Some people close to me joke (I think they are joking!) that “Tom doesn’t work full time”. True in a conventional sense, though my brain is switched on from at least 8 am to typically 6 pm or later, so to me that is doing my work! It is true, though, that I restrict my client work to no more than around six clients at a time and no more than around 30% of my time talking with clients. That then means that the other 70% or so of my time is about people and ideas in other ways (and often complimentary to my conversations and work with clients, as I always have my clients in mind).
Yesterday was a reasonable typical day, even though it was a day when I didn’t actually have any client calls or meetings. It went like this:
- No, I didn’t get up at 4 am and take three hours of meditation and green juices as so many LI “thought leaders” seem to think is a) worth posting, and b) believable. My day did begin when I got up a bit before 7 am. A good sign is when I wake up like that a few minutes before my alarm goes off.
- Yes, I did bounce out of bed. I am a morning person, but this is really learned behaviour from when I was a swim parent getting up well before 6 am several days a week (thanks, my sons!).
- My first hour of the day was breakfast, then checking the news, then a few pages from one of the piles of books next to my armchair. Yesterday it was “Transport for Humans” by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland.
- I then had a call at 8 am at the request of a friend who asked me to mentor a small business owner looking to scale. It was an energising 90 minutes.
- After that I had some life admin for a while, then a call at 10 am for an hour with a mentee who I talk to every six weeks or so. We’ve been doing this since the start of the year and it is a really positive and productive relationship initiated through a mentoring programme from a professional network I am part of. I am a huge fan of mentoring as part of networks and associations, happy to talk to anyone interested in this through my experiences over more than two decades.
- As I had a gap between calls between 11 am and 2 pm, first I wrote a daily post for this blog, then I jumped on the exercise bike for an hour for some structured training, accompanied by podcasts (David McWilliam on Economics and then The Rest is Politics with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, though I’ve also been listening to Empire recently, all of these are excellent). I’m focussed on winter training now to lose the “chemo kilos” and be fit and strong (and lighter by at least 8 kg!) for a bike adventure next spring or early summer
- I then jumped online to see what people were talking about and enjoyed a LinkedIn post by Roland Harwood about people (like he and I) who love to connect, then connected some others into that conversation, which I sense will result in more connections to people and ideas!
- At 2 pm a first LunchClub call in about six months, which also turned out to be a mentoring call. Love LunchClub, great to be back at it!
- From 3 pm onwards I was then free until a network video call with a Cayman network at 6 pm, so I did some research, some preparation for upcoming client calls, and some more reading (slowly digesting the exquisite writing of Carlo Rovelli).
- The network call was a social connection one, a lovely way to finish the day!
All in all a well-balanced day with four calls totalling around five hours, alongside some reading and some business and life admin.
PS started before 8 am and finished around 7 pm. Well-rounded and (cough) full-time 😉 …and full of people and ideas, and one where I also got exercise in even though I never left the house!