My work life is broken down into hours. Whether I’m doing project-based work or ongoing retainer-based engagements, I look at my work calendar as a series of hours which can be allocated to the tasks that I’m hired to accomplish. Obviously, any time I’m spending on work I’ve been hired to do is money; I’m paid for my time.

And when old colleagues reach out and ask to catch up during the work week, for 30 or even 60 minutes of potential work time, I say yes, without hesitation. Yes, I can carve out unpaid time to connect with you, former coworker. Or I can meet with your friend who wants to know more about podcasting. Or I can meet with you, stranger-to-me who is reaching out to me for networking advice.

Not long ago, I shared thoughts on the power of awesomeness, on how meaningful it can be to reach out to someone whose work you liked or whose contribution you valued, and tell them so. That kind of mood booster is not zero-sum; it injects goodness into the recipient’s day, and it’s likely they’ll push out even more goodness in their interactions, thanks to you. It’s the opposite of a vicious circle. It’s a virtuous… I don't know, dodecahedron.

Saying yes to folks, taking the meeting even if it’s a distraction or delay from the more “important” or actionable work of the day — it’s a good thing to do. If you only say yes and fill up every working hour with such calls, that’s a problem; you’re not being generous, you’re getting walked all over. But if a couple of these come up each week, you’re talking about an hour or so out of a 40-hour work week.

You should take that time out of your hectic schedule.

Sharing the gift of your time, expertise, and counsel is absolutely exhibiting more of the power of awesomeness I talked about earlier. And of course any of the people you advise — particularly armed with your incomparable advice — may well end up in the position to help you, too. They could become key decision makers at companies you want to work with, references, or clients. Even if they don’t, it’s hard to argue against putting more goodness into the world.

You need to do well at your meetings themselves, of course. But doing a good job with your meetings starts before the meeting. It starts when you send the calendar invite.

Maybe you have an executive assistant, you lucky duck. More likely, you schedule your own meetings. I think there was a time that services like Calendly and Fantastical were looked down upon, but now I believe busy humans understand that tools to help us schedule meetings more efficiently are a gift and we should embrace them.

But here’s the thing: How you name meetings matters.

If I’m sending the invite, and my meeting is with Marie, I’m going to name the meeting “Lex / Marie sync” or “Lex Friedman Consulting + Marie’s Business Name” or something along those lines. Listing my name first doesn’t suggest to Marie that I think I’m more important than she is; it’s helpful: It means even if her calendar truncates things a bit in whatever view she’s using, she can see the name of the person coming up on her calendar. That’s a tiny gift.

The most annoying meetings on my calendar are the ones that are labeled things like “Call with Lex” or “Meeting with Lex” or just simply “Lex.”

I get meeting invitations like that every single week. Those are helpful to the inviter, but not to the invited.

Include both names in your meeting title, so that it’s clear for everyone. And if you're including extra details in the invitation notes, say so explicitly in an email, because many people don’t see those notes.

And don’t ever schedule someone for more than 30 minutes unless you’ve asked first. When we agree on a time and you then send me a 45-minute invite, I’m miffed. I quite probably can’t make the extra 15 minutes, because of how crazy my calendar gets.

Good calendar etiquette doesn’t take a lot of time. But it can save a lot of it! And earns tons of goodwill.

No matter where you work, no matter what you do, your business has priorities. And almost certainly, it even has competing priorities. Essentially, there are lots of important things to get done, but finite resources available to accomplish them all. That’s business, and that’s life.

I’ve worked at startups and I’ve worked at huge companies. Everywhere I’ve worked, I’ve encountered multiple, simultaneous top priorities. I’ve been on both sides of the negotiation between The Product Side and The Revenue Side, where the product team needs the revenue team to decide which is more important, Feature X or Feature Y — and the inevitable answer from the revenue team is that they’re both extremely important.

And if it’s just two things on this hypothetical list, that’s remarkable: It’s frequently Feature X, Feature Y, Bug Fix Z, Rebrand A, New Copy B, and Additional New Feature C.

I’ve seen long lists of projects that are all stamped as P1, the highest priority. I’ve seen multiple P0s, where that zero is meant to represent a truly mission-critical feature without which we’re suffering immediate massive breakage. Multiple P0s!

