by Serguey Shinder
For years I scheduled hard conversations first thing. Performance discussions, a turned down promotion, bad news about a project. Ten in the morning, get it done, and then two clear hours for the design work I most needed to think about. It seemed considerate to everybody, including me. The dread would be over early and the rest of the day would be free.
In the autumn of 2023 I had a run of them close together. We were restructuring one of the teams, and over six weeks I had nine conversations I would have given a good deal to avoid. Each was followed, as usual, by a block of time for real work. At some point I noticed that I could not remember producing anything in those blocks, so I went back through what I had written in each one.
It was not much. In a normal two hour block I would get perhaps eighty minutes of useful work done. In the blocks after those nine conversations, the average was under twenty. The rest had gone on reading the same page three times, answering messages that did not need answering, and above all on replaying the conversation. I rehearsed better replies to things that had been said. I wondered whether I had been fair. I drafted, in my head, emails I never sent.
This was not tiredness. A short walk did nothing for it. It was that the conversation had not finished. It had ended in the room and carried on in me, and anything that needed my full attention was competing with something that already had most of it.
So the arrangement has changed. Difficult conversations now happen in the afternoon, usually at half past three, and whatever follows them is deliberately undemanding: email, reviews of small changes, planning for tomorrow. Straight after each one I spend ten minutes writing down what was said, what I promised, and what I am still unsure about. That does more to close the conversation than anything else I have tried, because the part of me that keeps replaying it seems mostly afraid of forgetting something. And I no longer put one of these conversations before any block of work I cannot afford to lose.
There was a second benefit I had not expected. The other person gets the same treatment. Nobody leaves a bruising discussion at half past ten and is expected to be sharp in a planning meeting forty minutes later.
The mornings I protect are now protected from the one thing I had never thought to protect them from, which was my own diary.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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