How Leaders Can Close the Day on Purpose

Pushing the work forward is half of a leader's job. The other half is stopping at the end of the day to look at what it did, and ten minutes in three short parts is enough to do that.

The situation below is invented, to illustrate the point.

Why does a busy stretch feel flat when the work is going well?

Picture a founder we'll call Priya. Her company has been in a hard push for months. A new contract needs delivering, two people have joined, and the diary has no gaps. Most days she ends with a list of what got done and a longer list of what's waiting.

By now the days have started to run into each other. If you asked her what went well last Tuesday, she couldn't tell you. She finishes things all day and the work is going well. What's missing is a moment to see what all that finishing adds up to.

What makes it so easy to skip the step back?

Stopping feels like slowing down, and slowing down feels risky when the work is real. Her team is watching too. If the leader is still answering messages at nine at night, nobody else feels free to stop.

A guest on our podcast, a long-distance adventurer, knows that pull. He had recently pedalled a go-kart from the south of Finland up to the Arctic Circle. The plan was 700 miles and the route came to 921, over fifteen days that he described as long and wet. He told us how a bad day sounds in your own head: "my back aches or I'm wet all day", and it would be easy to say, "this is stupid, what am I doing?"

Any leader who has carried a long push will know that question. The usual answer is to keep going and avoid looking too closely.

Who gives a leader the time to step back?

Nobody hands it over. A leader's diary fills from the outside, and the end of the day is the one slot that nobody else will protect. Priya can wait for things to calm down, but the people who need her already have slots in the diary and the step back has none.

So the decision sits with her. If she wants the day to have a close, she has to choose when it starts and where it sits. Our guest put the balance in one sentence.

"You have to find a fine line between grinding out the miles and trying to reach a destination and taking a step back and appreciating where you are and what you're seeing."

A guest on our podcast

What does "discipline equals freedom" mean for a leader?

It means a leader has to hold two opposite demands at the same time, and a habit is what holds them together. In Lead With Ownership we teach this through an Echelon Front principle, in the module titled Discipline Equals Freedom (The Dichotomy of Leadership). The principle starts with the leader who relies on motivation alone, or who struggles to find the right balance. It says that disciplined habits and balanced judgement create consistency, effectiveness and freedom.

For Priya, the two demands are the push and the look back. She can't drop either one. If she only pushes, she can't tell what's working. If she only looks back, the contract goes undelivered. Our guest was describing how he got through long days alone, and he never used our language. We think it carries over to a leader's day, and what he does is specific enough to copy.

What does a daily debrief look like in practice?

His had a set order. The camp came first: "once I've found somewhere to hang the hammock, I've got that set up, I've managed to cook myself some food." Then he sat somewhere with a view to "just kind of break down the day and think about the next one, but not too much detail." He doesn't like to plan the next day in much detail, because he doesn't know where it will take him. He wants "an idea of kind of where you might get to."

On his first few trips he tried writing the day down. He found that a video of himself gave him more. A recording, he said, lets you "get that raw emotion that sometimes you'd lack from little notes. You could see it in my face, like how tired I was." He called it "a tool for me to break that down", and the messages that came back from people following along helped on the harder days.

He remembers a day when it rained all day and his phone broke. By the evening, he said, you go, "Well, I'm still all right, you know, nothing's hurting, I'm fine. And then you appreciate the day for what it was."

He is clear that effort needs a reward. Early one morning on a quiet road a moose looked at him for half a second before it went into the woods, and he called that "a reward for forcing myself out of that hammock." Rewards come in different forms, he said, from a sunrise to the food you eat that evening, and "you need some kind of reward for the effort you put in. We're just wired that way, I think."

"I don't know anybody's just gonna keep on grinding, grinding, grinding, grinding for no reward."

A guest on our podcast

A leader's rewards are ordinary ones: the delivery that went out on time, a new starter who spoke up in a meeting, a hard conversation that went better than expected. They're easy to miss at the end of a full day, so the leader has to stop and notice them.

How can a leader try this in ten minutes?

Close the day in three parts. The structure is ours, built on the order he described, and it's worth two weeks before you judge it.

1. Finish what's open, then sit down. Send the last reply and put the day's papers away. He built the camp before he sat down to look back, and a debrief goes better when nothing else is pulling at you.
2. Break the day down in three lines. What was hard today? What's still all right? What happened that you'd have walked past if you hadn't stopped? Write it, say it or record it. If you record it, listen back once a week, since his experience was that a recording carries tiredness that notes lose.
3. Look ahead loosely. Write one line on where you'd like to get to tomorrow. Leave the detail out, because tomorrow will change it.

Once a week, send your three lines to one person who'll answer, such as a co-founder or a mentor. The replies he got helped him on the hard days, and a leader can arrange a smaller version of that.

What does a month of it change?

A month on, Priya's days are as full as they were. She has a page of three-line entries, and she can say what went well last Tuesday because she wrote it down that evening.

She also sees something she'd missed. The same task sits under "what was hard" on four evenings in a week, so she hands it to someone better placed to do it. The push carries on, and each day now ends somewhere she chose.