Optimize your impact, not your hours

I was recently asked: “How do you optimize your productivity hours?”

My answer was clearly not what the person had expected: “You don’t. You optimize your impact!”

When we think about productivity, we often look at the wrong metric: the hours spent and the effort taken, not the output and impact of what we did. However, how busy we felt or how hard it was, doesn’t matter with regards to our productivity. We can be very busy, work extremely hard, and still not achieve anything.

Therefore, “hours” is the wrong metric. It’s not about the hours we spend and the effort we put in – it’s about the output, deliverables, and impact we achieve through our work. So the real question is: “How do we maximize the output and impact we have?”

The answer is to put our energy to its best use, invest our time where it matters most, and keep ourselves healthy and balanced so that we can operate at peak performance for those deliberately selected areas.

Three simple shifts in your mindset will get you there:

Focus on the things that matter most

Invest your time where you get the most bang for the buck. Don’t spend all your time in “busy work” – it’s easy to fall into that trap as we feel so accomplished if we were busy with lots of stuff all day.

Instead, we need to develop the discipline to look hard at the impact of our actions and have the courage to say “No” if some work and priorities don’t make sense.

Of course, we also need to communicate early, proactively, and clearly to our stakeholders if we decided to deprioritize a given task. No surprises!

Remove distractions

Multitasking doesn’t work – period. As endless studies have shown, multitasking doesn’t work for anything that requires our conscious focus on two things at a time. You can brush your teeth and reminisce about your day – however, you cannot solve a logical problem and check your email simultaneously. The switching cost to get back on task after an interruption (multitasking) is surprisingly high – often up to 20 mins.

Knowing that every distraction can cost you up to 20 mins of your focused time, you need to eliminate all distractions. Switch off notifications, don’t have email counters on your phone, kill all notification sounds or pop-ups – better even, close all apps aside from the one you need for your current task and put your phone on mute. Don’t even listen to music; our brain immediately zeros in on the lyrics – if we like it or not (white noise is ok).

Allow your brain to get into “the zone”, find your “flow” and be sharp, focused, and effective. When you’re done, you can leave “the zone” and follow distractions for a little while.

Protect your recovery times

The third piece of advice actually does go towards optimizing your productivity hours (although that’s not my primary purpose): ensure that you can be at your A-game when you’re on task.

You cannot be the best version of yourself if you worked through the night or weekend and come into the office already exhausted in the morning. Take your breaks, take time to recharge, don’t push beyond the point where you are focused and effective. You need to recharge, you need to balance, you need to come back the next day with your A-game.  

Observe yourself and your focus and notice the point where you aren’t productive anymore. I learned that it is better to call it a day then, rather than trying to push through a little more – most times, your work will get sloppy and faulty when you get tired, and you will spend more time cleaning up the mess you created than if you had just waited for the next day. Trust me, I’ve been there many times.



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Lessons from Amazon, a global pandemic, and other crazy times
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ISBN 9798718017663

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Do you have a Worry list?

Hint: you should!  😊

We all have a lot on our minds – juggling different responsibilities, complex project dependencies, competing priorities. The risk of keeping so many things in our heads is that we will miss a bunch. We had a great idea, go to bed, and poof, it’s gone.

The solution to this is to get those ideas, questions, challenges out of your head and into what a former manager of mine called his “Worry list”. If you learned formal project management, you would call it an Issue tracker, but I like “Worry list” better.

The idea of a Worry list is to 1) get things out of your head to free up mental space, 2) collect all issues and questions in one place, so you don’t miss any, 3) have a way to systematically “burn down” the number of issues until you are ready to launch, and 4) see a glide path that lets you predict if you are on-track or off-track.

Add to your Worry list – This process is ongoing until the end of the project (and usually into the sustain phase afterward). If you discover a new issue, challenge, or question for a project, you add it to the list. No curation, no prioritization, no nothing – just capture the thought before it eludes you. Have one place and one tool where you do it and just drop things in right when they come to your mind. I like Microsoft To Dos, others use OneNote or paper, and if you want to go fancy, you can build an Excel issue tracker. The most important piece is that you keep your tool simple enough so that you will use it consistently. If you add too many bells and whistles, the maintenance effort will be too high, and you won’t follow through.

