will fill in all the cracks real fast. So these are all things we know, the key thing to ask your­self is, am I proac­tive­ly block­ing in the strate­gic things that mat­ter most in my cal­en­dar, that helped me to hit my goals, which is it could be your per­son­al goals, and it could be your work­out, or it could be your life goals. And that can be time with peo­ple that mat­ter a lot in your life. And obvi­ous­ly, your work goals. So it’s, incred­i­bly impor­tant. And again, that’s why ide­al­ly, a lot of the high­est per­form­ing peo­ple we work with, they have their annu­al goals, quar­ter­ly goals, many will have a month­ly ver­sion or a month­ly tar­get. And then week­ly goals and dai­ly goals.

Brad Giles 18:46

So heavy. And they

Kevin Lawrence 18:49

no longer reflect that.

Brad Giles 18:50

And that’s my point. And so maybe for you look at your cal­en­dar over the last week or two, how many of the appoint­ments in your cal­en­dar or blocked out time or notes align with your quar­ter­ly, your annu­al your three year goals for your orga­ni­za­tion? How many? How many of the things that you’re spend­ing your time on actu­al­ly align with that. Now, let’s say that it’s 80% of the things that are in your cal­en­dar don’t align and only 20% do. And maybe what you can do is set your­self a goal to say what about if in one year’s time I can flip that on, I can have 80% of the things that are in my cal­en­dar actu­al­ly align with the goals for the orga­ni­za­tion that I’m work­ing on, rather than these ad hoc catch ups or things that are not nec­es­sar­i­ly work­ing on the busi­ness or to use Stephen cobis terms are impor­tant but not urgent.

Kevin Lawrence 19:53

Mm hmm. And that ratio will depend on your role. Yeah, right. Like if you’re a CEO most of your stuff, your Work­ing on should be one to three to five years in the future. And very strate­gic most like 80% Plus, right, and you’re gonna have some stuff around the day to day, but a true CEO with a cap­i­tal C is for­ward look­ing and strate­gic most of the time. And as an exec­u­tive, that will notch down a lit­tle bit as a direc­tor and notch down as a man­ag­er. You know, as a man­ag­er, you might be spend­ing 80% of your time 20% of your time on some of this strate­gic stuff might actu­al­ly be real­ly good for a man­ag­er, depend­ing on the size of the com­pa­ny. So it’s dif­fer­ent based on your role. The ques­tion is, how do you get it to ide­al one of the key thing a key activ­i­ty, which I’ve been need­ing to do again, and I will in the next month or so, is to build out what your ide­al cal­en­dar is? What would it be for­got­ten about to the con­straints of today’s and I love to take peo­ple through three years in the future, because today kind of vapor­izes. And so what would your ide­al cal­en­dar look like? And if you look at how you’re allo­cat­ing your time, and inter­est­ing­ly, for what it’s worth, in the field that we’re in, you know, it I ide­al­ly, to be my best have Fri­days free, right? Fri­days is a flex­i­ble day when I do my strate­gic stuff, and my think­ing time and oth­er work. But some­times based on how stuff gets sched­uled, I don’t have that flex day on Fri­days. And then it’s hard­er for me to do all the think­ing stuff and the on the busi­ness things I’d like to do. So no mat­ter what. So no mat­ter what I do, and how well I block my cal­en­dar, if I have, you know, time every day of the week with clients, which I love, I enjoy it. And that’s the thing, I love my time with my clients, they’re awe­some, peo­ple enjoy the work, but they don’t have enough time to do my job as a leader of the firm. Right? So and that’s, and that’s prob­lem­at­ic. So there’s by set­ting your ide­al cal­en­dar and hav­ing an idea of what that looks like it does set you up to win anoth­er per­son I know when I’m in a more of a deliv­ery role was say­ing some­thing sim­i­lar. They spend­ing so much time deliv­ery, they nev­er get to their admin­is­tra­tion Nev­er mind the proac­tive think­ing. So again, every­one’s got their own ver­sion of it, and you have a good sense of what you need.

