I have lots of meetings at work, so much that I often need to prioritize and determine which is more important vs. another.  This factors into time management in general, which is possibly one of the most important skills for any effective business man, both personally and professionally.  So important that many, many books have been spilled on time management alone.

A few years ago my wife committed to taking the kids regularly to daily mass.  I really wanted to join them, but struggled because I always had work commitments come up, a place to be, a person to meet, a project to complete.  I stopped and considered, “what is really more important here?”  “How can I make this happen?”  I finally scheduled my meeting.

Every Friday I have a meeting on my calendar at 8:00 AM called “MWG”.   Since it is a meeting on my calendar, it doesn’t get scheduled over.  It’s a reoccurring meeting, so I don’t have to mess with it.  It isn’t marked personal or optional.  When someone asks me if I can move it, I tell them that I have a very important commitment at that time and it’s on my calendar.  It also sometimes give me the opportunity to describe what the meeting is, which is a great opportunity to evangelize.

Here’s what it looks like on my calendar:

I’ve talked with other business people about the same concept, with many being able to implement it very well in their own lives.  A frequent response I get is, “me being gone from the office for one hour is worth $1,000” or something to that affect.  This is a great opportunity to discuss, what is really more important to them and to whom they owe their success.  In answering the same question myself, I needed to answer, “is my success really because of my own efforts?”  If I want my life to be about more than this world, then my principal relationship and advisement needs to be unworldly.

I’ll share a brief example.  Every Friday I have a very important customer meeting, occurring about 30 minutes after the MWG.  There was a period of time when the meeting was incredibly stressful, with a multi-million dollar customer relationship riding on the success of a project.  I found that regularly attending daily mass with my family before that meeting allowed me to have peace regarding the customer relationship.  That God takes care of the “birds of the air” …. “are you not worth much more than they?”  It’s enabled me to be the kind of leader for my company that I desire to be for them, but I would have never had that capability if not for my MWG.  I owe everything to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.

I hope everyone has the opportunity to have a Meeting with God.

Cheers!

Nathaniel