There’s always a lot going on in work and it can be easy to sacrifice essential, foundational activities in order to progress the “real work”, but doing so eventually takes a heavy toll. Just like spending enough time contemplating what’s being done and why and if that’s the right thing to be doing, there is a need to be prepared and thus avoid going into every situation trying desperately to figure out what’s going on and determine your position on the fly, a position that you may regret taking and finding you later need to defend out of not wanting to loose face.
Some activities demand preparation, it only takes one attempt at winging a presentation to convince most people of the value of being prepared, whereas it is too often the norm, for example, for people to arrive in meetings late and utterly unprepared, which is just a waste of everyone’s time. Again, this type of problem is all about time management. How many back to back meetings or events fill the calendar? How much time is set aside for preparation, if any? And how would you feel if a colleague blew-off a meeting you considered important in order to prepare for some other meeting or event?
Personally, I’ve seen too many organizations where terrible meeting etiquette prevails, from an over reliance on using meetings to actually do work, to the lack of defined purpose or an agenda, and so on, with a particularly nasty vice being the continuous overloading of calendars with recurring events and double, triple, and more bookings, and in those organizations a common underlying issue (no doubt one of many) is the lack of consideration for colleagues. Being busy can wrap us in a sense of urgency that can manifest as a feeling of self importance that in turn erodes the consideration we would normally have for those around us.
One way to help restore that consideration might be to build enough sacred time into our schedules to ensure we are prepared for the events that keep the wheels turning in our respective organizations, and in that small way show some professional consideration to those around us and start to limit the urgency that’s pressing us to be so unprepared in the first place.
Martin Minnock 