Brad Giles 22:17

Awe­some. So I’m clos­ing that out. Are you work­ing on things that are impor­tant and not urgent? That’s the goal or things that are impor­tant and urgent. That’s where it that’s where humans just, unfor­tu­nate­ly, get dragged into, you know, this. So Stephen Cov­ey’s Sev­en Habits of High­ly Effec­tive Peo­ple is where that con­cept comes from encour­age you to kind of look in there if you’re inter­est­ed. Let’s move on. We’re sure. Yeah, what do we got next, Kevin? Yeah, I

Kevin Lawrence 22:53

mean, I’m won­der­ing, we head down for num­ber three, I don’t it does­n’t feel as rel­e­vant right now. That’s more of a pro­duc­tiv­i­ty thing. Maybe we get a side­bar but a pro­duc­tiv­i­ty hack. I’m in a ses­sion I was in this week, we’re talk­ing about a great book on pro­duc­tiv­i­ty called get­ting things done by David Allen. I love that a great sys­tem. Yeah, it’s a great book. It’s a lot for a lot it’s a pret­ty tech­ni­cal sys­tem. So a lit­tle much for a lot of peo­ple. But the essence is of its good but he has a phrase in there Brad and he might remem­ber the the the right ver­sion of that phrase, but it’s basi­cal­ly a sys­tem for touch­ing things once. Then the one thing I had a sort of a some­what a fil­ing sys­tem and out that I did I used for a while it fad­ed away, but the thing that stuck was open up an email action right now. A piece of paper action right now. So my insur­ance paper comes in for insur­ance on a vehi­cle, I take a pic­ture and instant­ly text it to my insur­ance agent who’s awe­some. And then it’s han­dled. Right? It’s lit­er­al­ly receipt, open it see its pic­ture, send it say please insure it, and then it’s done. Ver­sus Oh, I’ll send it to her lat­er. Yeah, write things like touch­ing things once. Now there’s a key is you can also touch things once and send it out. But it’s only half done. ie some­one’s going to come back with four ques­tions and that’s the art of touch at once and with every­thing that it needs. So that’s a beau­ti­ful piece around per­son­al pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and from very good pro­duc­tiv­i­ty books.

Brad Giles 24:39

Yeah, yeah. I love that. David Allen’s book Get­ting things done it’s just yeah, read it and employed sev­er­al points to that. includ­ing his fil­ing sys­tem which is just fan­tas­tic. But let’s move on. So

Kevin Lawrence 24:53

so let’s go that we’ve done num­ber five, which is your per­fect cal­en­dar for 2020 to even like, what would it ide­al­ly look like for you? You to be your best. And, you know, in that strate­gic time you have what have now num­ber six is, you know is in your cal­en­dar. It’s either short meet­ings or no meet­ings. So we go back to you said no, no agen­da, no atten­der, and we’re no atten­der, what­ev­er, you know, agen­da. I love that. That’s one piece. But oth­er things is how can you actu­al­ly not even have a meet­ing? Like, is there a way to resolve it with­out meet­ing? You know, and some­times, you know, some peo­ple, it’s a quick phone call, like, lit­er­al­ly just imag­ine, as pick up the phone and call some­body. And what I notice is, you know, the clients of mine, that are old­er than I am, by default, just pick up the phone and get stuff done. Yeah. And very, very quick­ly, the younger peo­ple, they’re more like­ly to text and try which of which both can work, but at some point, is there a way we can do it with­out a meet­ing? Right? Or can we do it in a five minute meet­ing? I love five minute meet­ings. Let’s talk for five min­utes, get it sort­ed out, move on, right? And I’m a, you know, an impa­tient per­son by nature. But basi­cal­ly, how do you not get into the trap of the default 30 minute or 60 minute meet­ing and, and avoid them if and only do them if they’re needed?

