If you’re anything like me, you spend far more time than you’d like sitting in an office chair in front of a desk (and Zoom style calls).
Some days I do move things around.
I take my laptop to a coffee shop, or head downstairs with a temporary folding desk. But more often than not, I’m most efficient with my familiar setup – the big screen, the higher quality microphone and camera, the space, the lighting. I use those for the zoom calls and working on campaign strategies and recording loom videos.
But the work I enjoy the most is the kind I can do from my big yellow chair (with yellow footstool): writing content for one of my upcoming books; strategising plans for a team retreat; ringing a client or team member on the actual phone (!), writing these creative headspace notes.
The chair is comfortable. My feet are propped up. There’s space for tea (perhaps something stronger??) next to me. It faces a different direction than my desk does. It changes my perspective and my attitude.
Yellow chair work is:
- Flexible. It doesn’t have a hard and fast “join time” (the kind where someone doesn’t show up after 3 minutes and I’m racing about sending emails and Whatsapp messages and wondering if I got the timing wrong).
- Relaxed. I’m not leaping from one zoom call to another, frantically dashing off summary bullet points and briefs and updating our project management tool… I’m sitting back a bit with the laptop on my knee, not bolt upright in my office chair.
- Spacious. This is true creative headspace work: There’s room to think, to stare off into the distance, to breathe.
- Big picture. It tends to relate to big goals for myself and my company: books I’m writing, a podcast I want to start, LeaderShift sessions for the team. It can also be sales related (other than a prospect zoom call) – sending follow up emails, making connections on LinkedIn.
- More offline than online. I may be on my laptop, but Slack is closed and my phone is flipped over facing down, and my Google docs and sheets are in offline mode, so I can be focused. I’m very easily distracted – more so right now than ever, with house selling and house buying and all the close-up and set-up tasks appearing every few seconds.
The more yellow chair work I do, the closer I am to reaching my personal goals as a business owner. And of course the reverse can also be true: so if I haven’t done yellow chair work in a long time, it’s good to get in the yellow chair and think about why that is so.
Here’s some of the yellow chair work I’ve done in the past few weeks:
- Book editing
- Reviewing goals from last year’s client retreat
- Writing Creative Headspace notes, of course!
- Sketching (for these notes or for fun)
- Intentionally reading a business book (current one is The Authoritative Coach by Chris Marr), and making notes
- Sending handwritten cards to team, clients, friends
- Team retreat preparation
Yellow chair work also crosses over to travel times: on a train, popping into a local coffee shop, space between in person meetings. I was down in Manchester this week for Accountex North, and got quite a bit of yellow chair work done, minus the chair!
My life and business goals may not be yours, but I’m curious what your version of yellow-chair work is?
