The most valuable resource in a professional digital life, and in general in the digital world, is attention. As a leader and a decision maker in a business your time is very busy, and attention is limited. If you’re a sales person or recruiter, it’s hard to get enough attention to get your foot in the door. I don’t think I’m unique, in my experience most people in digital leadership or business leadership roles have a similar diary/email load. So let’s have a look at what that looks like…
We use Google Workspace at work and that’s got some really nice insight tools in Google Calendar that can give you a nice breakdown of your commitments.
June was a super-busy month, according to my analytics, I had 127 hours in meeting time and 67 hours free in my diary (including lunch times!).
So, taking out a 30 minute lunch, that’s 56 hours that aren’t accounted for. Most of my meetings are booked for 50 minutes, that leaves a 10 minute context switch air-gap and a chance to make sure I’ve got any of my actions in place in my personal productivity system etc. We do have a day a week that is meeting free. Other than daily stand-up. But that means those four days a week are often basically all meetings.
A lot of the remaining time goes into dealing with the things that come up, as a leader a priority is to unblock my team. Answer queries as soon as they come up, remove obstacles, make decisions, enable others to make that decision, ad-hoc coaching etc.
That makes that meeting free day even more valuable, it’s the chance to sit down and get things done that require my individual focus.
Most months, it looks like it’s more like 50/50 split between meetings and non-meeting time, but that doesn’t make it much less busy with the ad-hoc unblocking activity!
A lot of the ad-hoc unblocking happens digitally, via instant messaging platforms or email.
Checking my inbox, I had 120 active threads yesterday. Rapid and effective email triage is important. I use gmail features extensively to make sure I pick up anything that’s an internal priority quickly and do regular inbox zero passes on everything else. Things get flagged for later action when I have the time to take the considered action, or ruthlessly got rid of.
I’m not unique, I think that’s a fairly common pattern. Everyone is busy. That’s why attention is the most valuable resource. That’s why all those apps and websites do so much to get your attraction. All those free services? They’re selling your attention. They get your eyes on their surface, then they rent that surface out.
Anything you’re doing to gain attention in that sales or business development role needs to be really on point - the people you’re trying to reach need to spend theirs super carefully.