A Meaningful Delta

“When more is the goal, we never fully arrive. It is insatiable. And that is the problem with always wanting more.”

Joshua Becker

I was once invited to attend a meeting to plan a meeting to schedule meetings. This was a real request from a Deloitte consultant to me while on a project in New York. I declined that invite and every single other meeting invite he sent. I wish I could say that was the last wasteful meeting invite I ever received but anyone who has worked in corporate America knows, meetings, whether meaningful or not, are all too common. They are death by a thousand paper cuts. The deluge of meetings on my calendar eventually got me to think, how do you define a reasonable cadence between meetings? This thought lead me further down to how do you define a meaningful delta between occurrences for anything done repeatedly?

The frequency of how often to participate in an activity, to meet with people, to to race, or otherwise has always been an analytical pull for me. For example, how often should you have 1:1s with a manager, how often should you talk with family, when should you take a break from work outs, etc? I came with a term that specifies what I measure for when defining frequency: A Meaningful Delta. I have not, however, been very good at explaining this to anyone other than myself. So this post will try to do that and hopefully help you find a better cadence at everything.

The core of the question is what is the right time time lag between events, what changes in that time, can enough change to warrant greater or less frequency. An equation that looks like the following forms from these questions.

mDelta = (^measurable factor/ time) * influence on factor (direct, indirect, combination)

Example, company wide changes need a significant time to collect all the data and measure. The sun of all employee and customer actions comes together to form the influence on the changes in this measurement. The minimum time to look at this data is one month. Hence, an all hands that occurs once a month is more than enough. But too long like quarterly May mean the delta, changes, are too great to cover in a single meeting.