Daily Standup 05 – How To Make Mondays High Impact

This is is part of my live-learning series! I will be updating this post as I continue through my journey. I apologize for any grammatical errors or incoherent thoughts. This is a practice to help me share things that are valuable without falling apart from the pressure of perfection. 

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Daily Standup 05 - How To Make Mondays High Impact
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Daily Standup 05

How to make Mondays high impact

– Blocking off external meetings

– Aspirational personal routine

– Weekly kickoff with team

– Timely important communication

– Eat the frog first

 

 

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Automated Transcription

OK hello, good morning Tyler Bryden here very excited for Monday. We’re coming in closing out April 2022. I shared the video on Sunday that there is a big week coming up with earnings. Will be monitoring that if anything newsworthy comes out of it, which I’m sure they will. Maybe we sharing that in some stand ups as we go along.

A couple points of interest. First of all, what the hell am I wearing? I don’t know. It’s got this weird short sleeve sweater thing. I like it. Weird color.

You can also see some color accents along the wall. Trying to paint the house right now so trying to figure out and. Ended up in a store with like, OK, I don’t know what color to pick. 15 samples paint them all over their walls, figuring out which ones. Yeah, so if you have any insights, how many feedback, let me know.

And then lastly, a little bit of a new setup behind me here. Just adding a little bit more sort of texture. Some of the things that I love, some bonsai trees, some favorite books, my first audio equipment, camera, even a little speak logo there. So very happy about that. Now let’s jump right into it.

It’s Monday and the question I’m asking myself. I’m asking myself this every day, but especially on Mondays. Look at this as a weekly kickoff and say. How can we make this a high impact day? How can we make this a high impact week?

And you know again could could look at this every single day, but I’m going to look specifically at today and a couple things that I put in place now. Caveat or reminder that you know, maybe I truly am nothing to aspire to. These are things that are working in my experience and some of the lessons that I’ve learned from people who have been successful. I think there’s tools of Titans back there and some great books. Sort of understanding and. Breaking down the routines of successful people and then I’ve adjusted that for my own self to see what works best.

So a couple of things that I’ve just found are like best practices personally, but then also that apply to the team which is for myself, one of the big drives is to block off external meetings, at least until the afternoon. Focus on the internal team. Bring everyone together for kick off. Make sure that everyone’s aligned, and if there’s anything that comes after that sort of kick off meeting where it’s like, hey, I need to jump on a call. You want to have that time blocked out so that everyone feels that they are in the right place instead of, you know that that call gets pushed back till way in the afternoon on Monday or Tuesday.

The next day kind of thing. So I think you want to avoid that by happening. And so I, you know, forever have blocked out in the calendar. No morning meetings on Monday and generally I’m a meeting avoidant person. Really want to make sure that that time is prioritized.

You’re spending it in the right place and have built some things into Cowley to sort of automatically structure. Agendas and things and I’ll share more about that at some point too. And the other part I think now that’s a piece that’s applied to the team, but how can you apply so one of the things is that we have that kickoff meeting at 9:30 AM Eastern Standard Time and the reason is because I think if you make that meeting too early, people don’t have the ability to then execute on their personal routines and for myself as I’ve mentioned, tajia dog puppy slaps me in the face about 6:30 in the morning. I get up very important part of this routine Chai. People are saying mad at me if I said it, but it is tea. I’ve got to the habit of caffeine.

Sorry everyone and mad at you. That’s all mad at you Monica, but I also thank you. I love it and that making sure everything is clean, clean. Cleanliness helps you if you sort of Jordan Peterson. Clean your room, clean your mind or whatever that is making sure that that’s done.

Workout sort of some personal hygiene, you know, shower and I do run that. I feel like. You know guru loser. When I say that. But this this cold shower routine has really helped me and I feel energized right after that.

And I’ve noticed that the end of the day I think it’s it’s also attributing to me I’m sleeping better at night too. So you know, I think you have to have this aspirational personal routine, including workouts. Hopefully some cardio in there. You don’t have to hit that everyday, but if you have that and you can execute on that in the morning before you start your team, your teamwork, then everyone comes together in a place where they feel good. And they’re ready to go for the week, and I think if you bring that meeting too early or you try to kick that off too early, you disrupt that. Or you create friction and then people need to do that after the the meeting.

So that’s just something that I’ve sort of noticed. Again, this is different depending on team size. I don’t know what the scale that some companies do this at. I honestly don’t know. I’ve been Max eight people on the team and I think we’re about four full time right now showing up on weekly kickoffs.

And then it’ll communicate in with contractors and things like that. So in the weekly kickoff, one of the things I found what’s really nice is. Preemptively, what we’ll do is just drop a slack thread in and it’ll be. You know, weekly kickoff and then generally kick it off or batchel does and we just put like a numbered list and try to prioritize it. A bit of you know what?

