Meetings With Yourself: A Way of Enhancing Your Personal Productivity
The idea of holding a meeting with yourself may sound crazy. After all, surely you’re always, in effect, with yourself. However, in reality, you spend a good part of your time thinking about external issues, with your mind focused on a thousand things, but not on yourself, as such.
For this reason, having meetings with yourself can be an excellent idea. In this article, we’re going to talk about the benefits that they can produce in your workplace. As a matter of fact, they can increase your productivity, since they’re spaces that allow you to organize your ideas and project yourself in a more accurate way.
Just as you hold meetings with others to process work matters, you can hold meetings with yourself with similar objectives. You should conduct them in a similar way and aim to generate similar results. Let’s take a look at the idea in more detail.
“ Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes .”
-Carl Jung-
Meetings with yourself
When talking about meetings with yourself, the first thing that causes confusion is the word “meeting”. That’s because it’s supposed to refer to an attentional intersection of two or more people. Nevertheless, in this case, it’s about bringing together the part of yourself that’s focused on the external with the dimension that looks inward.
They’re called meetings because they follow the same pattern as those in which more than one person participates. Indeed, the concept is simply transferred to an individual activity.
These meetings with yourself are especially recommended if you have multiple activities to carry out and little time to do them. Also, if you’re faced with some tremendous responsibilities or are going through a crisis situation at work. It’s in these kinds of circumstances that you’ll get the most benefit out of meeting with yourself. That said, whatever your situation, you should make sure you have one once a week.
Planning meetings with yourself
You plan meetings with yourself just like you would organize any type of meeting. First, you must define a start and end date and time. Then, you must record them on your agenda and respect that time, as you would if it were a meeting with others.
As a rule, the objective of these meetings is for you to evaluate your own work and restructure any activities or tasks that warrant it. However, it’s important that you define a specific objective for each meeting. The more concrete your purpose, the more likely it is that the results of the meeting will help you achieve it.
For example, you might want to identify a more functional methodology for carrying out one particular task. Or perhaps assess the reasons why you keep delaying another. You can also simply try to assess how well you’ve done during the week. The important thing is to specify your objective.
Developing the meeting with yourself
Meetings with yourself follow the same protocol as other meetings. It’s essential to completely block your agenda for them as you mustn’t be interrupted. It’s also best to schedule them ahead of time and at times when other activities are unlikely. Ideally, you should plan them a week in advance.
When planning meetings with yourself, it is also important to identify what material and tools you’ll need. For example, work diaries, work schedules, notes, etc. The meeting will be more productive if you have the necessary resources available.
You should also make a plan of activities or an agenda, as you would for any other meeting. What are you going to do? In what order? If the meeting is for self-assessment purposes, you might want to split up your performance into sections. For instance, punctuality, compliance with your work schedule, quality of products, etc. Organize them numerically, deal with them, and draw conclusions.
You might want to develop your own strategies and tools. The most important thing is that you have no distractions. That’s because, in meetings with yourself, you have to disconnect from everything in order to reconnect with the true meaning of your work. These spaces help you to develop more mental organization and enhance your work.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Gutiérrez Pulido, H. (2010). Calidad total y productividad.
- López Fresno, P. (2018). Estudio exploratorio sobre el concepto, tipología y significados de las reuniones de trabajo (Doctoral dissertation, Universitat Rovira i Virgili).