Combining strategic thinking with detailed engineering work, all in a day’s work

If you are in a job position where you must spend large amounts of your day on detailed work, it can be difficult to switch over your thinking mode to strategy when you need to.  You may find that you wake up, full of energy and ideas, and plan to make that important strategic call at ten.  Only, after working for two hours on the minutiae of a project, you can’t remember exactly how you make an important call, what you would say, or more importantly, why it was a good idea in the first place.  There must be more details to take care of, which are the logical and easiest next steps.  However, you can get a game plan together to stay in strategic brain whenever you need to do it, for as long as you need to.  If you want to make a big call at ten, do strategic planning work for the two hours leading up to it.  Identify other big clients.  Send emails to some potential strategic partners you’ve identified.  Read Harvard Business Review’s email digest or listen to a TED talk on a business idea.  Have a conversation with a colleague who is able to think strategically about the call you need to make.  There will be time to get back into the details after your important work is done for the day.