The Silence Between Meetings

"Free WiFi" on a train is the biggest lie we've been sold. For various reasons (moving between phone masts at 100 mph, a couple of hundred people all accessing the same onboard access point, sitting in a Faraday cage) getting a stable internet connection on a train is an adventure in futility.

That's not actually the point of this article. I'll save that rant for another day.

The point of this one is what happens when you are unplugged and have an hour, give or take, to do nothing but sit and think.

I could, like a lot of my fellow travellers, download shows to a device and pass the time that way. I have done this and run out of interesting shows fairly quickly. I could read, and I do; commuting has meant I have had more space and time to get through my anti-library and actually consume some of the books that sit on the shelf judgementally staring back at me.

Or I could think...

There's a lot to be said for doing nothing. I struggle with that. The idea of taking a holiday and spending a week by the pool fills me with dread. However, we've moved as a society to a place where we seem to always be doing something.

But here I am, sitting with pen and paper (yes, don't judge) and just sitting with my brain. Side note: I've just pictured a cartoon scene of me and my brain sitting alone in a room, awkwardly not knowing what to say to each other.

This thinking time has allowed me to join together the various dots of my week.

My calendar is usually a collection of seemingly unrelated topics: 1:1s, hiring, projects, organisational discussions, the occasional fire, and everything in between. Different days, different contexts.

Ask any engineer and they'll tell you that context switching is the silent killer of productivity. As leaders, context switching is the job.

What I've come to appreciate is that this can be both the burden and the benefit of leadership. Left unattended, the constant switching can feel overwhelming. Given space, however, those seemingly disconnected conversations start to connect.

A hiring discussion on Monday. A project review on Tuesday. An organisational challenge on Wednesday. Individually, none of them appear related. Yet given enough quiet, patterns begin to emerge. The dots join. The puzzle starts to fit together. You can suddenly see solutions that weren't immediately obvious in the noise.

Thinking brings clarity.

I value this silence. I yearn for the boredom of nothing.

So when leaders tell me they're too busy, I encourage them to be purposeful in unplugging for an hour. And I mean really unplugging, not leaving Slack notifications on "just in case".

Sit with your thoughts.

Most of the important conclusions from my week didn't arrive during meetings. They arrived afterwards, in the silence between them.