Burndown – This is the fun part. Instead of wondering what you need to take care of next, you look at your list and pick the most important or most urgent question or action. You solve it. You move on to the next. You can prioritize your list ahead of time or pick what is appropriate for the moment. This is “burning down” the list of issues (or bugs if you are in SW development).

Glide path – Looking at the glide path lets you determine if you are on-track or off-track. If a plane is within the prescribed glide path during landing, it will smoothly touch the runway. If it’s off the glide path, bad things could happen, and the pilot needs to take immediate action. The same is true for your worry list: if you solve 5 issues per day, have one week to go until launch, and 40 remaining items on your worry list, you know that you need to take action and change course. A glide path can be mathematical science (linear or polynomial regression) or just a rough temperature check (oops, still ten issues left for the week) – it’s up to your preference. In either case, it’s critical to know if you will be ready in time or not.

Punting – The hidden secret for shipping any product or project is to determine what not to tackle when you are running out of time. Some things must be done before launch, but others can wait until after. Solving issues is not the only way to burn down your Worry list – you can also decide to punt some issues for later. SW companies do that all the time and for good reasons – see this famous (and misleading) article on Windows 2000 https://www.zdnet.com/article/bugfest-win2000-has-63000-defects/. When launch day comes close and you run out of daylight, decide what really needs to get done and what is nice to have and can wait for another day.

Get your worry list started now! You will see that you will worry much less once you have it (you effectively delegate your worries out of your brain and into the list).

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Did you like this post? Want to read more? Check out our newest book!

Thriving in High-Pressure Environments
Lessons from Amazon, a global pandemic, and other crazy times
By Alfons and Ulrike Staerk
ISBN 9798718017663

Find it on Amazon: Paperback, Kindle

If you like what you’re reading, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. If you don’t like it, please tell us what we can do better the next time. As self-published authors we don’t have the marketing power of big publishing houses. We rely on word of mouth endorsements through reader reviews.

Meeting effectiveness and efficiency

We all spend a LOT of time in meetings. That time is important and valuable, as meetings help us to discuss topics, get different opinions, resolve issues, and decide on actions. However, those meetings can also waste a lot of time.

So how do we make meetings more effective? Here are some things that I learned over time – 8 quick checks for your next meeting:

• Shorter is better – Humans have a tendency to always fill the available time (I think it’s a yet undiscovered law of physics). If you have 2 hours for a task, you will need two hours. If you have only 30 mins, you will focus on what’s most important and be done after those 30 mins. Likewise, if you have 1 hour for a meeting, you will fill that time. Think about what the absolute required minimum duration for a meeting is and then schedule for that time. That will force you and everyone else to stay on topic and move forward.

• Have an agenda! – If you don’t chart out the way, you will not reach your destination. Share a meeting agenda ahead of time to set proper expectations and get the results out of your meeting that you need. In a previous team, we had a rule to not join a meeting if it didn’t have a clear agenda and purpose.

• Define desired outcomes and manage towards those outcomes – If you don’t say what you need from the meeting, you might be surprised by what you will get. In tandem with the agenda, also define what the desired outcomes are (e.g. “In this meeting we will agree on the proposed project plan and develop a complete list of necessary changes to that plan. After the meeting, execution against that plan will start.”). If you define clearly what you want to achieve, attendees will be more focused on helping you to get there. It will also give you a way to redirect discussions if they get derailed (and they always will).

• Recognize sidetracks and get back on track – Every meeting goes sideways at some point. Identify discussions that are not critical to the agenda and your desired and stated meeting outcomes, suggest to move them offline, and politely redirect the group back to the actual agenda. Something that can be quickly solved in the room (2 mins or less) is ok; everything else should be dealt with offline.

• Know who should be there (and who shouldn’t) – It’s easy to invite anyone who could be even remotely interested. That is also very expensive and doesn’t really add to your credibility as a thoughtful leader. Decide who really should be in the meeting to make the desired progress. Send meeting notes to everyone else.

