Summer reflections: Daydreams

This is the fourth of six summer specials of the agency leaders newsletter. In each edition, I'll suggest some prompts to think about when you get some time to yourself to think and dream about your agency. Make sure to rest lots first, but add in a day or two away from work here and there over the summer to just read and think. Creative businesses need their leaders to take this space for thinking or they stagnate.

Reflections on daydreams

Imagine you've just had the most incredibly perfect week in your agency.

What happened in this perfect week? How did you spend your time and energy specifically? What made you happy? What made it feel really productive? What did you not do in the week?

What steps can you take to make your weeks more like this?

What do you need to stop doing, and what do you need to make more time for?

What can your quiet heroes take from your desk to enable your weeks to become more like this?

What actions are you going to take to make this perfect week a reality?

Summer reading recommendation

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman.

The opposite of a time management book, it accepts the reality of the limited time we all have. Instead of pressure to get more done, it focuses on making meaningful and rewarding use of that time.

From the blog

Some highlights from our posts for agency leaders in the last year to catch up on or revisit:

• How agency owner-CEOs have to wear too many hats.

• Being the owner first

• How the founder needs to change the way they use and focus their time at key inflection points in the growth of an agency, including the first million.

• Finding your deeper purpose and where to focus your time in the agency could be guided by the Pyramid of Purpose, which I wrote about recently as a way to relight your fire.

Quotes of the week

“How we spend our time is how we spend our days. How we spend our days is how our life goes. How our life goes determines whether we thought it was worth living.”
— Keith Yamashita, respected coach for CEOs of fast-growth tech companies

“Days are expensive. When you spend a day you have one less day to spend. So make sure you spend each one wisely.”
— Jim Rohn, entrepreneur and motivational speaker