VC investor Phil Morle on 7 ways to find time for thinking

The natural flow of time in venture is towards the ‘transactional’. Without a deliberate other process, days become 30-minute zoom window slices.

These become a terrible blow to big thinking because they gobble up the available time but also because:

The default is ‘out’ rather than ‘in’.
‘No’ is easier than ‘yes’.
Assessing/judging someone else is easier than imagining what is possible.
A clear outcome is needed in a short time, meaning it is probably shallow in impact.

Sometimes this is OK as a means to share information or quickly qualify a next step, but my brain shrivels when the whole day looks like this.

Seven ideas to shake it up

Here are some approaches I am trying:

I schedule time for me. This is important time and it is all too easy to sacrifice it. I ensure there are at least a few hours each week to work on a bigger project or idea.
I walk between meetings. I need time for my brain to let ideas in. A 30-minute walk instead of a rushed 10-minute Uber does the trick. Carry a notebook or some way to capture what your brain does by magic.
I question every standing meeting. It is easy for a week to fill up with them. They are called ‘Check ins’ or ‘WIPs’ and they can quickly become a time suck. They also delay forward motion until that meeting happens once per week. If they are e becoming ‘How’s it going?’ meetings, replace them with one of the ideas below or eliminate them altogether. What can be moved to asynchronous communication?
I schedule long 1:1s with no agenda: I am scheduling more time for face-to-face 1:1s with people to go deep into things. This is hard to do… rejecting 2 or 3 smaller meetings for a deep dive into one. But I have found the outcomes to be transformative.
I am trying ‘maker sessions’: We’re trying some sessions as 60-minute creative sprints where we express our ideas by making things. It is opening our minds to new possibilities.
We have unpacked ‘All-ins’ to squads: We found that we were naturally trending towards everyone being in every meeting. We have just attacked this and now have small ‘squads’ who spend quality time on domain-specific issues (some are investment theme centric, and some are firm operations) – these conversations go deep and then reflect lessons learned and outcomes back to the larger group as needed.
I write more: I reserve time to write. It forces me to reflect on something, consider what matters, and think about a specific response. Sharing ideas publicly, forces accountability. We now have 6 people in our firm who ‘Build out Loud’ through their writing.

This post first appeared on Phil Morle’s Building Out Loud blog, where he writes about what he is learning in deep tech venture building. Read more here. Follow him on Twitter at @philmorle