Sweet spot

This is about sweet spots and why we shouldn't ignore them

At 7:30pm yesterday, I met my best friend for a drink.  I'd just left work and felt tired, but in a happy way; that tiredness you feel after a long walk in the country, or after a game of football you just won.  As I sat waiting with my pint of Guinness, I started to think about why I felt this way.  I knew pretty quickly, it was because I'd been great that day, I'd hit a sweet spot.  I wish I was great every day, but I'm not. This time, I thought, I would try to work out why today had been so good, and see if I could recreate it.

If you're interested in what my day consisted of, I've put it below*, but knowing what made me hit my sweet spot is only going to help me.  What might help managers and workers alike is to think about when they last had a great day.  When did your team last hit a sweet spot? What did you do when it happened?

After a great holiday we have photographs and we reminisce about the great times we had.  Maybe at work we should do something similar.  Take time to reminisce about those sweet spots just after they've happened, and maybe the process of thinking about them will make them a little more likely to happen again.

p.s. if you haven't had any sweet spots... it's time to make a change.

* My "great" day had: a well prepared meeting, a quickly minuted and documented plan for change under time pressure, a creative idea outside of work that I didn't ignore, some consultancy that reminded me where I'd been, a productive creative process that had beautiful logic to it, and finally a slightly late finish so that I had documented that creative process and shared it.  My day didn't include any doubt over what work I should do next.