Hey folks, I'm Swati.
Welcome back to my weekly newsletter.
This newsletter is those conversations: what I'm seeing, thinking, and what I'd tell you if we were grabbing coffee.
This week's edition is about what to do when you've finished all your work before time.
But before that:
When you've finished all your tasks for the day, what do you usually do?
Last week we hosted a CXO Event at Masters' Union, and a team member of mine had been running point on it: the deck, logistics, guest coordination, hotel and transport bookings.
She had put together the whole event in a week.
When I sat down with her a day before the event on final alignment, I found some big gaps that she hadn’t thought of.
So I spoke to her to understand how she went about organizing the event.
Her process included looking at past event agendas, using AI tools for deck creation, and coordinating with hotel and transport providers.
She was proud of how fast she finished, but she didn't seem to register what could have been better.
And this seems to be a pattern in today’s Gen Z. The work gets done, and instead of sitting with it for a minute, the next move is scrolling reels on the phone.
Whether it's the commute, a 10-minute break from work, or even at the toilet seat, the entire generation is scrolling reels in any window where nothing else is happening.
I'm not moralising about screen time but I do think there's something we lose when we never let a gap stay a gap.
For instance, psychologists Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman found that people who first spent 15 minutes on a boring task came up with significantly more creative ideas afterwards than people who skipped it.
TLDR: The mind needs the in-between, as that’s where it makes connections and notices what just happened.
But we are filling every in-between we have.
At our office at Masters’ Union, we have check-in and check-out timings. I'm not the biggest fan of this system, and that's a conversation for another day.
What I'm noticing is that when work gets done early, people stretch out chai-sutta breaks or open Instagram to kill the rest of the time.
Here's what to do with that hour instead.
These could be micro-inconveniences that are not dealbreakers, like the outdated onboarding doc, or the link redirect going to the homepage instead of the archive page.
They stay broken because fixing them is nobody's job.
Sure it’ll get you noticed, but it’ll also help you make friends (when one person solves what’s bothering everyone, everyone wants to talk).
Don't stretch the work to look busy.
Tell your manager you're done, and tell them what you'll do with the rest of the day.
Something like: "Wrapped the X by 3. Using the next hour to clean up the Y doc, then starting Z for tomorrow. Flag if there's something else you'd like me on."
In a year when leaders are being asked to find AI-led efficiency gains, an honest pace is becoming increasingly rare.
It is also exactly the trust that pays off when a stretch role comes up.
This was my main point with the team member during that conversation.
If she'd walked the agenda past me well in advance and asked "what would you change about this," she could have caught at least one of those nuances, if not all.
Especially something that uses what you know better than they do.
Most managers above 40 are still figuring out where AI fits in their day-to-day, and most won't voluntarily ask for help.
Set up an AI agent for a weekly report they currently compile by hand, or build a prompt library for their team.
Either way, they get an hour of their week back, and you get a manager who remembers the day you went out of your way for them.
Hit reply: what do you do in the gaps when you have nothing to do?
I read every email.
Swati
PS: If you manage people, ask your team this week what they learned that they didn't know last week. It'll tell you enough about who's offloading to AI versus who's leveraging it.