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Provide the Boss Some Quiet Time Each Workday

Most people feel fortunate if they survive the day and accomplish all the things that are required of them. That’s fine, but it’s not sufficient if it appears to be difficult for you to take on anything extra. Think about how it might be for your boss, who has tons more to do over the course of the workday than most in his or her employ.

What’s the solution for you and your boss if that is the case? It’s to carve out time whether you have it or not. To do what? To think. To plan. To strategize. If you think about it, your boss needs to do that too. For that to happen the staff needs to carve out some kind of zone of privacy for the boss.

Strategic thinking is essential in this day and age. Six months out, two years out, a decade from now. What should you and the boss be thinking about with respect to your organizational future and what it holds?

Quiet time is important time, and if you don’t take it, you lose it to something else.

When could that be during a busy day? Not in the morning. That’s the busiest time for most people. It could be at noon in line or connection with lunch in the privacy of an office or in a quiet corner. Or it could be in some part of the afternoon when things slow down.

The challenge is that chief executives aren’t in control of their day and how they spend it. The London Business School of Economics and the Harvard Business School surveyed 500 chief executive officers and found that, in a 55-hour workweek, they were trapped doing things that were far from fun.

In an average workweek for those executives, 18 hours were spent in meetings, 2 making phone calls, 2 on conference calls, 2 in public events, 5 having business meals, and 20 participating in miscellaneous activities. Only 6 hours were spent working alone.

When Colin Powell became secretary of state in January 2001, he became one of the busiest people in the country. He had bilateral meetings, countless visitors, and myriad phone calls. Never a dull moment, never a spare moment, so it seemed.

As his chief of staff and someone who took responsibility for his workday, I issued an ultimatum to the staff: the secretary gets quiet time in the amount of an hour a day unless he’s on travel or there is a crisis at hand.

It made no difference what time of day; however, it made a difference that he had the time. To do what? To go on his computer and get information, to pick up a phone and gather information or give direction to others, or simply to stare out the window and think.

He not only came to value that quiet time, he came to expect it. It was something we put on his calendar of the day’s activities, and people protected it. They even enjoyed it, and the smart ones took time for themselves during the time we fenced for him.

How to make this routine? Declare it and do it. What’s the value of all this? For one thing, it is bound to reenergize you mentally and physically. At the end of the day it makes you feel more confident that you have planned or assessed something that otherwise might not have happened.

It can be a hands-behind-the-head moment. It could be scribbling notes to yourself, it could even be doodling or googling something you were looking for. But whatever it is or whatever you make it, it’s apt to make you better at what you do.

There’s a lot of sense to that. If it’s good for you, think of what you are doing for the boss. That person of importance in your professional life needs and deserves this quiet time too.

If the boss rejects the notion to formalize this habit, find a way to sell it. If nothing else, ask for a trial run. If you are successful, you may be on the road to a precious destination.

When I told the secretary’s secretary to provide him with private time, I got a “Yahoo!” I thought she was going to dance around the office. She was more excited about this quiet time for the secretary of state than I had expected. She had never had this luxury for her previous bosses. If she had, I suspect she’d have been taking better care of them.