When everything’s a P1 top priority, nothing is. So how do you handle it when there are multiple, competing top priorities?

(Fun fact: This is a question that I like to ask folks when I’m interviewing them for a job.)

Of course you can and should weigh what’s truly the most important thing, if there’s any advantage to specific sequencing, if one thing is truly more important than another. But the cold hard reality is that sometimes there are multiple things of equal importance, and they all have to get done, and they’re all super important. When you’re faced with those situations, how are you supposed to prioritize?

The answer is simple: You just pick one thing, and start working on it.

You’ve heard of analysis paralysis. I also want to warn you about prioritization procrastination. Sometimes there’s an instinct to get lost in the debate, weighing the pros and cons of the right ranking of tasks, devoting ever-increasing people-hours to the work of deciding what the work should be.

Don’t do that.

Pick a task, and start. Choose a project, and get to it. You can feel the stress and worry of the other project — or projects — that you’re NOT starting, but to what end? Start some work. It’s truly the only way.

And of course it’s extremely important to just pick one, not to keep wrestling with the decision over which. If you can’t pick one, give them all numbers and ask Siri or Alexa or Google to pick a number between one and n. Then just start.

You’ve probably heard the axiom that the best time to plant a tree or start a project was a year ago. The second best time is right now.

When there are competing top priorities, you’re already behind. The only solution is to start working. When doing everything at once is impossible, the only option is to get to work. Pick a task, and know that when it’s finished, you’ll go on to the next one.

When you’re writing, it’s not worth stressing about your opener. Just start writing. You can figure out your intro later, before you click Send.

But when you’re launching a phone call or opening a Zoom, you only get one shot to start it. The opener can define the meeting. (Your email subject line and opener are really important, too. We’ll get to that some other time.)

Your approach should be different if it’s a cold call, or a first-time meeting. Obviously if you have a longstanding friendship/relationship with the person or people on the other side of the call, you do you; your history and rapport is an asset, and you shouldn’t shy away from it.

When you’re meeting someone for the first time, though, you need an approach that’s warm, confident, and inviting. You need to be likable, of course, but you also need to establish from the outset that you can be trusted, that this will be a good meeting, and that you’re in control. (Not as a power dynamic in the relationship, but rather — this meeting has a point, a flow, and will progress in a way that’s meaningful.)

I’m all for shooting the breeze at the start, but keep an eye on the clock. In a half-hour meeting, two minutes of breeze-shooting at the start is about 7% of the meeting. Three minutes is 10%, and if I don’t know you yet, it can start to feel one of two bad ways: Either you’re wasting my time (or don’t have enough material stuff to talk about), or you’re faking a rapport that we haven’t built yet.

This sounds draconian and I don’t mean it to. If the breeze-shooting gets to 2 minutes and 12 seconds, you haven’t ruined the meeting. But I think it’s important to read the room endlessly, on repeat, and make sure you’re showing from the get-go that this is a meeting that values other people’s time.

And then when it’s time to start the meeting proper, your job is to set the stage succinctly. Here’s who I am, and here’s why we’re meeting. Neither should be a book report.

You don’t need to share your full curriculum vitae. You’re establishing your role at the company you’re representing, and what you’re hoping to get from this call. Hi, I’m Lex. I head up our widget quality assurance team, and I’ve been with the company for two years. I know you sell widget cases, and I’d love to learn more about your business, and whether there are ways we can work together.

I never love a meeting that opens with “Do you want to kick this off, or should I?” This is true even in internal meetings. You’re not throwing your weight around if you own a meeting that you called or requested; you’re leading. You’re owning. That’s a good thing.

(And remember, if it’s a Zoom, don’t forget my strategies for better video calls.)

Particularly if it’s a cold call or a first-time meeting, know your spiel, and work to deliver it without sounding like a robot who’s memorized a script. I handle X, I’m looking to do Y, and I’d love to learn more from you about whether that’s possible. Even when you’re selling — which again, isn’t a bad thing — your frame needn’t be “here’s a thing I want to sell you.” All meetings and negotiations and sales involve listening, and listening is a way to learn, and we all love to be seen as having something worth sharing. So if instead your frame is “teach me; I’d like to learn more about what you do / offer / need” — you’re setting up your conversation for success, because the other person feels valued. They feel important. That’s a good thing.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember — just like with a big presentation, or an improv show, or a wedding toast — the audience wants you to succeed. They’re rooting for you. Starting the meeting off with confidence and control takes so much pressure off, because now the other party doesn’t have to worry if the call will be chaotic or worse, a waste of time. So open strong. You can worry about closing later.