• Engage people by asking them directly for input – Many people join meetings, make up their own thoughts, but stay quiet. This is particularly pronounced in virtual meetings and the worst for attendees who join only on audio. It’s so easy to multitask, or just hide away. Ask people specifically for their opinions. Ask them by name. This is important if you need a decision, but it is also a critical tool to ensure that more introvert communicators are not drowned out in meetings – their thoughts and opinions are just as important but often harder to get.

• Drive for decisions – Be sure to get the outcomes you desired from the meeting. Drive for decisions, ask people by name for their sign-off or explicit disagreement. A little tip / dirty trick: how you phrase the question matters. “Are you all ok with this?” leaves ambiguity and wiggle room. You will never know for sure that you have full buy-in or a defendable group decision. “So in summary, the decision of this meeting is X, unless anyone voices any objections now.” removes ambiguity, and forces people to voice any concerns right now. They cannot say “I didn’t know or agree” later. Everyone needs to be clear that now is the time to voice concerns or rest their peace forever. This is not about forcing a specific outcome; it is about eliminating decision avoidance.

• Write the meeting notes – Everyone will have a slightly different opinion of what was discussed and decided in the meeting. And as time passes by and memory fades, those gaps will just widen. Write down all decisions to have them documented and make them stick. Plus, who writes the meeting notes controls the decisions to a large part. Bonus points if you take the notes in the meeting and share your screen so that everyone sees them and has an opportunity to jump in right away if they disagree.

Inefficient meetings have been one of my pet peeves for a long time (being a true introvert, I hate long meetings without clear purpose and tangible forward progress). Following the above rules can make all your meetings substantially better.

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A practical guide to living healthier, happier and more successful in 52 weekly steps
By Alfons and Ulrike Staerk
ISBN 9781077278929

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The Fallacy of Measuring Everything

I wrote many times that you cannot manage what you don’t measure. While I still agree with that principle for most of the things we do, especially those we need to drive towards a certain goal, I will make a counterpoint in this post today.

The counterpoint is that we are overdoing measuring ourselves and pushing ourselves towards goals in today’s culture. We’re mechanizing every single part of our lives.

As always, the magic lies in the balance, and balance is what we are often losing sight of.

We push and measure ourselves at work. We track every single minute, make ROI (Return of Investment) decisions for everything we do and don’t allow any slack or waste (i.e. idle time or downtime).

Then we come home from work and do the same all over again. We track the time we spend on different activities, run through our task and priority lists, make sure every evening for the kids is booked and planned with some enrichment activity, and even when we go for a walk in nature we’re tracking our steps, distance, and how we rank against our buddies.

We deprive ourselves of downtime, time to go with the flow, time to think and let our thoughts go free, time to recharge and recover.

Everything must be in balance to thrive. Respect that balance.

Let go, as much and as often as you push and focus.

Contrary to previous posts and recommendations, I’ve lately stopped tracking my steps and recreational activities. I’m not measuring ‘fun’, ‘recovery’, and ‘relaxation’ anymore, as I realized that measuring those and pushing myself to do more and better, only turns it into another chore. ‘Recovery’ becomes another drain instead of something that recharges us.

I’m still pushing hard against goals at work, and I have a list of things I need to do in my private life. I still have clear goals and outcomes I want to achieve. However, I am now also clearly identifying areas, where none of those measurements matter, and I can just go with whatever happens at the moment.

I have a general framework of how I want to spend my time (family, mindfulness, sports, and nature), but I won’t sweat or be mad at myself if I didn’t do all of them every week. I also don’t worry anymore if I spent 5mins on a walk with my dog or 30mins. It’s the quality that counts, and how much it helped me unwind and recharge.

I have very clear goals and metrics for work, however, I also identified areas, especially in my personal life, where I only go with loose frameworks and personal values.

It is liberating, and it gives me more focus and energy to measure and manage the things that need to be managed.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Make sure ‘measurement’ and ‘achievement’ is not the only tool you have in your toolbox.

 

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Did you like this article? Want to read more?

