Coffee

A little while back I set up an 11.30 daily coffee call from my own company account. Over the years I have invited a few people I had worked with or otherwise knew from work. People I liked and didn’t want to lose contact with, and from those it’s self-selected to a small core group who show up reasonably often.

There are now two to four people who attend them fairly regularly. Ironically, I’m one of the people who attends them the least often. It’s just a 30-minute Teams, an agreed time during the working day where, if you have the time, you can jump on and have a quick catch up with some other people that you know from different places.

Very often we have these conversations with our social groups, we have them with people we’re working with, but unless your colleagues make the transition into your friendship group you don’t really speak to the people you work with or that you used to work with even though they might be great people. Your attention quite naturally shifts to the new people and the new work.

You might be reading this thinking, yes I do! In which case perhaps I should be more honest and say all I’m doing is talking about my own experience which is people I have worked with I don’t really engage with in the same way that I do my friends or my family. Perhaps this means I’ve got a lot more to learn about business networking, I don’t know. Perhaps it means the Venn diagram of my friends, family, and colleagues ought to be rearranged somehow, the boundaries re-drawn.

Today I had a moment available and I stepped onto the call. It was empty when I first walked in but very quickly one of the people I used to work with joined the call and we had a bit of a chat. We talked about the market for jobs and what was going on and some of the changes and the people that we knew and the companies that we worked for over the last few years and how opportunities were going up and down and that sort of thing and then he mentioned that he was looking forward to the slash and burn.

He and I had talked about this previously. He’d mentioned that at his new house periodically he’ll have some people over to help slash and burn. Cut things down put them on the bonfire burn them off and he’ll lay on some food and people can come around and help him out. It seems like a pretty sensible idea so I said “oh look you know I’ll come” and I’d said this several weeks before not realising the date had already come around and it was in fact tomorrow.

Fair to say I’m really grateful I jumped on the coffee call today because it means that I was able to remind myself that I needed to get over to the West of London to help S with his slash and burn.

He’s not exactly a next door neighbour so getting there for 7:00am, which is the time that we’d agreed, meant I needed to leave about 5:20 in the morning. I need to go to bed a little bit earlier this evening so I’m well rested and able to hop in the car bright and breezy and get over there to help out.

I was asking myself why why am I excited to go to somebody else’s house and help them with their things when I have things of my own to do. I think this comes down to being a sociable creature. I do have my own things to do but I think those are all manageable and being managed so there is a bit of capacity and if you have some capacity why not give it to somebody else and enjoy the opportunity to be of service.

I know the food is going to be great and I’m going to really enjoy being able to spend the time with other people, talking and working together with other people is one of life’s great joys.

So really glad I joined the coffee call today.