There is an obsession with having lunch with someone. People tend to pack more in their days. I was doing the same for some period of time, especially being obsessed with this famous book from K. Ferrazi about effects of networking. I am not against networking, I am for more thoughtful approach to it.
This is why I do prefer to have my lunches on my own:
My own headspace
I firmly believe that your lunch time is the time when you can disconnect and switch your mind to something else. You’d argue that it is better time to socialise with your colleagues or random people around (I use to approach to random people sitting at busy foodcourts, sit with them and engage into their conversations).
I’d say that you can do it when you in the mood for that. You can learn more about your colleagues when you work on something together, when you set time to socialise, but don’t make it your daily routine or some kind of social duty. Instead, I spend this time to what I call “reducing my education debt”
- Reading my articles from Pocket
- Reading books
- Listening to things from my “Watch later” list on Vimeo or Youtube
- Watch lesson from the course I am taking
So the main rule here that I don’t surf internet for new things. I reduce my debt and educate myself. It creates sense of accomplishment, along with finishing my meal ;)
Deeper connections
I work with beautiful people and have awesome friends and we have lunches together. What I strive to is to have deeper and more thoughtful connections with them. It is more like long-term investment. When you have limited capital, you don’t want to spend it here and there, you want to strategise.
On other side, you always connected with most of the people from your environment almost 24/7, thanks to slack, emails, im’s and whatever new fancy service is popular this week(sigh).
So if I’d look for a quick chat or want to get to know more or share something with the person, I just could text them and get almost immediate response.
Time
There is a contradiction. When you want to save time and plan your lunches, you actually would spend more of it. Especially for the cases when it is not 1-1 lunch:
- Wait everyone to gather and especially for this last guy to hit the toilet we go
- Decide on place and move to it.
- Decide on what to order. Usually, waiters prefer to take one single order from one table
- When lunch is over, and group is big, there are always 1-2 guys keep eating
- When 1-2 finished, there still people sitting in their phones. This is, actually, how people start disconnecting from each other. What was the point to do all of the above, if you have nothing to speak about when there is no food on the table?
- Pay the bill, do the math, go back to the workplace. Slowly.
This, in most cases, makes around two hours. Please also consider +1 hour of post lunch coma, if you ate a lot and had to drink while eating.
Eat my own food
Probably I should put this paragraph first, but it is not a main reason.
I cook by myself or take the food that my wife prepared. I know what is there and how it was cooked. I know how it will affect my body (at some point) and in general I feel good about saving money and eating healthy.
Sometimes I cook nothing so I still have to go out ;)
Inconvenience
There is a psychological term called congruence. In short, it is when the way you act consistent with what you think. Children are all congruent till the certain period, by the way.
So part of my philosophy is about being congruent. I probably write more on that topic one day. So I want to be congruent and say “no” to:
- Things I don’t want to eat
- Time where I don’t want to eat
- Places which are hardly friendly for having food or have a poor service
- Don’t have to adjust to eating and speaking speed of other people
- Social duty of joining people for lunch
So what is my lunch routine now on weekdays?
- Home-made food without any glutamate, gluten, sugar or whatever stuff added
- 20-25 minutes of eating and reading or just eating (this time is more than enough to eat one set of meal properly)
- 10 minutes of short walk
- Getting back to things that I was working on