I will keep posting articles here and I have them lined up way into summer 2020. However if you want to get it all in one comprehensive, structured, and grammar-checked (!) view, check out our new book:

 

Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First

A practical guide to living healthier, happier and more successful in 52 weekly steps

By Alfons and Ulrike Staerk

ISBN 9781077278929

Find it on Amazon: Paperback, Kindle

 

If you like what you’re reading, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. If you don’t like it, please tell us what we can do better the next time. As self-published authors we don’t have the marketing power of big publishing houses. We rely on word of mouth endorsements through reader reviews.

How do you shine a light on the moon?

How do you shine a light on the moon?

Well, it’s actually pretty easy: you use a laser, not a flashlight.

So what is so special about a laser? It’s really just two things: focus and coherence.

I. Focus (Spatial coherence)

A flashlight creates light in one point (the lightbulb) and then lets it travel out in a more or less focused way. There is a lot of energy produced, but it spreads out in multiple angles, with a quickly diminishing impact. A laser bounces light back and forth in one beam between two mirrors before part of it escapes in a single beam and travels outward.

Lasers are focused (spatial coherence). They point in one direction, and one direction only. As a result, their light travels far without losing intensity.

Focus maintains energy and signal, ensuring that it will travel far without being watered down. That is just as true for our strategies, stories, business, and life. All too often people are all over the place. They overload stories (at Amazon we use PR FAQs to develop, crystallize and communicate big new ideas), have unclear and disconnected goals (for example in annual planning, or OP1 in Amazon speak), jump around adjacent problems (e.g. project updates), or are jack-of-all-trades and master of none (often seen in personal priority setting and time management).

We need to constantly push ourselves to gain and maintain focus!

When you write a PR FAQ (or call it strategy proposal), what is the one thing you want to achieve? Make that your story and stick to it. If you had to pick one thing, what would it be? What is most impactful? If you need to land only one thing with me (and I won’t remember more anyway), what’s that one thing? Put everything else in the FAQ (i.e. the appendices for your proposal).

That focus needs to come from you. Don’t collect a bunch of ideas, and present them (regardless of whether it’s just bullet points or a polished narrative) to see what sticks with the audience. ‘Throwing spaghetti on the wall’ only makes a mess that you will need to clean up afterward. You need to do the hard work of figuring out what matters most and go through the painful process of letting go of all the other cool stuff (there will be another PR FAQ for those).

The same thought model applies to all other plans, strategies, and written updates that we produce. Spend the time to really understand what matters. Then figure out all aspects and implications of that one thing, and write it down in a flow that allows others to follow your thinking.

The same is true for your career. You can do many things every day, and our space certainly allows you to be busy and tactical all day long. The problem is that busy and tactical doesn’t get you very far in the long run (nor does it get your team anywhere). The flashlight shines brightly a few feet away, but it won’t travel to the moon.

Take your time, sit back and think where you want to go. Then make a list of the few (!) things that you need to be really good at and deliver, to get there. Focus on them and deliver excellence. I hate to break it, but people rarely get rewarded for the effort. They do get prompted for impact.

If you’re versatile, you will be the go-to person to fix issues and plug holes. If you focus on your core areas, you will be looked upon to lead others.

The hard work is to keep that focus. Make time for constant check-ins and reflections. When tactical escalations distract you, take a pause, reflect, and come back to your priorities.

Don’t compromise strategy work for tactical work. It’s a true temptation, as humans always seek instant gratification. Push back against that desire. A good framework for that thinking is the 4-block model of urgent vs important. Make sure you spend the majority of your time in the top two quadrants. Avoid the bottom two. Spend time on the important things that move you and your goals forward!

 

 

II. Coherence (Compounding)

The second important quality of a laser is temporal coherence. The waves are aligned in resonance, with the peak of every wave overlaying and sitting on top of the peaks of other waves. It’s the perfect compounding effect. Without that compounding effect, a laser would be nothing else than a very flimsy flashlight, that won’t even be able to illuminate something a foot away.

You want to use the same compounding effect in your stories, projects, career, and life.

When you tell a story, don’t jump around. Once you have identified the key point that you want to convey, build upon it. Develop it further through your PR FAQ, OP1, or project update. Don’t jump around to other adjacent things. Stay on the topic until you’re done, then stop.