I’m doing something risky. I’m describing a story as funny before you’ve heard it. You’ll be the judge of whether it’s actually funny. I think it is.

This post is for premium subscribers only. But I want to be clear: most posts on Your Intermittent Lex will be completely free. That said, some folks are paying, and they get a little bonus content. This is one example.

I started this Substack in November. Now we’re nearly halfway through January (!), and it’s still going strong. I’m proud of that.

More generally, though, I’m proud of the Substack itself. And human awesomeness is a big part of the reason why.

Back in December, I wrote a post called “The Importance Of Passion Projects.” I made the point that side hustles — even (especially!) side hustles you don’t intend to profit from — are super important. After I shared that post, a couple colleagues reached out to tell me how much they enjoyed it.

I’m neither bragging nor humblebragging here, by the way. But one of the comments I received was: “Thanks for sharing. It’s something I personally haven’t given myself time for lately, reading your post really helped.”

What made that comment so meaningful to me was that it was sent from a Wondery colleague who honestly I didn’t and don’t know very well. A second Wondery colleague wrote, too.

I love giving compliments and sharing praise. I’m human, so I love hearing it too.

I promise, this isn’t a cry for you to heart this post and tell me how wonderful it is. Rather, it’s a reminder of the power of sharing — of radiating — positivity. When you see people do or create or share things that you like, tell them so. The mood boost I got from those comments absolutely served as a push to keep writing. And every time I sit down with a blank screen to write another post here, I think about what those (now-former) colleagues would want to read, and what others would want to read.

I think about what posts I could write that will affect people enough that they’ll want to tell me that they were affected. Their compliments improve my mood, so I’m surely a nicer, happier person that day. Maybe I close more deals. Maybe I delight more clients. And if my posts really inspired/delighted/reassured them, maybe they’re having the same kind of positive impacts with their own interactions that day.

I guess it’s the “pay it forward” mentality. If you see good work, say so. Be awesome. It’s awesome to celebrate awesomeness. It’s good for everybody.

Obviously I recently launched paid subscription support. Good ol’ Lextra Credit.

And now I’m faced with the constant decision: What’s paid, and what’s free? This is the torture of every freemium business, every newspaper website, and on and on. you want to share your good stuff. But you also want to reward paying subscribers. It’s tricky.

All of us have to make this subjective decisions all the time. There are recipes and decision flows you can use to decide which choice makes sense when, but it mostly comes down to gut.

Some folks — my former employer Amazon among them — use a great analogy, about one-way and two-way doors. If you’re making a decision that you can revert on quickly, that’s a two-way door.

Let’s try that button in red — two-way door. If it doesn’t work, we can go back to blue.

Let’s pivot to video — one-way door. You do that, you’ve pivoted to video. A new pivot would mean tons of wasted time and money and energy and morale.

Launching a paid version of this Substack — kind of a one-way door. If I stop offering it, do I refund my paying subscribers? Do I just make them hate me for life? One-way door. I did it. Now I must feed the beast.

I like the one-way/two-way door method of thinking. Penn & Teller, in their book Cruel Tricks For Dear Friends, talk about the rule of No Permanent Damage. If they can do something, even something crazy, and it won’t permanently damage/harm them, they’re in. I like that mentality.

Having paid posts in addition to free ones is hard, and maybe alienates some freeloaders free readers, but it’s a fun challenge, no permanent damage.

Find a rubric that makes sense for you. What’s your decision making approach that feels natural? Doors? Damage? Coin flip? As long as you’re comfortable with your approach, make it work for you.

I’ve written previously about playing mind games with yourself, and how effective just telling ourselves that we have an advantage can be. (It’s all an offshoot of faking it til you make it.)

An important corollary skill is identifying tricks that make you more effective, more productive, or just generally happier. What does it take to the best you?

