I asked AI to help me pull together the agenda for our last quarterly planning session, and it had opinions. Most of them were reasonable. The one that stopped me was about how I open the day. I start with a personal check-in, where we see how everybody's actually doing, and the AI flagged it as a waste of the first slot on a tidy schedule.
My first reaction, delivered with all the eloquence I could muster: "uhhh, you do know we're human, right?"
I kept the check-in, and I'll get to why in a minute, because something else happened at that same session that made me look at my whole approach to planning prep differently.
Jay Noticed
Somewhere in the middle of the day, Jay turned to me and asked where the snacks were. He was teasing me the way you tease someone who shows up without the thing they always bring. I always bring snacks to planning. I like to joke that it's in our partnership agreement, filed right around the equity section. This time, I just plain forgot them, and my guess is the room would've let a missing agenda slide faster.
We all laughed, me included, but it stuck with me for the rest of the day. Food is the only part of how I prep for planning that anyone in the room can see. Everything else lives in the days before the meeting or the week after it, and when I've done it well, it's invisible. I'm fine with that, though it also means I'd never sat down and looked at the whole list, so Jay Feitlinger, consider this my answer to your question.
What Is All of It For
There's a single idea under every piece of this. I want my team's best energy going into the quarter and the problems we're there to solve, and I want to clear out anything that would burn through that energy before we get there.
Food is the easiest example. I've been in enough hangry strategy sessions and enough well-fed ones to know which kind goes better, no research required. So I don't put lunch out at noon and hope it carries everyone through the afternoon. The food goes on the schedule like anything else, placed where I know people's focus starts to slip.
The Homework Happens Before Anyone Sits Down
Everybody fills out a short form before planning. It goes out early and spells out exactly what I need from each person. It's also standardized, so we can hold one quarter up against the last, and I've automated whatever pieces I could. I'd rather nobody on my team use their sharpest thinking on admin before the day has even started.
You can feel the payoff in the first hour. When people show up with their answers already in, nobody has to spend the opening getting everyone else up to speed, and we get to the good stuff sooner. In our case, the good stuff usually means we start disagreeing with each other.
Clients Can Wait One Day
In agency life, a client can reach you at any hour through any channel, including the one you forgot was sending you notifications. If somebody's in the planning session with one eye on Slack, I'm only getting half of them. So we cover the client work for the day, which frees everyone at the table to be fully present.
Why Did the Check In Survive
Back to that AI suggestion. Before I ask anyone to spend a whole day thinking about the next ninety days, I want to know if they're coming off a rough week or a rough month. Knowing that tells me who might need some extra support and how hard I can push the group that day. Making room to connect is one of the very few agenda items I'll defend, even when the software sounds extremely sure of itself.
The Week After Is Part of the Plan
When I've watched a plan quietly fizzle, it almost always happens in the week after the meeting. People go back to overflowing inboxes, and the new priorities get buried under whatever was already burning. So I plan that week for my team too. It keeps the momentum and the excitement from draining away, and it also gives everyone some room to recover from a long day. If the rest of the prep worked, people leave with enough energy left to actually get going on what we decided together.
Next Quarter
Jay was kidding, and I know it. I'd still like to believe the snacks got noticed because the team has come to rely on everything else too, including the parts they'll never see.
Got planning or an SKO on the calendar? You'll give the content plenty of thought no matter what. Set some of that attention aside for what your people need to arrive ready and leave with energy to spare. As for me, snacks are getting their own line on next quarter's prep form, up at the very top, so I don't get caught twice.
What's the thing your team would only notice if you forgot it?
I write about running operations and leading people every week in String by String on LinkedIn. Come say hi.
