Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Rattle and Pedal, Diversion Thoughts on Marketing and Growing Professional Services Firms. Your hosts are Jason Mlicki and Jeff McKay.

Jason Mlicki:
So Jeff, before we start today’s episode I have to make a confession. I haven’t had actually any time to think about this topic.

Jeff McKay:
That’s because you’re such a busy man and engaged father, I assume. I thought it might be because of all that hard work you’re doing to make it into the Mr. Universe contest.

Jason Mlicki:
I already won that. Yeah, right. But a running joke I have with my kids whenever we’re going anywhere, and we see someone who’s a really, really large muscle build man. I say, “Man, that guy looks just like me.” And they all laugh. 6’2″, 120, right?
Anyway, the reason that was a joke of course is because our topic for today is talking about the need to create time to think. So that’s what we’re going to talk about. And, in setting this up, I thought you made a good point, that there’s sort of two underlying realities to this topic.
Reality number one is maybe you’re somebody that had built time to think into your business habits. And that time has disappeared or eroded as a result of the pandemic crisis and sort of the stressors that’s put on you and your organization. And then group two is the group that has never really created time to think. It’s never been something they’ve been able to do, or willing to do, or haven’t really kind of figured out how to make that happen, or even know why they should make that happen. So I think we need to kick both sets of tires and see where it takes us. So you start us out from there. That’s fair, right?

Jeff McKay:
Yeah. It’s fair. It’s fair. Well, so point, counter point. Do you remember a Point Counterpoint on Saturday Night Live?

Jason Mlicki:
Oh geez.

Jeff McKay:
It was Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin.

Jason Mlicki:
Oh yeah.

Jeff McKay:
Oh my gosh, we’ll put a link to one of those videos. And I’m playing Dan Aykroyd and I’m biting my tongue to not start with his opening line. Oh gosh, that made me chuckle.
So my point was, I don’t think people set time aside to think, and if they do, they don’t set enough time. And I say that because in the world that we live in, particularly professional services but I think this is true of most businesses, is utilization drives everything and you don’t want to be seen as the person who’s wasting time. And taking time to think is not necessarily billable. So it’s seen as wasted time, not priority time. So I really don’t think people take the time to think. And not just think because I do think there is thinking going on.
There’s two types of thinking in my mind. One is decision-making thinking. We have an issue. We need to define that issue. We need to understand that issue. We need to evaluate solutions to addressing that issue. And then we need to decide and act to address the issue. That’s not the type of thinking I’m necessarily thinking about specifically.
I’m thinking about the type of thinking that is big idea. It’s taking the time to ponder what if scenarios and look at those topics that aren’t time constraint. They’re timeless. They’re universal. But they inform those other kind of tactical decisions that I just described.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah, no, it’s, that’s a really interesting point. And it’s funny, as you were talking, there was so many things firing in my head that I almost blurted out 50 things. But the one that really struck me is, and I keep doing this in our episodes lately, is just timestamping them. So we’re recording this on May 20th, I think. It’ll probably publish about a month out from when we were record it.
My point in saying that is there’s a big conversation going on in the overall us economy right now around this idea of efficiency versus resiliency. And how the pandemic has sort of exploited that our supply chains have been sort of fixated on driving efficiency for years and years, at the cost of resiliency. And now we’re sort of experiencing the repercussions of that. Lack of PPE equipment, all the things that have played out during the crisis have kind of rooted back to that kind of central thing. The reason I tell that story is only because I feel like that’s the culture of American business these days, right? It’s been efficiency, efficiency, efficiency, kind of across the board in so many companies, in so many cultures, that like you said, someone who is over in the corner, just sitting in a room, staring at a wall for a half a day, people look at him like he’s crazy, right? “What does that guy doing? Who’s paying him?”
And so it’s, yeah-

Jeff McKay:
Pick up a shovel and dig.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah. That’s a critical thing to be doing, right? It’s a critical task. So I do think we’re having a reckoning with that. And it’s a good one. It’s a good one for us to deal with, both as business leaders, business owners, and even as consumers. So my wife and I have had this conversation that it’s, so much of the American economy has been driven by, “Oh, you can get that cheaper. You can get that cheaper.” Well, maybe cheaper is not always better, right? Like maybe we, as a society, need to be more comfortable paying more for some things. Because that quest for the cheapest thing has driven us to the brink of collapse. And in the moment, so, anyway, random comments.
But I really liked the way you framed it, the idea that this is not thinking to solve a problem necessarily. It’s maybe blue sky thinking. It’s exploration. It’s thinking about where the business is, where it’s going, the path forward. So that’s all good thinking.