What are the? What are the big goals this week? Or what are the things that we’re kicking off and that then brings some alignment to an agenda to the team. Everyone’s aware of that if there’s any deviation from that, it’s slightly addressed in the slack thread, and then it’s. You know easy to go through each point point by point with the team, and so for example, this week we’re looking at affiliate Slash referral program and then we’re looking at a pricing calculator that we’re releasing.

So these are two big. They sound like small things, but they’re not. They’re quite big multi week engagements and big changes to front end database. Everything within the system and so that’s multi. That’s been a thread throughout several weeks now, but different levels of execution on that and just doing that.

Slack thread allows you to see everyone else. There’s a bit high level of visibility there, and if there’s any questions then we ask each other on there and it also brings some accountability and responsibility to the team. So if I wrote this at the start of the week, generally we will try to review that at the end of the week and as we go through the week or as we get ready for that weekly review, we strike out the things that we’ve done and then have the things that we haven’t completed, not striked out. And without you know, disappointment. We go through. Why are things achieved?

Why are things not and generally the reason is people are are they are they think they can do more than they can do. So reduce the amount of task and then in then increase the and then choose the ones that are high impact as you’re probably not going to get done as much as you want and then other things, especially in the environment that we’re in are going to pop up. So you’re just not prepared for the five extra tasks that you just didn’t expect that week. And all of a sudden no stack on each other become higher priority and things that were seen. To priority the start of the week might not be that that same priority, so that’s one piece that I’ve seen the other part, again from a more I would say personal piece, but within this, so whether you’re in sales, whether you’re in. You know your your fundraising when they’re grants, whatever it is, I think the it’s very important to do timely communication at the start of the week.

So if you haven’t scheduled, say, a calendar meeting with someone that you want to get on a call that needs to be done, you need to reach out Monday. Latest Tuesday morning if you’re actually want to get that call done that week. Otherwise, I feel like you are possibly depending on the relationship. Of course, infringing on that person’s schedule. If you’re saying, hey, let’s jump on a call.

This week for myself, I’m pretty rigid with. OK, this is what my week looks like. I’ve got these meetings in the afternoon and then I start to block time around to make sure that I have these sort of flow state periods and if I don’t then. If I don’t, then I know that I’m not going to execute in the way that I want, and I find it, you know, difficult when someone wants to sort of jump or barge into a schedule because something is high priority, and generally if if it was, that would have been somewhat noticed last week, you should have reached out then and then we could have scheduled a meeting at a convenient time for both of us so we can show up ready, prepared, ready to make that a success so. You do have to balance this piece of you know.

People are starting just like you. You are starting the week. You’ve got a task list that you’re most likely going for. You’ve got your own people that you want to respond to or need to go out to and for you to jump on, say Monday morning. First thing, that’s a you know, almost an attack on someone’s time in a way.

And again, this matters on the relationship, but sometimes I’ll wait, say Monday afternoon, or again, a Tuesday morning to float that email over and give them a little bit of breathing room to start the week and then say hey, hope you having a great start to the week. Here’s what I was hoping to do, and that generally allows them to say, OK, I can actually get some time, you know, Thursday or Friday. I’d love to love to chat. Or can we push this to next week and then opens up that ability so? Timely communication again, just important, and in that sort of.

Just flow of communication and again, whether it’s if you’re doing sales pipeline and you’re saying hey, you know I wanna reach follow up with this person or close something. All those things need to be sort of timed right? So you’re coordinating it with their convenience and making sure that they’re getting the chance to open that email. Read that email or whatever kind of communication it is. So lastly eat the frog 1st and this is just generally saying who I should attribute this quote to.

I wish I knew I could do probably do. A quick search, but basically the idea is do the hardest things first and Mark Twain. Damn it, I knew that too. So this is wake up in the morning and generally just where I’ve seen this fall apart is you say you want to work out you start, but you don’t work out first thing in the morning. You start the day, and by the time it hits 5:00 PM, you’ve done a bunch of stuff and you’re tired so you don’t do it.

And instead the idea here for myself is to flip this. Do the hard things first, get the workout done. Get the things that I don’t want to do out of the way. The rest of the week, then has breathing room, and I think that’s important as a team to do address those things. Early in the week and then have yourself the ability to adapt, react and then do high impact things later in the week as they sort of emerge and again depending on where you are in a stage of a company, the team size or responsibilities.

This can all look very different, but generally some of these concepts have served me well seem to have served other people well and make for a high impact Monday. I hope that there was something good in here for you. I’m ready to go make a Monday. Great ready to make the week great and appreciate you tuning in. Thank you so much.

 

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