A good way of thinking about this is the inverted journalistic pyramid. Start with your punch line, then as you go further, add additional details. Don’t jump around. The story should not change, if the reader goes further down in your text, it only becomes more detailed and colorful. If someone only reads the first paragraph, they should understand the core. As they read further down, their understanding should deepen, but not change. If their understanding changes, and the story morphs and shape-shifts in their mind, then you didn’t do a good job in understanding, developing and focusing on the key point.

 

Likewise, in your career, make sure the activities you’re driving are aligned with your goals. Make sure you are consistent with them! Switching around all the time will not let you gain real momentum anywhere. Focus, deliver, deliver more, build upon it, until you can proclaim victory. Small things add up, and the effect of compounding investments is staggering. It’s doesn’t need to be much that you add every time, but it needs to be consistent.

It’s easy to start a lot of things, and not follow through with them – I only need to look at the list of PR FAQs that we ‘wanted’ to write in our team but never did, or the plethora of action items we decide upon in brainstorming meetings and offsites, but hardly ever followed through with. Once you identified a goal, keep pushing.

Don’t kick off a lot of things, and then abandon them. Start a few that matter, and follow-through to the end. Go a few steps further every week, every day. Layer wave peak on top of wave peak. Gain momentum and build upon it. Make it an (Amazon) flywheel that you are constantly pushing!

Be a laser, not a flashlight. You CAN shine to the moon (and back).

#focus #goals #career #success

 

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Did you like this article? Want to read more?

If you want to get it all in one comprehensive, structured, and grammar-checked (!) view, check out our new book:

Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First

A practical guide to living healthier, happier and more successful in 52 weekly steps

By Alfons and Ulrike Staerk

ISBN 9781077278929

Find it on Amazon: Paperback, Kindle

 

If you like what you’re reading, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. If you don’t like it, please tell us what we can do better the next time. As self-published authors we don’t have the marketing power of big publishing houses. We rely on word of mouth endorsements through reader reviews.

Reflections on Achieving Your Goals: Develop an Accountability Mindset and Culture

High performing teams trust each other. Like raising an orchid, building trust requires a lot of attention and dedication to nurture, but it can be broken by a single mistake.

If you cannot trust your teammates, morale will go down. If you cannot trust your manager, you will hate to go to work. If you cannot trust your employee, you will avoid giving them important work.

Accountability matters

Accountability is one of the big inputs to trust. Can you depend on your co-worker’s deliverable to be ready in time and quality when you need it? Or do you need to chase them down, or worst case have to fix issues yourself in the last minute?

Decide if you commit, but once you do it, do it fully.

Accountability does not mean that you have to say yes to everything. However, once you do, make it a personal promise. Make it a matter of personal pride and values to come through on your promises.

Asking for help – be specific

Be specific when you ask someone for help. Don’t make ambiguous statements like “Someone should do X.” No one will feel responsible. In first responder training, they teach you to point to a person and tell them exactly what to do, otherwise no one will hear you.

Ask directly, explaining the ‘why’: “In order to achieve X, can you do Y by Z?”

Agreeing to help – treat it as a personal promise

When you are asked to help, you don’t have to say ‘yes’. You don’t have to agree to the timeline right away. It’s ok to explain tradeoffs if you take on that new task. It’s ok to ask what drives the timeline and offer a different date that you can make. Ask questions, understand reason and priority, be clear what you can do by when before you commit.

Once you commit you commit. It’s not ok to pay lip service and then let the other person hang. It’s not a badge of honor to miss a promise because you were “too busy”.

You need to make a personal promise or say “no”. Right there and then. Don’t leave it ambiguous, hoping a miracle happens along the way or everyone will forget.

When you do commit and confirm, be specific: “I will do X by Y.”

After you committed, block time in your calendar right away. Treat your commitment as a personal promise. Delivering against your commitment will not only impact how you are viewed in the team, it also subconsciously reflects on how you perceive your own personal integrity.

In many ways, the worst impact one has by not delivering on promises is onto oneself.

 

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Did you like this article? Want to read more?

