The Admin Day Will Never Write Your Strategy

Nearly every owner we know has an admin day. Usually a Monday or a Tuesday, out of the venue, laptop open on the kitchen table.

The plan is always the same. Knock over the invoices, the roster and the emails in the morning, then spend the afternoon on the big stuff. The catering menu. The price review. Where the business is actually going next year.

The big stuff never happens. By two o'clock you are fried, the inbox has filled back up, and the strategy slides to next week. Again. It has been sliding since autumn.

That isn't a discipline problem. Cal Newport, a computer science professor who has spent years studying how people do their best thinking, would call it a design problem. You are trying to do two completely different kinds of work in the same day, and one of them always eats the other.

Deep Work and Shallow Work

Newport splits all work into two piles.

Deep work is the thinking that needs your full attention for a long stretch, pushes your brain about as hard as it goes, and produces something that is hard to copy. Designing a catering offer that makes money. Rebuilding the menu around margin. Working out whether a second site actually stacks up.

Shallow work is everything logistical. Emails, invoices, rosters, supplier orders, approving timesheets. It has to be done. It just doesn't need much of you, and you can do it half distracted.

Newport has a neat test for telling the two apart. Ask how many months it would take to train a smart graduate, with no background in your business, to do the task. The roster: a few weeks. Paying invoices: a few days. Deciding which of your three catering packages to kill, and how to price the one that stays: years of knowing your customers, your kitchen and your numbers. That one is deep.

Anything that passes the test in a few weeks is also a strong hint it shouldn't be yours at all. We covered how to hand that work off in Stop Making Coffee. Start Making Money.

Most owners fill the admin day with shallow work and expect the deep work to turn up at the end of it. It won't. Newport explains why.

Why the Admin Day Eats the Strategy

The research he leans on comes from Sophie Leroy, a management researcher who published a study in 2009 on what happens when people switch between tasks. When you move from one job to the next, part of your attention stays stuck on the first one. She called it attention residue. And that leftover pull makes you measurably worse at whatever you do next.

Now picture the admin day. Invoice. Email from the landlord. Gap in the roster. Supplier price rise. A staff member texting about Saturday. Back to invoices. Every switch leaves a little residue behind. By lunch you are carrying twenty half-finished thoughts, and not one of them is the catering menu.

So when you finally sit down to think about next year, your head is still stuck on the price rise. You don't get a blank page. You get a page with fifty notes already scribbled on it.

The second problem is how much of this thinking you actually have in you. Newport, drawing on research into how experts practise, puts the ceiling at around four hours a day for someone well trained at it, and closer to one hour for someone new. Most owners are new at it. That hour is worth spending first, when the tank is full, not last when it's empty.

This is why a thinking session fails when it gets squeezed in after the admin. We have written about Keith Cunningham's thirty minutes of weekly thinking time in The 30-Minute Habit. It works. It just doesn't work at 3pm on the admin day, forty switches in.

Deep Work Schedules That Fit an Owner's Week

Newport describes four ways people fit deep work into their lives. Only some of them survive contact with a hospitality business.

Monastic. Cut out nearly all shallow work and become hard to reach. Fine for a novelist. Not an option when the machine goes down at 7am.

Bimodal. Set aside long stretches, a full day or more, for deep work only, and leave the rest of the week open for everything else. The psychologist Carl Jung built himself a stone tower by a lake and went there to think. The owner's version is one day a month out of the venue with nothing on the list but the big questions. It works if you have a manager you trust with the floor.

Rhythmic. The same block, at the same time, every week, so you never have to decide when it happens. Tuesday, 7 to 9am, at a table that isn't in the venue. This is the one that fits most owners, because the habit carries it on the weeks when motivation doesn't.

Journalistic. Drop into deep mode whenever a gap opens up, the way a reporter can file a story on deadline in any room. It is the hardest version to pull off, and it is the one owners fall into without meaning to. "I'll think about it when things calm down." Things don't calm down.

Go rhythmic unless you have a good reason not to. Then split the admin day in two. The deep block goes first, in the morning, before you open a single email. The shallow work comes after, batched into one run.

If you can't find two hours in the week, the calendar isn't really the problem. It is everything you have already said yes to, which is the whole argument of If It's Not a Clear Yes, It's a No.

The Exercise: Redraw Next Week

Grab next week's calendar, on paper or on screen, and do three things.

One. Mark every block D or S. Deep or shallow, using the graduate test. Be honest. Most owners find their week is nearly all S, with the D squeezed into "whenever".

Two. Book one deep block. Two hours, same time every week, first thing, out of the venue. In the calendar entry, write down what you will have in your hands when it ends. A draft catering price list. A menu with six items cut. A yes or no on the second site, with the numbers behind it. Not "think about catering". A block with a finished thing at the end of it gets used. A block called "strategy" gets cancelled.

Three. End the admin run with a shutdown ritual. Newport's version takes a few minutes. Go through every loose end. For each one, either write down when it will get done or park it somewhere you trust. Then close the laptop and call it. Newport literally says "shutdown complete" out loud. It sounds a bit silly. It is also a clear signal to your head that it can stop chewing on the supplier email over dinner.

Run it for a month. The admin still gets done, usually faster, because shallow work shrinks when it is batched. And the strategy finally gets written, because you stopped asking a tired brain to do it at the end of the worst possible day.

Your best thinking needs your best hours. Give it them.

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Further reading: Deep Work by Cal Newport

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Inspired by Deep Work by Cal Newport. If this hit home, the book goes deeper.

Keep reading: The 30-Minute Habit That Changed How We Run Everything · Stop Making Coffee. Start Making Money.

If you want a Perth coffee roaster who thinks about your business the way we write about it, let's talk.