Time Well Spent

After our full-day workshop, the VP who’d hired us came by to chat about next steps. Before he did, he shared that this had been the best day his team had spent together since they’d started working together.

The day had opened with an icebreaker — what are you bringing into the room with you today? — and the sentiments people offered ranged from ‘skeptical optimism’ to ‘stress about not being at my desk.’ By the closing round, the words had become ‘grateful,’ ‘energized,’ ‘galvanized.’

I keep thinking about how the VP said it. Not “great session” or “good ROI on the offsite budget.” But ‘best day.’ As if a day could be measured the way you measure a life.

The poet Mary Oliver asked the question that undoes most of our time management: what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life. It’s usually a question built for crossing major thresholds, for graduation speeches, not for a Friday workshop. And yet there it was, alive beneath the VP’s sentence — persistent and mostly invisible, beneath what we call work, if we pause long enough to notice it.

Organizations measure time constantly. Hours worked. Meetings attended. Product launch dates. Utilization rates. Deadlines met. Revenue by quarter. We have become exceptionally sophisticated, almost by instinct now, at accounting for where time goes.

What we rarely ask is whether it was worth going there.

A fully booked day can be profoundly productive. It can also leave us wondering, somewhere between the sixth Zoom call and scarfing down a quick lunch at our desk, what exactly we did with this small, non-renewable portion of our lives.

This time consideration is amplified when you are leading others. You are not just taking up your time. You are taking up other people’s time. A single hour spent in a meeting with twelve people effectively consumes twelve hours of their collective time. Sometimes you’ll leave the meeting with a concrete decision or renewed drive or direction for your team’s initiatives. Other times, far too often, you’ll disperse without a clear understanding of the meeting’s purpose.

Having worked with groups for years, my colleague and I weren’t about to leave our Friday offsite to chance. We designed an intentional arc for the day: an invitational meditation to bring people’s human selves into the room before we asked anything of them, an icebreaker with ground rules — remain curious, assume positive intent, invite the voices of others — and only once that trust existed, the harder work of the team alignment and strategy work at hand.

Part of what makes that arc work is the trust between the two of us, and the leader who’s hired us. We ask a room to assume good intent and make space for other voices, and we strive to make that true between us first, in view of everyone, before we ask it of anyone else.

In short, we deliberately built the conditions for impact, but the impact was a trust-based confluence of all who showed up.

While impact was and always will be our intention, the outcome is never really ours to guarantee.

Every workshop or offsite carries that same risk, no matter how well it’s designed and facilitated. It asks people to show up engaged and intact, to meet the room in the present moment, and no agenda can make that happen. It can only make it possible. The gap between a well-designed day and a well-lived one is where the actual risk lives, every time — in the room, and in the eternal now of where and how the team shows up.

Thomas Merton wrote that our destiny is to live out what we think. Because unless we live what we know, we don’t actually know it. After decades of running workshops, I know that trust built early and earned consistently can carry a group into harder conversation later, even well after the workshop. What I couldn’t know that Friday was whether this particular room would let it.

Calendars are strategy documents disguised as scheduling tools. What repeatedly receives our time eventually creates our lives. Say your team’s real answer is innovation — then look at how much room the calendar leaves for anyone to think an original thought. The gap between the two is the actual strategy, whatever the mission or team charter says.

The systems around us will happily fill, even greedily consume, whatever time and space we surrender, in organizational life and in our life outside of work. There is always another meeting, another notification, another apparently urgent thing asking to borrow an hour. Leadership is deciding which things deserve one, on behalf of people who trusted you enough to hand you the hour in the first place.

Not the most productive. Not the most efficient. The best day.

‘Stressed about my to-do list,’ someone said that morning. ‘Galvanized,’ by the afternoon. I suspect nobody in that room was thinking about their one wild and precious life. They were just living it, for a few hours, on a Friday, in a light-filled meeting room, that this team will carry for time to come.

If you want a more trusting team, a culture of belonging or a magnetic brand that attracts more of the right customers, I can help. If you'd like to explore if working together makes sense, drop me a line.

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