I will keep posting articles here and I have them lined up way into summer 2020. However if you want to get it all in one comprehensive, structured, and grammar-checked (!) view, check out our new book:

 

Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First

A practical guide to living healthier, happier and more successful in 52 weekly steps

By Alfons and Ulrike Staerk

ISBN 9781077278929

Find it on Amazon: Paperback, Kindle

 

If you like what you’re reading, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. If you don’t like it, please tell us what we can do better the next time. As self-published authors we don’t have the marketing power of big publishing houses. We rely on word of mouth endorsements through reader reviews.

Reflections on Achieving Your Goals: Keep Heading Towards Your Big and Daunting Goals

Do you know where you want to be in a year, in 5 years, in 10 years? Do you know what you want to achieve in your life? Do you know what you want to proudly look back at when it’s time to make the big tally.

Know where you want to go and keep your goal in focus. Find opportunities to celebrate and award yourself along the way. Suck it up if times are tough, but also be gentle and forgiving to yourself – not everything will always work out exactly as you thought.

I hope you don’t just idle along from day to day, getting blown around by the random winds of life.

Know your goals

It all starts with knowing where you want to go. Don’t merely think about the next step you could do from where you are. Think about where you want to be when all is said and done. Then work backwards from that end goal and lay out the path that gets you there.

Think longterm. Prepare, invest and build for your future. Don’t fall prey to the easy way out or the instant gratification. Keep your eyes on the goal post.

Find little rewards on the way

When you have a goal that’s a little out there and maybe even daunting, it’s important to find and set rewards along the way.

Do what engaging games are doing: establish little goals and rewards along the way. Celebrate when you achieve those milestones. Keep yourself moving to your distant end goal by setting in-between goals that you reach along the way. Set rewards with those goals that keep you excited and keep you going.

Train your resilience

Some times, probably many times, it will be hard to push to your goal. There will be many temptations to go the easier way that provides instant gratification but distracts your from your desired outcome (e.g. plucking down in front of the TV instead of going for a run).

Here are some things you can do when ‘the going gets tough’:

• Look forward – keep your goal in mind, keep the forward momentum in focus

• Get perspective – put things into perspective, don’t get stuck in the current feeling but look at the bigger picture

• Know your why – be clear with yourself why you are doing things, what drives you

• Build on your passion – find the things in the current moment or the challenging situation that you are passionate about, spend as much time as you can on those

80:20

While all of the above is true and good, sometimes life happens. If you head towards your goals 80% of the time, you can be proud of yourself. If you strive for 100% you will get hard, myopic and will probably miss out on bunch of equally important things.

Always remember:

The art lies in the empty space.

Give yourself some slack every now and then. Be focused but also let go when the pressure builds up too much. Even the strongest tank needs a pressure valve.

Be focused but also let go. Don’t force yourself too much. Take a day off. Forget all your rules and duties, put down this guide and just enjoy life for at least one day the week.

 

---

Did you like this article? Want to read more?

I will keep posting articles here and I have them lined up way into summer 2020. However if you want to get it all in one comprehensive, structured, and grammar-checked (!) view, check out our new book:

 

Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First

A practical guide to living healthier, happier and more successful in 52 weekly steps

By Alfons and Ulrike Staerk

ISBN 9781077278929

Find it on Amazon: Paperback, Kindle

 

If you like what you’re reading, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. If you don’t like it, please tell us what we can do better the next time. As self-published authors we don’t have the marketing power of big publishing houses. We rely on word of mouth endorsements through reader reviews.

Reflections on Achieving Your Goals: Not Everything is as Urgent as it Appears

A critical part of being accountable and delivering against your commitments (promises!) is to actually have bandwidth for them, in other words to not over-commit.

We already talked about how it is ok – actually expected – to say ‘no’ when needed. What we didn’t talk about yet are timelines (or ‘deadlines’ to make it even more scary sounding).

Not everything is as urgent as it might appear at first glance.

Clarify expectations

Not everything that comes from your leadership comes with a “drop everything else and do this right now” expectation. In most cases, leaders just want to know when they can expect an answer and have the confidence that they don’t need to spend their energy to track that deliverable for you.