Jeff McKay:
Yeah. And life is interrelated, right? Business. And we’re seeing that in spades right now. It’s important for people to step away, I believe, and to ponder, to contemplate any number of dimensions. When my wife takes time to think she thinks about relationships. That is singular in her mind. And how are people doing, and how do certain events impact them? What was the result of her last exchange with somebody? She worries about her kids or her mother or other friends that she has. I seldom think about relationships. [crosstalk 00:06:41]
Really. I’m like, “How can you spend that much time thinking about that.” And if [crosstalk 00:06:47]

Jason Mlicki:
That’s why you don’t have any.

Jeff McKay:
Right. It made me start to say, “I need to take the time to think about those types of things.” I think right now a lot of people are contemplating life and death. Because in their minds and in what the media has told us, it’s at your front doorstep and don’t step outside. And I think we as human beings, try to avoid thinking about our own demise because it’s scary. But just imagine what thinking about your death, and I do believe lots of people are going to be different and living life more fully after this, because they have taken the time to think about how short life is. So I think that’s critical one.
I think another one that time to think about is just all the thoughts running around in our heads. And this is something I do fairly regularly. Just sit down and just watch the thoughts flow by like a river. And it’s bizarre what goes on inside my head. The things you worry about, or your past, or your future, or why something is some way. And it’s just fun to watch those go by. And there’s a calming effect to that as well. And that list just goes on and on about things to be thinking about other than billable items.

Jason Mlicki:
All right. So for the lighter side of your comments, my eight year old has informed me that toilets and teapots kill many people in a year. That was awesome.

Jeff McKay:
[crosstalk 00:08:23] Write that down right now.

Jason Mlicki:
He proceeded to tell me he now has toilet phobia, which of course, is a joke.
It really [inaudible 00:08:35] aside that related to something that you just said is that I was reading on how the mind works. And one of the things that’s fascinating is that our memory is terrible. In fact, they found that really about half of our memories are inaccurate entirely. We’ve sort of conjured them out of our head. And the reason is because the place where we store in memory is the same place where we dream in our brain. And so like the interaction between the past and the future are sort of like, are piled on top of each other. They’re sort of cluttered together.
My point in saying that is when you stop and think about what you just said, as it relates to death and some of those things, is that it is really hard for us to control our mind, to focus on the here and now. Even in the moment when you’re having a conversation, you and I are talking, and your mind is constantly jumping back to memories you had from years ago or it’s jumping forward to dreams you have about the future. And it has a hard time staying on focus and staying on task. And so the time to think is partly that, I believe. It’s partly just making sure that you’re literally creating time to focus on the here and now and not living in the future or living in the past, which your mind kind of unconsciously does all day, every day without you even noticing. Which is crazy. Right?

Jeff McKay:
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki:
So anyway, another episode of random thoughts from Jason Mlicki, right?

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Rattle and Pedal, divergent thoughts on growing your professional services firm. Your hosts are Jason Mlicki, principal of Rattleback, the marketing agency for professional services firms, and Jeff McKay, former CMO and founder of strategy consultancy, Prudent Pedal. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by telling a friend and rating us on iTunes. Thank you. Now back to Jason and Jeff.

Jason Mlicki:
So maybe the underlying assumption on this, my sense is that there’s two groups out there right now, to some extent. There’s a group of people that had really carved time into their schedule to think, and it was a big part of their daily habits or weekly habits, as business owners or as marketers or as business leaders. And suddenly that time has evaporated. It’s just gone. They’re busier than they’ve ever been. I mean, I know we have a client that I was talking to the other day and he said, he’s like, “Jason, I just don’t know how much time I’m going to have to think about what you’re asking me to think about. Because it’s literally 15 hour days over here at five days a week and then weekends as well.” So he’s just completely overextended beyond belief. And so I think that there’s still a lot of people in that zone. That are sort of going to have to, they had created space for this and they’re going to have to claw it back.
And then, like you said, there’s a whole group of people that have just never stopped and thought, that needed to think this way and make that part of their daily or weekly business habits. So in the interest of time, why don’t we jump into a little bit about, you tell, we talked a little bit about why this is important. Let’s talk a little bit about, when is the best time to think. And you alluded to this a little bit in sort of the prep. Is this something that we have to take control of ourselves and make it a habit? Or is it something that external forces bring upon us? Kind of just, let’s talk about that for a few minutes.

