Welcome Wednesday: Your first meeting of the day is cancelled. How do you spend the extra time?

Jimmy Seddon
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 20, 2022

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

I hope the week is going well for everyone so far.  I decided this week we'd go with a scenario question, because these can be fun.

"Your first meeting of the day has been cancelled.  What do you do with the extra time?"

  • Do you rejoice for some much needed focus time to dive into some work?
  • Do you go back to bed because it was happening too early anyway?
  • Do you actually spend the time to eat breakfast instead of grabbing something on the go?
  • Or something else completely?

For me personally, I'm usually up and at the keyboard before 7am.  Since I end up walking the dogs and taking my son to school around 8 am, I try to get a few things done before then.  My first meeting of the day isn't usually until after 9 am (standup is at 10am).  I would likely use the time to dive into work on something else as there is never a shortage of tasks for me to complete.

I'd love to hear in the comments how you would spend your extra time.  Please tell me below!

Have a great rest of the week!

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Samie Kaufman - Your Gal at Gliffy
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 20, 2022

There's a 100% chance I'm staring at my list of 20+ overdue tasks, thinking "Wow! Maybe I can chip away at a few of these!" and then getting stuck on the first one I try to tackle. 😁  

I'm with you on trying to get as much done before that first meeting as possible, though. The mornings are definitely my most productive time!

Welcome to the community, everyone!

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Andy Gladstone
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 20, 2022

Although I don't manage my life in Jira, I always have a healthy backlog of items waiting for time to be brought forward. After cursing under my breath about yet another meeting being cancelled too close to last minute, I would try to quickly pivot and pull something from the backlog that requires quiet time to dedicate the new found timeslot to. Like @Samie Kaufman - Your Gal at Gliffy I would probably bite off more than I can chew.

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Samie Kaufman - Your Gal at Gliffy
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 20, 2022

I do hate a last-minute cancellation, especially if I've prepped for it!

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Thorhalla Gudmundsdottir Beck April 20, 2022

@Samie Kaufman - Your Gal at Gliffy @Andy Gladstone same. I'd probably start all of them at the same time or do one of those "chain reaction of half finishing and finding other things to do in the middle" things 😭

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Samie Kaufman - Your Gal at Gliffy
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 20, 2022

YES! The number of times I jump from task to task without finishing anything... ooph!!

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Summer_Hogan
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 20, 2022

@Samie Kaufman - Your Gal at Gliffy and @Andy Gladstone and @Thorhalla Gudmundsdottir Beck - totally the same here too! I'm a bit lucky in this regard though as we have something called "Focus Time" every Wednesday for the 1st half of the day. During this time meetings, chats, etc are not allowed. This is time set aside to focus on things without interruption. It is the greatest thing ever! 

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Thorhalla Gudmundsdottir Beck April 20, 2022

That is a good idea!

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Trish Cescolini
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 20, 2022

Like so many of you, I would breathe a sigh of relief at the prospect of having some additional "free" time to get some work done.  However, the reality is that I would pull something from my to-do list and then either get so engrossed in that project that I would miss the reminder notifications for my next meeting, or I would end up randomly jumping from one distraction to another without ever really completing anything.  Ugh...but I'm trying to do better and make more valuable use of these golden opportunities.

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Taranjeet Singh
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 20, 2022

@Jimmy Seddon That's an interesting question!

For me personally, I usually don't have any meetings scheduled before 11 am; but if in rare situations, I have such an early meeting scheduled but cancelled at the last moment, I try to use this free time to catch up with my pending unread personal emails (including, Atlassian Community emails) as well as company emails, since I get a lot of them due to the nature of my role (i.e. being the only technical consultant working on any assigned project).

I try to get through as many of them as I can before moving to actual more technical tasks for the day.

Having some free time for the breakfast is a thing of the past for me. I have breakfast always in parallel with one or the other task I am working on. :-(

 

Have a great Wednesday and rest of the week, everyone!

 

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