Brad Giles 26:14

They aren’t need­ed. They aren’t need­ed. I don’t I don’t real­ly love the slack kind of com­mu­ni­ca­tion world, which is just text. It’s just like text, text text. An inter­est­ing thing I read a cou­ple of weeks ago was that the num­ber of peo­ple who buy a new phone and nev­er take it off silent, ever. It is actu­al­ly sky­rock­et­ing. So peo­ple who just leave their phone on site 24, sev­en all the time, because they only use it for tex­ting or the inter­net title as in

Kevin Lawrence 26:47

for not receiv­ing phone calls. Yeah,

Brad Giles 26:49

it nev­er ever reads that don’t even it just nev­er ever reads. And that’s a soci­etal change. That’s hap­pened. So peo­ple are mov­ing away from phone calls a lit­tle bit. But some­times you can just real­ly make a big dif­fer­ence. With that quick phone call. You know, you’ve got to cre­ate a high bar­ri­er to entry for your time for your cal­en­dar. Yes, it’s got to be dif­fi­cult to get a meet­ing, they’ve got to go over a num­ber of hurdles,

Kevin Lawrence 27:19

they need to Yes, there needs to be a process to fil­ter it. So only the impor­tant meet­ings get through. That’s why in my world, you know, Jan­ice is in my mind, my right hand is the per­son that sets those meet­ings. And she knows she needs to get a few pieces of infor­ma­tion before she sched­ules me with any­one. And even when I do tell her set a meet­ing, I tell her whether it’s an A B or C pri­or­i­ty, like hey, go ahead.

Brad Giles 27:44

I tell you so I was that last week, I went to a book launch some­thing that’s quite rare where I live busi­ness book launch, even rar­er, love­ly book, from no to how it was called by a great guy, Adam mul­let, but I met with a per­son, they’re real­ly love­ly guy. We were chat­ting and you know, he had an inter­est­ing job. And he was­n’t as he did­n’t have his own busi­ness. But even if he did­n’t, I don’t real­ly do nec­es­sar­i­ly a lot of net­work­ing. In per­son. And I was just we were just chat­ting about strate­gic plan­ning and stuff like that. And he said, You know, like this is I find this real­ly inter­est­ing. I’d love to catch up for cof­fee one day, and I just recoiled. I was just like, Yeah, I know. I don’t do that. I yeah, like, I don’t catch up. For peo­ple that don’t know, for cof­fee. Like I nev­er, nev­er nev­er do that because my cal­en­dar is too pre­cious. Even if you want to work with me, I’ll be high­ly reluc­tant to meet with you. I mean, I

Kevin Lawrence 28:51

in my thing, if there’s some­thing and if there’s I believe there’s some poten­tial val­ue for either par­ty. Yeah, def­i­nite­ly. It’s a phone call.

Brad Giles 28:59

Yeah,

Kevin Lawrence 29:00

get on the phone for 15 min­utes. If there still is, then we’ll set up anoth­er phone call. We’ve got a pri­vate well go to par­tic­u­lar cam­paign thing he got to pro­tect your time and your cal­en­dar and make sure what gets in it deserves to be in it. Num­ber two, that it’s done effi­cient­ly and effec­tive­ly. Yep. I and by the way, don’t be afraid to end a meet­ing ear­ly. If some­one’s not pre­pared. And it’s one of the things I’ve seen, you know, if some­one’s not pre­pared and you’re pro­tect­ing your cal­en­dar, and it’s like, what if you’re fin­ished ear­ly? Awe­some. That’s great. But also if some­body isn’t pre­pared, okay, hey, I can see. I was expect­ing this to be ful­ly laid out with ABC my you know, my mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion I’m sor­ry, maybe I did­n’t make that clear enough. So how long do you need to get it togeth­er? Great. Good. So let’s plan on Thurs­day. I’ll see you then. Book a time.

Brad Giles 29:53

He is the thing if you turn up to a meet­ing and some­one says Okay, so what are we here to talk about? That should be like a siren going off in the back­ground. But that’s

Kevin Lawrence 30:02

com­mon Brad, peo­ple don’t know. And even, even when we have strate­gic dis­cus­sions, I do a lot of debate time with exec­u­tive teams that I work with and CEOs. What are we try­ing to achieve with this dis­cus­sion? What is the out­come that we want? By the way? We do that before so peo­ple can pre­pare? And then Okay, what is the action? Yeah, like what is going to hap­pen, so we don’t waste this time. So basi­cal­ly, you’re gonna be very pro­tec­tive of your time of peo­ple that want it. But more than that, you need to pre plan the time you need for strate­gic things. So short meet­ings, or no meet­ings is their next point. And it’s crit­i­cal. And there’s noth­ing like a quick call some­times, or telling them to make the call.

