My Favourite Tip: Daniel Flynn - Make time for blue-sky thinking

“What the? Thirty companies? I can barely run one!” Daniel Flynn couldn’t believe what he was hearing. 

As co-founder and managing director of thankyou, Daniel was struggling to keep a cool head, and asked a mentor for some advice. That mentor ran 30 companies, and his advice was that Daniel should clear his calendar for one day a week, every week, and use that day for thinking. 

Initially, it sounded impossible. How do you remove yourself from the day-to-day work of your company a fifth of the time without everything falling apart? And yet, his mentor was doing it while running a small empire!

So Daniel decided to try it out, and he hasn’t looked back. He calls them “blue sky days”, and while he might sometimes use them to write content or to solve an immediate problem, they’re usually blocked off for, well, blue sky thinking. For the kind of untethered, meandering daydreaming that produces big ideas.  

Daniel shares some of the prompts that guide his thinking on blue sky days, and his methods for protecting his time when more “urgent” concerns pop up.

Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn or the thankyou website

You can find the full interview here: thankyou co-founder Daniel Flynn on big ideas, mentorship and purpose-driven culture

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CREDITS

Produced by Inventium

Host: Amantha Imber

Sound Engineer: Martin Imber See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.