Jeff McKay:
Well, what are your thoughts on that?

Jason Mlicki:
Well, my initial thought is that if you’re not proactively taking control of it, then it’s physically never going to happen. And that’s probably the single biggest block for people that have never created that space. Because they don’t schedule it into their routine. They don’t schedule it into their habits. I’ve been really kind of fascinated lately by we use Office 365, and Office 365 is sort of throwing analytics at me. And it’s something that it’s just out of nowhere, just all of a sudden they started sending me these emails with weekly analytics about sort of my interactions. Who I’m interacting with the most, how much they’re responding to me.
But one of things that’s interesting in there is it has this thing on how much of your focus time is being taken away. And it’s like, all of it in the last month. It’s like all my focus time. However, it’s defining focus time, it’s it sort of must be, because I’m not setting up focus time in that regard. It’s sort of identifying focus windows for me, based on my behaviors, and then saying, “Well, that time is disappearing on you.” So it’s sort of this constant reminder in the back of my mind that I’ve got to grab that back. And it’s even prompting me to say, “Hey, would you like to block out focus time to make sure that people stop stealing it from you?” Which is pretty cool.

Jeff McKay:
That is cool. But, as you describe that, that’s very much a utilization mindset. Because it’s measuring your focus time staring or doing something on a computer. So you might be actually out there thinking big thoughts, quiet time with no help of electronics whatsoever, but it makes you conscious of it, right? So to your point, you have to schedule the time. And this is where I think people fall short. If you don’t schedule the time, you’re not going to get it done. Or you’re going to do it haphazardly? And you’re not scheduling time because it’s not of value to you.
And whether you schedule 15 minutes a day before you even start your day, or at the end of the day to just sort through all the chaos in your mind, or you set up a whole day to say, “Hey, this is my day of thinking. I’m going to work extra hard and focused on these days. So that I can free up that capacity to do it on these days.” And it can be all of the above. You can say, “Hey, every day I’m spending 15, 20 minutes in just silence and thinking about stuff.” You may set up one day a week. And maybe you set up a week a year or a week a quarter, to go do that type of stuff. And I mean, that’s big time to take. Not everyone has that capacity. But I think there is a framework that works for you.
But for me, Jason, I tell you my best thinking happens on the bike. So if I go out for an hour ride, or maybe a two or three hour ride, I don’t take any electronics or anything, and try to get to a place where my mind is not focused on cars coming at me or potholes or other kind of diversions or distractions, but a place where I can just go and let my mind be free. I’ve gotten in the habit of carrying a notebook on every ride, because it seems like ideas and thoughts and clarity come to me during rides.

Jason Mlicki:
Are creating time for reading and thinking the same thing?

Jeff McKay:
No, I don’t think they are. I think they feed one another, but I think thinking needs to be unfettered. I mean, a book or something could be a catalyst for something you may want to think about. But no, I think they are different. I think they’re different.

Jason Mlicki:
Now, the other flip of this is there the risk of creating too much time to think? Which people kind of go, “Well, that sounds crazy.” But is it? You think about what you kind of comment on. Maybe it’s a week a quarter. People have encouraged me to do this sometimes, say, “Jason, you need to take a couple of days, and just step away from the daily business, and just be removed from everyone and everything.” And that’s a little bit too much for me. That’s just not how my brain tends to operate. Could you literally create too much time and space?

Jeff McKay:
Yes. And I think the number is up to the person because it’s going to be different for everybody. So how do you know how much is enough? There are metrics that drive our lives. There’s business metrics, work to be done, utilization, sales quotas. And if those things start to erode too severely, you could be out of whack, or the thinking and pondering is not paying dividends. But I think there’s family time, because you, there’s only so many hours in a day and you have to take time away from your family to do some of this stuff. And if those relationships start to suffer, that’s probably too much time, or that’s not the proper allocation. But if you’re not seeing the fruits of the goals or of spending time to think, you need to reflect on the structure and the time you’re putting in into it.

Jason Mlicki:
So if you’re thinking you’re not getting the outcomes, you need to think more about how to think.