Brad Giles 30:47

Yeah. Like, hey,

Kevin Lawrence 30:49

I need to talk to you about this. It’s okay. Hey, I trust you, you make the deci­sion. And if you’re deeply con­cerned, tell me your two options. And we can dis­cuss it, but I’m pret­ty sure you can han­dle this. Yeah, on cer­tain things. Some­times peo­ple just want too much feed­back. But, you know, if we were to sum this up, Brad, if you look at your, your phi­los­o­phy of art, because we all have the same amount of time, and there’s a stat of 168 hours a week that it’s the same for all of us. But if you’re look­ing at opti­miz­ing the time that you work, you know, what, what would be the num­ber one mes­sage you would have for people?

Brad Giles 31:29

I would say, num­ber one, what gets mea­sured gets man­aged? And so under­stand­ing where is the slip­page in your cal­en­dar, how many of the, if you were to col­or your cal­en­dar, imag­ine you print­ed out your cal­en­dar, and you call it at all, how many of these meet­ings are work­ing on the most impor­tant things, how many of these meet­ings are catch ups, or super­fi­cial or some­one try­ing to sell you some­thing or some­thing like that, that that are unnec­es­sary. And then how many of those meet­ings could have been a quick phone call how many because a phone call, you can end after five to sev­en min­utes, right? And meet us there is more of an oblig­a­tion to go through a cer­tain rhythm that you don’t need to? So that’s what I would say, what about yourself?

Kevin Lawrence 32:20

yeah, first of all, and in this vir­tu­al world that we work, there’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty for a lot, it’s eas­i­er to have short­er meet­ings. And that is the mas­sive effi­cien­cy that I have found in these in this work­ing dig­i­tal­ly almost all the time, you lose some stuff. But the effi­cien­cy is is is notable, I would say is that, you know, think of your cal­en­dar, like a strate­gic tool. Like in my case, I’m blocked my vaca­tions. That’s the first thing that goes in my cal­en­dar, the time for myself, and my fam­i­ly. And I set those times aside, that that goes in first. And then it goes into all the oth­er things that almost an order of val­ue. But it’s it fierce­ly pro­tec­tive of that cal­en­dar, and only let­ting the right things in and a lot of those niceties just aren’t need­ed. And again, being fierce­ly pro­tec­tive when some­one wants to meet with me. Why? What are we going to cov­er? How long do we actu­al­ly need? Right? And again, if it’s one of the CEOs I work with, it’s like, What do you need? And I’ll jump on the phone like ASAP, that’s dif­fer­ent. Yeah, cuz I know, it’s crit­i­cal that you know, that’s a dif­fer­ent thing. That’s my that’s, you know, a key. Yeah, just being real­ly dili­gent about it. And it’s almost like every meet­ing in your cal­en­dar costs you 100 bucks. Yeah, lit­er­al­ly, if you think about a good ener­gy of ener­getic cur­ren­cy, like, Don’t take it unless you know, it’s gonna be real­ly valu­able, and that the peo­ple are going to be pre­pared to make a good use of the time just vig­i­lant about your cal­en­dar ver­sus accom­mo­dat­ing is what I would say.

Brad Giles 34:01

All right, awe­some. So with that, let’s just say look after your cal­en­dar, let’s close by say­ing that look after your cal­en­dar. So with that, if you would like to learn more about Kevin, first of all, I encour­age you to check out his book, your oxy­gen mask first. Also, he’s avail­able at Lawrence and co​.com. For myself, my book is called made to thrive. And my web­site, Brad is evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com dot a year. It’s been such a plea­sure to chat to you today about your cal­en­dar, set­ting the right pri­or­i­ties. We look for­ward to chat­ting again next week to you about anoth­er inter­est­ing sub­ject about build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies. Until then, have a great week.