One of your greatest tools as an assistant when it comes to communication is your daily meeting, or morning prayers as we affectionately call them in our office.
Why morning prayers? Well, I was brought up Roman Catholic and at school we met every day as a community for morning prayers. That meeting was as much about making sure we were all on the same page at the start of each day as it was about the praying, I suspect, and that is what this meeting is all about.
Simply put, it’s the most important meeting of my day.
Why? Because once we have that meeting, my assistant can get on with her job – which is to make me most effective.
But why do I recommend it bring only 10 minutes a day?
That’s for two reasons.
Firstly, I have the attention span of a gnat. I really don’t do
detail unless I am dragged kicking and screaming. Or unless I have cleared a chunk of time to do it. The idea of spending an hour once a week talking about administrative detail is my idea of hell.
That said, my 10 minutes every morning allows us to cover a multitude of things, and
because the meeting is every day, we CAN cover things in just 10 minutes.
Every morning we cover:
1. What’s in the calendar for today?
2. Has anything changed since yesterday?
3. Email communications – is there something she wants clarified or to bring to my
attention
4. Staff issues – is there anything she thinks I need to know
5. Status updates on projects
6. Upcoming travel
7. Follow-up items
Of course, not all of these need to be covered every day. It depends on what happened the day before. But when a meeting is every day, you can cover a huge amount in 10 minutes.
The second reason for only having 10 minutes is that nobody else wants 10 minutes of my time. When you have a meeting which is an hour long, you know that inevitably, somebody else will come during the week saying that they have something urgent to discuss with your manager.
Be honest. How often do you sigh and take yourself off the calendar so they can have your hour?
Stop it! You need your 1:1s. But by making them 10 minutes a day, you are less likely to have to give that time to someone else.
Whether they know it or not, this time for answering questions is essential for building understanding, rapport, and collaboration with your manager.
