Katie Walsh, Purposeful Meetings for Better Outcomes

Speaker: Katie Walsh, VP, Corporate Communications

Katie Walsh: What I love about epsilon is that we're always go, go, go. We are always passionate and trying to achieve a lot of things at once. But it also means that a lot of us are pretty booked throughout the day. And as we look to double our business and to solve some challenging problems in the market for our clients and, there's just time that needs to happen to have creative thought and have innovation. And it's really difficult to do that when we're in back to back half hour meetings and trying to eat on the fly. And there's not a lot of space to sit back and think about what might be the best way to solve a particular problem. So it's important that we do a little hygiene and maintenance on our calendar. And there's a lot of different ways that we can do that, but it's incredibly important that we do this now. So that we are bringing our best selves, our balanced selves to work, avoiding burnout. But also having a lot of fun thinking about different ways that we can work together and collaborate. And I think we've found that there's just a lot of meetings and a lot of meetings that have a lot of people in them and, and sometimes those meetings are necessary, but we really need to take a close look at how purposeful we're being with hosting these meetings and how we're cascading information. So it, it's the right time to do this is now and I couldn't be more in favor of looking at ways that we can, reevaluate our time management and how we run meetings.

Katie Walsh: As a leader on my team, there's been a couple of things that we've tried to do to make our time more purposeful and to take a look at the kind of meetings that we have, one is potentially decreasing to 45 minutes instead of an hour. If you have a meeting scheduled for an hour, survey says it'll take an hour. So if you can kind of build that 15 minute buffer, you can make it to your next meeting, have a minute to pause and like recollect yourself because a lot of times these meetings that we have are wildly different and you're moving from one thing to another and have to sort of reframe yourself. So that's one thing that is incredibly helpful. Another is to really use the function in your outlook invite that says optional and required. So who are the people that need to be there and prepared to engage and who are the folks that, you know, if they're able to make it work in their schedule they can attend, but if not, they know that there's going to be meeting notes and they can catch up, they're not going to miss out on information. So I think those couple of things have made a tremendous difference, also recommend advocating for your own schedule. So block off time if you need to eat lunch so that you can be a little protective of your own time and have that balance to bring your best self to all of your meetings and to all of your work.

Katie Walsh: Gosh, what would I do with more time in my day? I think one of the things that I'm always looking for more time to do is to read industry articles. So I think we kind of file those away or we flag them. I'm going to read that report. I really want to read that article, but then there's the next meeting and then there's the email that came in and a lot of times just knowing what's happening in the industry and kind of looking and at what other, companies are doing or how others have solved similar problems. We're missing all of that if we're just running from thing to thing. So I think that having extra time in my own calendar would give me time to read those articles. And also just to clean out my inbox, I function better when I have a clean inbox. So having additional time to just kind of go through and respond to those emails I've been meaning to do is how I would love to use some of that extra time.