Having a meeting with yourself is like a traditional check-in meeting you would have with a manager, only more pleasant because it is you you are answering to.
How do you hold a meeting by yourself?
- Schedule a meeting series for the same time
- Pick a time when you are always free and alone
- Start with a shorter meeting time
- Stick to the meeting religiously
- Have set meeting points
- Prepare as you would for any other meeting
- Ignore anything other
- Take notes/meeting minutes to track the status
- Improve as you go
See below for each step what to consider and what meeting points you might want to include in your own meeting.
What is it?
Having a meeting with yourself is an accountability and tracking tool. The set meeting time and content points you cover ensure that you regularly evaluate yourself, your work and goals and track your progress. Like a regular status report check-in, you would have with a manager, it forces you to asses if what you’re working on is the right thing and how you’re doing with that.
Why use it?
Especially, when you work for yourself and have no one to report to or track your progress it can be hard to align the bigger picture with the daily tasks. Having a meeting with yourself is a way to ensure that at regular intervals you make an active effort to align those two factors. Like with any other kind of weekly meeting you can freely adjust what exactly you want to evaluate and track and by individualizing this technique to your own needs you create accountability for yourself, even without any outside forces to enforce it for you.
How to Have a Meeting with Yourself?
1. Schedule a meeting series for the same time
Schedule the meeting as a series for the same time at the same regular interval in your calendar. Set the reminder in a way that fits your usual use of it. I always click away reminders that appear 15 minutes before meetings. That is why I always set up my reminders for the meeting time itself, since I’m on my laptop anyway this means I can just directly switch over to the meeting.
2. Pick a time when you are always free and alone
Especially in the beginning, it will take some effort to turn this into a habit and not just something you did once and then never again. That is why it is a good idea to pick a time slot when you are usually already free and by yourself, this minimizes distractions or scheduling conflicts. I set up my weekly meeting every Monday evening at around 9 pm. This fits me because around that time I’m always by myself, on my laptop anyway and so when the reminder shows up there is nothing stopping me from taking a few minutes to assess how I’m doing.
3. Start with a shorter meeting time
Start with a shorter meeting time, for example, 5 – 10 minutes. This way you are more likely to do it because it seems like less effort. And following the 5 Minute Rule it is likely that you will anyway extend the meeting once you are doing it. Once it has become somewhat of a habit you can then go ahead and schedule a meeting time that fits how much time you’ll need.
4. Stick to the meeting religiously
For something to become a habit one of the most effective techniques is to try to create a streak. Meaning that for the first few times you make doing the habit more of a priority than you would the content itself. Then once you have done it several times and it becomes a natural thing you just do, you can trust yourself to stick with it even if you miss it one time. So for the first two or three months make it a point to never miss a single meeting, even if that means that you’ll end up sometimes having a meeting that is just 5 minutes long.
5. Have set meeting points
For this technique to be useful as an accountability and tracking tool it needs some set structure you follow each time, otherwise, progress is hard to compare. For this define what exactly the meeting is for and what content point you want to cover each time.
Generally, there are two types of check-in meetings:
- Status report meetings that are about tasks and priorities
- How are you feeling – check in’s that are about assessing general well-being and personal development
Obviously, you can mix the two types too, making it a hybrid check-in session about how you are feeling about your progress, what your priorities are, and how daily tasks align with your own developmental goals.
The following are common meeting points you might want to include:
Goals:
- Longterm goals
- Project goals
- Milestones
- What milestones are you aiming toward next
Task Management:
- Current Tasklist
- Review all aspects of your life and different tasks for it
- Priorities
- Identify your top tasks that produced 80% of the results
- Define the tasks that you have to get done in the upcoming week (list with descending priority)
- Tasks completed last week
- Tasks still open
- Challenges / Problems
Personal Development:
- What are your development goals?
- Identify failures (what gets in the way of achieving goals or completing tasks?)
- Lessons learned from failures
- New habit to implement
- New thing to start learning
Owen Wellbeing:
- How satisfied are you with your performance or behavior
- How are you feeling
- Scheduling breaks
6. Prepare as you would for any other meeting
Preparation doesn’t need to be you taking another time slot just to prepare for a meeting with yourself. Rather either in the date series in your calendar or in some other note document write down your progress, tasks done, etc. while you’re doing it. This way when you have the meeting itself you can take your notes and use the time to evaluate how you’re doing and what needs improvement next week.
7. Ignore anything other
If distractions or interruptions happen anyway, your goal is to ignore them. Here too I would advise that if you have no other option it is better to have just a 2-5 minute meeting than to post-phone because once you start making it an optional thing you will stop doing it completely. That is because since it is just yourself you are answering to there are no negative consequences for not doing it. So until it is established as something you can trust yourself to do, it is mostly the aspiration of not breaking a streak you’ve got going, that keeps you sticking to it.
8. Take notes/meeting minutes to track the status
It is a good idea to have a designated notebook or document where you have the meeting points you cover written down and to take notes every time on what the status is. This is also the place where during the week you note down progress or things to consider for next week so that you can sort all of that during the meeting. Also, since you are doing this by yourself it is most likely that you are just writing out your thoughts rather than saying them out loud, so it makes sense to have it in a structured way.
Of course, you could also do this in audio or video form. The only thing that matters here is that it has a set structure and that you track the status at each meeting so that you can use it for a better assessment of how you are progressing.
9. Improve as you go
As with any productivity tool and technique you’ll want to spend the first few times getting used to making use of it and building some routine around that. Then once you have started to become used to it, figured out if it is useful for you or not, and can trust yourself to stick with it for a while, you can start to personalize it much more. Most likely you’ll want to start by tweaking the length or place of the meeting. But once that whole routine part is settled I would advise you to try out if it works better for you to record yourself rather than writing it down, or if you want to combine this technique with other productivity tools and techniques.