Thursday Already Ate Monday

A thirty-minute conversation on Thursday’s calendar has already eaten Monday. It’s chewing through Tuesday now with its mouth open, one eye on Wednesday.

And you’re tired. Shoulders-up-around-your-ears tired, from work that hasn’t happened yet.

From an effort standpoint, a tough conversation is one of the easiest things you’ll do all week. You sit down. You say the sentence. The whole thing fits inside a cup of coffee… and somehow the weight of it has been riding shotgun since Sunday.

The tired is honest, though. You have been working. You’ve had that conversation nine or ten times already, in the shower, at red lights, at the kitchen table after the kids are down. Every run is against a stand-in who is meaner than the real person, remembers every mistake you’ve made, and never once lets you finish a sentence. Each rerun costs a full emotional rep. You’re worn out from a job you keep doing in the wrong room.

Dread doesn’t scale with the size of the work. It scales with the size of the gap.

So when you catch it, skip the pep talk and shrink the gap. Pull the conversation closer, same day if the other person can take it, because the stand-in bills by the hour. If you lead anybody, watch your openers. “Can we talk Friday?” sent on a Monday hands someone four days of reruns with no script. Put the actual subject in the first message. Hard news with a label on it weighs less than a blank.

The other move is to hand someone half of it before you walk in. Before some meetings I’ll Slack a teammate one line: can you please challenge my thinking on this call? The pushback was probably coming anyway. Now it’s invited, we both show up ready, and it’s hard to take personally something you asked for in writing. The stand-in only has one move, the ambush. Ask for the ambush and he’s out of material.

Buyers carry the same weight. Plenty of deals die in the gap between “this is better” and the switching conversation with the CFO, rehearsed in a parked car for a quarter until the renewal date decides for them. Write the first two lines of that conversation for them.

The real person is usually kinder than the one you’ve been arguing with since Sunday. That one was you, doing an impression.

Stay Positive & This Applies To Any Meaningful Work, Not Just Conversations