Time to re-evaluate how I build relationships and interact with others

This has been on my mind the entire month of November. It’s something I've put aside for a while. Therefore, I am talking to myself in this post just as much as I am to my readers.

Some context: my previous experiments developing focus and batching potential distractions were meant to increase the time and energy spent on what is important but not necessarily urgent. This includes building skills, exploring ideas through reading and moving my project forward. In other words, striving to produce quality results and increase my ability to produce quality results.

Just one problem, which a few readers noticed.

You have to take control of your schedule to make time for the important. Your schedule cannot be constantly subject to external demands, or else they will fill up all your time and you will have no time to nurture yourself.

To do this, you have to defend your own dedicated productivity time. We live in an interdependent world and in most jobs you have to do things for other people. You have meetings you must attend. You must report your progress. Other people will make unreasonable demands of you because they themselves are under pressure.

So if you make yourself unavailable and don't respond to people's requests immediately (something always presented as urgent but is of highly varying importance), that might piss other people off if you don't handle it properly. Rule #2 from my last post may be especially hard for others to understand.

But the issue goes deeper than that.

"Important but not urgent" also includes one more big thing that solves this problem: investing in relationships.
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Apply newfound time and energy to investing in relationships and your ability to build professional and personal relationships

It should be no surprise that conflicts occur when people don’t trust each other and don’t know each other well.

Rather than waiting for conflicts to occur and then frantically trying to resolve them before they put your relationship at risk, why not try to prevent them from happening at all? If you’re trying to protect your time from other people’s demands, you’ll be on much better footing if there is mutual trust and understanding.

But it’s not easy. 

To state the obvious: Building solid relationships requires you to invest your time getting to know them on a "deeper" level," something which requires dedicated, focused effort. Just as it takes unbroken focus to move your project forward or develop a new skill, it takes undivided attention to cultivate a strong relationship. 

So schedule time for it. And don't be afraid to sacrifice your schedule for a person you care about.

So… how does one actually go about building solid relationships?

Personally, I find cliches like “be nice” or “be yourself” or “think of others” or "be a good listener" to be extraordinarily unhelpful. They are too general to tell if you are actually making any progress. It’s also easy to be a good person a few times, and then stop thinking of others because you just assume what you do is “good” because you’re a “good person.” It’s called moral licensing.
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Getting better

Disclaimer: I've focused on just a few concrete things. Clearly, this is an incredibly complex topic, and there is infinite variation and variables in how relationships are built. There’s a lot more I could do, but I needed to select just a few I could focus on.

High-value activity #1: Listening with the intent of identifying what the other person considers important, especially if you aren’t (yet) interested.

Caring about what they care about immediately builds trust. Not sure if you understand their priorities yet? Say you think this person is emotionally attached to a gardening hobby. The next time you see them, are they genuinely complimented when you ask them about their garden?

So imagine that person e-mails you, “Could you do X for me?” But you know that this person cares about Y a lot more, and you are in the position to deliver Y more easily than X, you can offer that instead.

High-value activity #2: Deliberately practice eye contact and other signs of listening

If eye contact is uncomfortable, practice making it comfortable. Another example of listening is never pulling out your phone to check e-mail while chatting with someone. Are you able to comment on what they are talking about that shows you are processing what they say? Even if you don’t care about the topic, you can 1) still practice, so it comes naturally when it matters and 2) build trust with this person.

Feedback mechanism: it’s not a bad idea to carry around a notecard and make a tally mark for every conversation where you make good eye contact. It’s critical to know if you’re actually making progress compared to yesterday.

High-value activity #3: Re-think how you perceive other people. 

If you think someone else is unprofessional, uncaring, unethical, a straight-up asshole, incompetent etc., don't just write them off as such. Certainly don't talk about them behind their back.  Complaining just makes you feel helpless. If you think they aren't listening to you or responding to you, try to understand WHY they aren't. Most of the time, you will discover you two simply aren't on the same page. They don't have the same information as you. If you want them to put in the effort to change their behavior, you should at least consider putting in the effort to see their point of view and then make a more effective presentation to them as to how and why they should change.


I have freed up a lot of time and energy through focus and batching. I came pretty close to simply picking up a new project and getting more work done, but I realized there’s something more important to invest in: people. Note that these “high-value activities” require full attention, and are enabled by the time freed up by enhanced productivity. I can’t resist pulling out my phone during a conversation if I’m constantly worrying about my work.