Jeff McKay:
Yeah, boy, that sounded, yeah. I mean really. I mean, why are you taking time to think. To me, it’s quality of life, am I living the life I want to live? Are my relationships and things in order? Big ideas. Am I thinking about big problems beyond just the moment? And am I producing solutions to them? And am I living a life of integrity, one that’s consistent with my values? I mean, to me, those are kind of the three big buckets of the purpose of thinking. And whether or not you’re achieving them will kind of dictate if you have enough time or if your time is effective. Because it’s to be one of those two things.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah, no, I agree. There’s one last thought I had that I wanted to cover before we close it out. So we talked about the importance of blocking out time. So creating time and space for this to happen. We talked about why it’s important that it happens. We talked about identifying where you do your best thinking. You do your best thinking on the bicycle. So there’s knowing where you are effective at developing your thinking. And I was going to throw out one last one that I think is important, especially for those folks that have lost time, where time has disappeared on them, and I’m just going to call it public commitments.
And so it’s this idea that one of the things that drives our behavior is when we make commitments to someone that we’re going to do something. So it might be me committing, literally just to a friend, it might be committing to you saying, “Jeff, I haven’t had enough time to think. By the time we meet again, I will have spent a day thinking on this X, Y, and Z topic.” And you asking you to kind of prompt me, “Did you do that?” So sometimes it could be as simple as that. It could be more, bigger, meaning that you’re going to produce a piece of thought leadership that says, “We’re going to have this webinar. Write this article. It’s due this date. Based on this thinking that I want to explore.” Or it could be committing to teaching something. Maybe you’re a senior leader, and you’ve talked about the curse of knowledge and you’ve got some set of knowledge you’d like to transfer to your team. And sort of making a public commitment that you’re going to work with someone in the team to share that knowledge.
So I’m sure there’s a million other commitments you can make, but it seems to me like that’s another way, if you’re trying to force yourself into this habit, that you can force yourself. A lot of times, even that public commitments thing, one of the things I’ve used through the years, is I’ll commit to, I did a lot with webinars. Commit to a webinar topic and a date, promote it, having known absolutely nothing about the topic beforehand. [crosstalk 00:19:37] I am going to talk about this. I don’t know anything about it right now. And I have to do a lot of homework to get there. And so it sort of forces me to learn. And then it forces me to think about that learning and apply it in a structured way. And so I think those are ways that I’ve, just some techniques I’ve used to sort of, I guess, force time into my schedule to think about things I want to think about.

Jeff McKay:
I love that. I love that. One of the things I used to be really good about, and this was before family, but I was committed to doing one or two spiritual retreats a year. And I’d just say, “I’m going on this date.” And there wouldn’t be a topic or issue or anything in my mind when I would schedule that time and make a reservation at a retreat center or something. It was set the time aside to do it. And the retreats that I normally went on were four day silent retreats. And it was always fascinating going into them, like, “What am I going, I feel this pressure. Well I have to study some topic or look at some issue or something.” And I learned that you just step into it and let what happens happens.
And the funny thing is the first three days are almost a complete waste, or two and a half days. Because your mind takes that long to just settle down, to get quiet. You wouldn’t think it would take that long, but it does. And you really get one day where you can actually have something fruitful come out of it. And that’s why I say taking time is so important. Because it does take time for human physiology to play out. And you talked about our memories and how horrible we are at them. We just have these anatomical constraints and we have to work with them. And that’s why the time is so important. Otherwise you’re just not going to get the best thinking.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah. It’s funny, I’ve in my life, used that same analogy from a vacation perspective. You know we started taking two or even three week vacations about seven or eight years ago. And there’s a lot of people listening to us that have probably never taken a vacation for a week in their lives.
The reason I did it was exactly what you said. It was like, it’d be two, three days to start to kind of like, get your head wrapped around that you didn’t have all these other commitments. And then you’re at the middle of the week. And then you’re [inaudible 00:22:08] back up again. So you end up with like a two day vacation. So I was like, I just found that that was the only way I could really enjoy time with my family, was if I gave myself enough time to really decompress from the realities and then recompress another side. So it’s a really good point.
All right. Well, I believe, I think that we have thought about this topic more than enough today. So I am going to say goodbye. And I will talk to you again next week having thought much more deeply about this.

Jeff McKay:
Sounds like a plan. See you, buddy.

Jason Mlicki:
See you back.

Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening to Rattle and Pedal, Divergent Thoughts on Marketing and Growing Professional Services Firms. Find content related to this episode at rattleandpedal.com. Rattle and Pedal is also available on iTunes and Stitcher.