New Musings Ahead

Well today marks a return to regular writing again….I hope.

Since I last penned anything here much has happened. For those who truly know me there is no need to revisit all of the changes in my life so we’ll stay focused on the next thing.

Post-Exit and settling of family estate I’ve begun to focus on three personal goals: Improvement of my physical health condition; getting back to regular reading and regular writing both long form and short form. These three things will be items that fill in the spaces alongside all of the other fun things in life that are already a big part of the daily calendar.

Today’s musing is simply about a new micro-habit I am employing to better manage my engagement follow-ups.

In this new chapter of my life, I am doing a wide variety of meetings on weekly basis. These meetings are all over the map as far as focus and engagement. Frankly on the back-end of 2022 it was incredibly overwhelming at times to try and meet with everyone who wanted to get some time. Equally so it became easy to forget what was discussed and whether there was a follow-up needed from my end.

Today I started the practice of doing a end of week retro of my calendar and noting down any takeaways/follow-ups form the meetings had. If I’ve not already done so I go ahead and make sure that whatever connections promised are done and any follow-up comments/thoughts are shared. This serves to put a proper cap on meetings had or to make sure that forgotten to do’s get the time to be addressed. It’s a simple exercise which I like because it is something that is more likely to become a regular part of my routine. It took me about 30min to do everything in the review process for this past week so hopefully that timeline will hold in future weeks.

As an aside I have been good about not getting on email nearly as often over the past few months. I typically spend less than 3–4 hours on email over the weekend which is a huge shift for me from the past. I’m working towards getting that down to 2–3 hours going forward by not over-committing myself to things. Yes I have been guilty repeatedly of over-committing in the past. It’s a habit I’ve worked hard to curb.

So let’s see how this works out. I’m convinced that this is a good step forward and it already feels good to know I’ve done my follow-up on at least this past week’s engagements so that already bodes well.