I realized this morning that I no longer needed the Slack app in my iPhone doc. You could argue that I never needed Slack in my iPhone dock, but it was an app that I opened many times a day, and whose notifications I relied upon, so it held that place of honor.

But I’m no longer in Slacks for work. And that icon is taking up especially valuable real estate on my screen. It doesn’t need to be there.

So I removed it. And I haven’t replaced it yet.

Now I’m studying which apps I go to the most, which apps I search for the most, and evaluating what should get that place of honor. Keeping Slack in my dock made me faster and more responsive, which people love. Now I get to conclude what other app’s presence there can help me do something better. Maybe it’s Lex Friedman Consulting work. Maybe it’s being a better friend. Maybe it’s just something that makes me happy. Maybe it’s the New York Times Crossword Puzzle app, since I launch that puppy every day. (It won’t be the New York Times Crossword Puzzle app.)

Other cheat codes in my life: I am too tired to workout at the end of the day, so I always do it first thing. I take rest days rarely, but I never take a rest day on a day where I think to myself “Man, I don’t want to work out today.” Those are the days I know have to do it, because if I give in to my laziness or reticence, I fear I might never start again. Your mileage may vary. This is my cheat code.

I’ve mentioned that I put the person whose face I’m looking at on Zoom right under the camera. It makes it look — rightly! — like I’m looking at them.

If I get a little behind on email, I respond to newer emails first. I’ve already been slow to the people further down, so I can still impress the newer senders with speedier replies.

I use the Notes app, Reminders app, and Fantastical on my Mac and iOS devices to remember everything. My sister relies on Slack reminders. But I don’t forget to follow-up because I have notifications that won’t let me.

These are life cheat codes. They make me better. Find yours!

My role at my last several jobs involved a lot of dealmaking. Closing deals where you (the company) feel good, and the other side feels pretty good, too — that’s the dream. I’m a good negotiator, and I won a lot of deals. And I attribute my negotiation success to my willingness to be as transparent as possible.

I’ll say more on that in a moment, but first, some housekeeping.

As I discussed on yesterday’s episode of Your Daily Lex (my daily five minute podcast where I talk about literally anything that’s on my mind), I’ve been considering whether I want to offer a premium subscription for diehard Lex fans.

I cohost another podcast, a tech show called The Rebound, and we offer a premium subscription called Rebound Prime. For $5/month, subscribers get bonus episodes, bootlegs (raw, unedited episodes minutes after we finish recording), membership in The Rebound Discord, and the ability to submit questions we answer on the show.

On yesterday’s Your Daily Lex, I ruminated about what I could offer as a subscription. I know a good name for a premium subscription — Lextra Credit — but I was debating what I could offer. Premium podcast episodes? Premium articles? A Slack or Discord?

I think yes. To all. Eventually.

And first up, it’s the occasional premium post. Most articles on Your Intermittent Lex (the thing you’re reading right now) will remain free. But a few, I’ll charge for. Including this post. Inspired largely by the fact that after I recorded yesterday’s episode of Your Daily Lex, someone (a stranger to me) actually pledged $100 to subscribe to this site as soon as I offered subscriptions. Thank you, kind stranger!

So let’s pretend for a moment that you’re a potential client and I’m negotiating with you. I’ve said I rely on honesty, so here’s the deal: I just started my new consulting business. It’s going well. I feel really good about where things are headed. But while they’re headed there, I’m not all the way there yet. There’s work to do. That’s okay — that’s the job!

And honestly, some of the job is building, pitching, and waiting. So I thought this would be a fine venture, too. I am all about multiple revenue streams.

After the paywall jump, some more thoughts on how and why openness works in negotiations.

I don’t mind telling the other party what I can offer. Sure, there’s the — very real, very important — strategy of holding back. If you’re willing to pay $10,000 if you must but you want to do the deal for $7,500, I’m not suggesting you need to offer $10k out the gate.

And I fully, completely, absolutely understand the instinct — if you want to land on $7,500 — of starting lower. Right? We learn from TV shows and generally accepted principles of haggling (GAPH, let’s say) that you’re supposed to start at $5k, have them counter at $10k, and then land at $7,500.