Don’t assume. Clarify and verify.

If a request came in without a timeline or clarification on urgency, don’t assume. Just ask: “Hey, when do you need this by?”

No decent leader will hold it against you if you ask, “By when do you need this?” I’m actually pretty sure for most leaders this will register as a plus point (if it doesn’t it’s time to look for a different leader).

What leaders want to know is whether you commit to provide the answer and by when. They want to be confident that you will do it and that they don’t have to worry about it. They will tell you if a timeline is not flexible and why.

As an employee, train your leader to provide that information with her requests in the future. However, also make extra-sure that you are managing yourself against that timeline! It is super frustrating as a leader if you need to keep your own reminders on everything you need, because you cannot rely on open loops to be closed without your constant follow-up.

Understand timelines

Not everything needs to happen right now. In fact, very few things are truly urgent, although many are perceived or presented as urgent or initially appear non-negotiable.

Unfortunately corporate culture has developed many bad habits in order to try to compensate for low accountability:

• Setting deadlines way ahead of time to build in buffer
• Setting short deadlines so that people do it right now and don’t get distracted
• Setting deadlines just because that’s what you do
• And the worst: setting a short deadline because something was sitting idle on your own desk for too long and now it’s really time to make progress

Understand the true urgency and timeline. Offer a plan to get there. Make sure you hit the plan.

Feel empowered to understand and validate urgency and tight deadlines. Ask for when a task is truly due. If it requires you to drop other things, understand what drives the urgency and what breaks if the deadline is missed.

If you think a deadline has a ‘safety buffer’ built in, ask for the real deadline. However, once you get the real deadline, you must make sure that you will be ready by that time. Otherwise, you just teach your partners to add additional buffers to manage in the future to work around your tardiness and unreliability.

If a deadline is infeasible, check your calendar and priorities and see when you can make it. Offer that alternative plan and check for agreement. If pushed, be clear what you will have to sacrifice in order to make that timeline.

In most cases, you will find that a deadline is actually negotiable.

 

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Did you like this article? Want to read more?

I will keep posting articles here and I have them lined up way into summer 2020. However if you want to get it all in one comprehensive, structured, and grammar-checked (!) view, check out our new book:

 

Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First

A practical guide to living healthier, happier and more successful in 52 weekly steps

By Alfons and Ulrike Staerk

ISBN 9781077278929

Find it on Amazon: Paperback, Kindle

 

If you like what you’re reading, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. If you don’t like it, please tell us what we can do better the next time. As self-published authors we don’t have the marketing power of big publishing houses. We rely on word of mouth endorsements through reader reviews.

Spiritual Balance – Week 40: Simplify and Declutter

We already talked about focusing on your priorities, cleaning up your calendar and inbox and decluttering your workspace. Let’s now take a broader stab at simplification and decluttering.

Simplify and declutter. Do it quick and radically, it will develop inertia. Don’t limit decluttering to your physical space, do it everywhere. Don’t fill up the empty space with new stuff.

Simplification helps you be you more relaxed, in the moment and happier because you are distracted by fewer things. There’s less stuff to maintain or to worry about. Further, clean space allows your mind wander freely and come up with new ideas, while stuff distracts and captures it (often with all the things you still have to do, like dusting those vases…).

Simplify and declutter radically

Simplification and decluttering (i.e. the art of getting rid of things you don’t really need) gains momentum as you are doing it. It has a strong inertia in either direction.

It’s pretty hard to get started. Off the top of your head, you seem to need all the things you have – why else would you have bought them in the first place?

However, push through it. Once you identified a few things that you don’t need anymore, or never truly enjoyed having in the frist place, things will get easier. As you get rid of things, you will feel a relief and that will propel you to get rid of more things that you don’t really need or want anymore.

Be willing to cut deep and cut fast. Putting one thing away a week will not give you that momentum and positive feedback. Instead take a weekend afternoon and make it a goal to fill a whole moving box (or two if you are an ambitious person). Don’t fret over decisions, if you don’t want to fight for an object, you are probably ready to let go.

Cut your losses

There’s a rule in investing that applies here as well:

“Don’t throw good money after bad money.”

