When all you’ve got is a hammer… everything looks like a nail. If your one-trick tool at work is endurance, it could be a long time before you realize you’ve been cracking eggs instead of nailing it. Don’t read… listen. Enjoy.
I’m an endurance queen. For over a decade, my shortest work week was 69 hours. I like endurance sports like hiking. I’ve got endurance big-time and it’s served me well. But the dark side to endurance is that it can set you up to overlook options.
When we use endurance to deliver results, we don’t stop to ask ourselves how we could be doing something faster or more efficiently. We’re too busy just grinding out the work.
For example, I was working on a task with our team. It was an important task and we were all focused on it. We divided it up and went at it. We worked nights, weekends and still didn’t finish. I realized that the deadline was less than 24 hours away, it was after eleven PM and I still wasn’t even close.
It didn’t matter if I could stay up all night. What I was doing would not be finished by the deadline. I closed my laptop and went to bed.
At 3 am, I woke up to the voice of my working brain.
Brain: “Hey! I noticed you gave up on the task we were working on.”
Me: “Ugh. Go away.”
Brain: “Um, so I’ve been working on an alternative. What you wanted to do? Wouldn’t really work for you later … it’ll always take this long. It’s not suitable.”
Me: “Huh. True. But Go AWAY.”
And because I’m a Zen Master when it comes to shutting my brain down so I can go back to sleep, I slept.
At 4 am, I woke to the voice of my working brain again.
Brain: “Hey! You approved the redesign so I’ve been tackling that.”
Me: Where am I? I’m in bed. I don’t work when I’m here. Go Away!
Brain: “Well, I just want you to know that if you let go of the design you wanted to use and do this other thing, it’ll take three lines of code and you can be done before you shower this morning. I’m heading out now.”
Me: “Wait! What?”
It wasn’t until endurance was no longer an option that my brain even tried to come up with another solution. Once working longer or harder was off the table, then I had to come up with another way.
It’s not just endurance that shuts us out from other options. Anything that we typically rely on to “win”, to succeed, to stay safe – is going to be an automatic “do that first” for our brains.
Sometimes, taking your best tool and leaving it at home can be your smartest move.
And that? Is just good to know.
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Great Mornings, Great Work Days and Great Lives might happen by chance, but why not DIY?
This is one of my ten best mornings. That thought changed my life. It was a beautiful day and I was heading out the door to work when the thought crossed my mind. This is one of the ten best mornings of the year.
I stopped in my tracks. Ok, not literally. I still headed out to my car, put the key in the ignition and headed out. But mentally, I was stuck. Why, I wondered, was this such a great morning? I started to pick the last few hours apart. I’d woke up, had great coffee, meditated and listened to music while I dressed.
Making these things part of my regular routine was not a great intellectual leap once I’d uncovered this. Over the years, I’ve added to my routine, noticing what makes a great morning and what doesn’t. I can pretty much have a blast before work on any day I choose now. A great morning for me includes not checking my cell phone, sitting quietly on my cushion with my dogs curled up beside me, getting outside with one of them and walking or running – all accompanied by my favorite playlist. If I really want to have a perfect morning, I’ll eat breakfast on my deck and continue the music during my commute.
You build great mornings and days by noticing what’s working.
You can also build mental resilience – strong, positive thought patterns – by noticing what’s working.
First off, we need to notice and celebrate the positive in our lives. Why not, right? We certainly pay attention to the negative.
Next – analyze what happened. Figure out how you were feeling at the time and what actions you were taking. Jot down what you were thinking. Replay the thought and double check it… when you think it again, does it give you the same feeling you had? If so, you have found the right thought.
Putting positive events through analysis is a very powerful activity. Here’s why: When you are really on, doing great and being your best self, you’re having feelings that feel great, you’re taking actions that pay off and getting great results. So figuring out what you’re thinking is really helpful. When things aren’t going well, we have to work hard to find believable ideas that we can use to help ourselves. Well, the stuff we’re thinking on a great day is exactly that – believable thoughts that work. It’s good to have them in our back pocket for when we need them.
So make sure to catch those thoughts like fireflies and keep them in a bottle where you can see them glow.
To learn how to slow down your thinking and catch the thoughts that work, book a free session with me – here.
