You Prep For Client Meetings. What About Time With Your Kids?
You probably prepared for your last client meeting.
You organized your thoughts. You defined the outcome you wanted. You anticipated objections. You may have done all of this for someone who, if you're being honest, ranks somewhere in the lower half of the list of people who matter most to you.
When was the last time you did any of that before sitting down at dinner with your kids?
This past weekend, my youngest son had a soccer game. The drive was about 30 minutes each way. Before we left the house, I spent five minutes thinking about our upcoming time together.
Specifically:
What music did I want to play that might open something up between us?
What questions did I actually want to ask, beyond "how was school this week"?
What topics did I want to explore if the moment was right?
How was I going to respond if he wasn't biting on any of it?
It probably sounds excessive. It also probably sounds like something I should have been doing the whole time.
I wasn't. Three years ago, I would have used those 30 minutes to think about my upcoming work week while he watched something on his phone. We were in the same car, sharing the same air, and we weren't together at all.
The asymmetry is irrational on its face. We apply rigor to the meetings that pay us and we wing it with the people we'd take a bullet for.
We have more than 10,000 minutes in a week.
I’m asking you to allocate five of them to prepare for one of the most important meetings you'll have all week.
Here's how the drive went. I played him some Passion Pit — a band we used to listen to together a few years ago. They just announced a new tour and we're going to catch them live. I wanted to reintroduce the music so he'd start getting excited about the show before I even told him about the tickets.
That's the move five minutes of thinking buys you. Not "play him a good song." Pick something tied to a shared past, knowing there's a future moment coming you'll get to share. Reactivate a frequency you used to be on together.
That doesn't happen if I'm stuck in my head thinking about work.
So here's what I want to offer you. Next time you know you're going to be spending time with your kid -- dinner tonight, the car ride after practice, a Saturday morning drive to the store— spend five minutes thinking about how to make that time as good as possible for both of you.
Not just for you. For both of you.
I'm not going to hand you the questions. You know your kid. You'll know what to play, what to ask, what to bring up, if you actually give yourself the five minutes.
If this is new for you, the first one might still go nowhere.
That's fine. You're not running a play.
You're building a habit.
The 30 minutes I just had with my son wasn't on my calendar. It wasn't billable. There was no agenda and no follow-up email.