What that means is that you should not add additional money to a sub par investment only because you hope that it will get better in the future. While that stock that went down for a year is really cheap now, chances are that the trend will continue and you will lose a lot of money.

Likewise, if you have bought something in the past that seems like a less stellar idea today, don’t get stuck in that ‘investment’. It might have been a good idea back then, but if it is not anymore, then say goodbye. Don’t throw ‘good money’ (your time, energy and mental capacity) after ‘bad money’ (something you don’t care about anymore).

If you have separation anxiety, don’t throw things away or donate them right away. Put them in a box. Once you didn’t touch that box for three months, bring it to a local charity for donation.

It’s ok to have bought something that doesn’t fit your life anymore. Cut your losses.

One area at a time

Attack one area of simplification at a time. Don’t let yourself get distracted as you hop from area to area.

If you want to declutter your living room, don’t get distracted as you bring stuff out through the garage. Pick one area or room at a time and tune out everything else. As always: focusing wins the day!

Decluttering and simplification is not only about stuff. The space you live in has a big part, but clutter and complexity is everywhere. Address all those spaces:

• Spaces – your home and living spaces, your yard, your office and work spaces, you storage (how much of that stuff do you really need),…
• Obligations – emails, calendar, volunteering, promises to ‘friends’, events,…
• Digital – websites, news, games, (phone) apps,…
• Relationships – friends that don’t lift you up, connections that drag you down, negative people, ‘friends’ on social networks,…

Don’t fill up the empty space

Of course, once you have decluttered an area, don’t fill up the empty space with new stuff. Keep the emptiness and enjoy it.

A clean empty space is not an invitation to bring in lots of new stuff (new clutter).

Cherish it, protect it, feel really bad for anything that contaminates it. Regard anything that move into that space as an intruder who needs to fight for its right to be there.

 

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Did you like this article? Want to read more?

I will keep posting articles here and I have them lined up way into summer 2020. However if you want to get it all in one comprehensive, structured, and grammar-checked (!) view, check out our new book:

 

Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First

A practical guide to living healthier, happier and more successful in 52 weekly steps

By Alfons and Ulrike Staerk

ISBN 9781077278929

Find it on Amazon: Paperback, Kindle

 

If you like what you’re reading, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. If you don’t like it, please tell us what we can do better the next time. As self-published authors we don’t have the marketing power of big publishing houses. We rely on word of mouth endorsements through reader reviews.

Be More Effective – Week 31: Bringing it All Together: Make a Plan to Calm the Monkey Mind

In Zen our usual behavior is often referred to as the ‘monkey mind’. Our mind is constantly busy, jumping from one thing to another, never fully focusing on following through on any single priority. There is always another banana on the tree that grabs our attention.

Calm you monkey mind. Reduce distractions. Make a plan and go for it.

Our goal is to calm the monkey mind. To remove distractions from our workplace, relationships and life in general.

Our goal is to understand what’s important today, the next week, this year and in our life. We need to assess, prioritize and plan.

Our goals is to make time for those priorities and focus on them, without being distracted by the banana on the other tree.

Our goal is to empty your ‘to do list chasing mind’ and free it to concentrate on the work at hand.

This week is really about consciously bringing together all the pieces we discussed so far. Step back for a moment. Reflect on the things you practiced the last 30 weeks and make a plan on how you will bring them together.

Make a plan. Write it down. Commit to it.

Clear your mind, make a plan ahead. Stop your mind from wandering and worrying. However, also know that you won’t fully stick to it and don’t get frustrated if you don’t.

 

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Did you like this article? Want to read more?

I will keep posting articles here and I have them lined up way into summer 2020. However if you want to get it all in one comprehensive, structured, and grammar-checked (!) view, check out our new book:

 

Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First

A practical guide to living healthier, happier and more successful in 52 weekly steps

By Alfons and Ulrike Staerk

ISBN 9781077278929

Find it on Amazon: Paperback, Kindle

 

If you like what you’re reading, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. If you don’t like it, please tell us what we can do better the next time. As self-published authors we don’t have the marketing power of big publishing houses. We rely on word of mouth endorsements through reader reviews.