I guess that works fine if you’re only ever going to negotiate with that seller once. But if you’re building an ongoing business relationship where there will be more work to come, you’ve now built the relationship on the premise that — quite simply — you lie about the price. You were willing to spend 50% more than you said you were. I don’t like that.

Yes, you absolutely have a responsibility to yourself and your business to save money where possible. But you also kind of have a responsibility to pay what’s fair. And again, I’m okay if $10k isn’t fair, would be a stretch, and is your if-we-absolutely-have-to-but-please-please-no rate. But if the price you want to pay is $7,500, my advice is that you say: “I would like to pay $7,500.”

Look, there’s nuance in every negotiation. It might not always be this black and white. But I’ve found very consistently, over many deals whose total value has topped at least $500M, that transparency wins.

Multiple jobs have asked me to swoop in to score better economics on deals that are essentially closed. These are deals where the other side thinks it’s all wrapped up, we’ve agreed on all terms. Then they call in me. Not quite The Cooler, but maybe… The Couponer? I’m brought in to see if we can “do better” than the terms we’ve landed on.

When I’ve been thrust into those positions, I again choose candor. “I know you thought this deal was done. I know you’re not going to love me. I’m involved because my company wants to spend less. We don’t close this deal unless we can figure out a way to pay less, and I won’t be doing my job unless I convince you that it still makes sense to work with us.”

I’ve explained that getting a deal below a certain value means I won’t need to get approval from certain higher ups. I’ve explained that budgets are tighter than anticipated. I’ve explained that the person you did the deal with up to this point wasn’t actually authorized to do it at that number, hence my presence in the process now.

The consistent thing is — I’ve told the truth.

And yeah, no one on the other side of those equations loves what’s happening, but I am confident that they appreciate my approach. Just a month or two ago, I had one of these “sorry” calls with a vendor for work. He was definitely surprised that we needed to pay about 20% less than he thought the deal was going to close for. He asked if he could have 30 minutes to think about it. I laughed — of course he could! I didn’t need an answer in real time.

He called back five minutes later and said we had a deal. And that he appreciated how candid I’d been about the hands we were each dealt.

And true story: later today, I have a call with that same guy, because he wants to work with Lex Friedman Consulting. I’m telling you, folks: Honesty. It works.

Happy 2023! When New Year’s Day falls on a Sunday (as it did this year), many companies treat Monday, January 2nd as a day off — to make sure we don’t miss out on a free-from-work day just because the holiday landed on a weekend.

I didn’t, though. Having just launched my new business, Lex Friedman Consulting, I wanted to hit the ground running. And I had a few potential clients who were willing (and even eager!) to talk Monday. So we talked Monday.

I didn’t feel like I was sacrificing work/life balance. Rather, I was excited to get to dive into building my own thing.

But even more importantly, I felt like I got a head start on the year. I played a little game with myself, and I’m still feeling it on Tuesday, January 3rd: I’m ahead of the game, because I worked yesterday when almost no one else did.

I don’t know how long the feeling will last — likely just a few more days — and if I know intellectually that if I probe that feeling closely, it doesn’t really make sense. I did a few calls yesterday, it’ll all balance out eventually; maybe others will work later than I do today. But I don’t need to probe this feeling, because it’s empowering and motivating: I’m ahead of the game! I worked yesterday!

We play these positive mind games with ourselves all the time. (We play negative ones, too, but that’s a topic for another time.) A personal favorite for me is the reward game: “I can refill my coffee when I finish these two emails.” “I’ll take a ten-minute walk after I finish writing this presentation.” “Once I finish wrangling this spreadsheet, I can play today’s Wordle.”

I’m a grown man; I can play Wordle whenever the hell I want. But there’s a benefit to holding off and using it as motivation instead.

In many ways, this is an offshoot of my advice about confidence. As I’ve said, the secret to building confidence is faking confidence. So even if I know that I’m not really ahead of the game because I worked yesterday, and even if I know I could go refill my coffee now and not force myself to wait until after I’ve finished this post — I can fake things with myself, too. So long as I’m doing it as a force for good, for positive outcomes, there’s no downside to faking things with myself this way.

So find those small wins, small motivations, and small ways to congratulate and reward yourself. They matter.