I’m going to tell you a dog story. Don’t get offended.
I spend a lot of time with my dogs, and my dogs, do a lot of cool stuff. So naturally, I’ll find parallels between my two big interests – dogs and, um, work. That doesn’t mean I think we can train people like dogs. But it does mean I prefer working dogs. Ba-da-bump.
If you would like to skip the story and just get to work, you can sign up for a free 25-minute session here – I’d love to show you how our expectations impact our work.
Ok – so here’s the story – I was new to dog sports and scheduled to compete in a rally trial. We got to the sitea bitlate and I was ignoring my dog – as much as you can ignore a seventy-pound Doberman attached you by a leash. I was focused on everything except my dog. Fifteen minutes before we were to go in, I stood up and rushed her through her exercises. Let’s just say, she wasn’t impressed with me. I knew in my bones that we weren’t a team at that moment.
When we entered the ring, things went from bad to worse. She made me sweat for every sit. Every turn, every command was met with excruciatingly slow responses. I was trying to count our mistakes. I kept waiting for the judge to tell us to exit and put me out of my misery. At the three-quarter mark, my anxiety turned to petulance. I was sure we were disqualified. I wanted out. My face was burning with embarrassment and I looked more like a pouting middle schooler than a grown ass woman. We finished the course and, in the ugliest win ever, managed to pull a third place that we didn’t deserve. Neither the judge nor I, wanted us to get that ribbon.
It’s my habit to always thank the judge after a match. I pulled my shoulders back and forced myself to approach her and offer my thanks. She was a stern woman, in her late sixties with a straight back. She had on a pale green suit that was classic and sturdy. She stared at me for a moment and then took me aside.
“Do you know what kind of dog that is?” She asked and didn’t wait for an answer. “Those dogs are military dogs. That breed was used by the United States Marines.” She seemed to grow a foot taller as she straightened herself. I did not inform her this was my third Doberman but I was curious. If this formidable woman wanted to tell me something, I wanted to hear it.
“When you work with a dog like that, you go into the ring and you expect a Marine!” She glared at me. “Perhaps you should get some other kind of dog.” She nodded to herself and waited expectantly.
“Yes Ma’am,” I said. “Thank you.” She clearly didn’t think I had the right stuff.
Because that dog and I were practically joined at the hip, in no way did I think I couldn’t handle her. But I did think a lot about what the judge said. That week, every time we stepped out to train, I’d remind myself to expect a Marine. I stopped trying to control her. I expected her to dog up. I expected myself to act like a person who was teamed with one of the smartest of all breeds. Lo and behold, that dog had game. She was alert, focused and on point. So was I.
Here’s the deal: What we expect to find, is often what we do find.
The belief that we are capable and can create positive change in our lives increases motivation and job performance – but not because the universe falls in line with our thinking. Beliefs impact our actions. If we believe we can succeed, we’re more likely to take actions that lead to success – taking classes, trying one more time, seeking answers. It just makes sense. If you expect that you’ll fail, why bother taking a class?
What happened with my dog and I was this: when I expected her to act like the dog I knew she could be, I walked faster, I moved with certainty. I didn’t keep looking down at her… and she had to be alert and moving quickly to keep up. She had to think for herself, so she stayed interested. Nothing magic, but man, it felt great. As we worked together, I was so proud of her, I thought my heart would burst.
So ask yourself, what do you expect of yourself and others when you show up at work? Be careful how you answer – it can be the difference between feeling like a Marine and feeling like you don’t deserve your own dog.
This week I just have to say something about exhaustion. Here it is: Have Mercy…on yourself.The whole blog, read to you.
Needless suffering. This is one of the things that makes me show up, week after week, blogging, coaching and reaching out. There are other things I could be doing with my time and frankly, after a long work week, I often ask myself if this coaching stuff is really worth it, and then, something like this will happen:
Me: “OK, and how do you behave, right then, in the moment?”
Client: “I fall apart.”
Me: “What does that mean? Specifically.”
Next, I hear something like this – they go somewhere safe – home, out for a walk, or just shut the door to their office – and they stop holding back their emotions. I’m not talking about cursing a little bit or needing a tissue. I’m talking about big, sloppy tears or explosive physical releases – emotional exhaustion, physical exhaustion or both. Sometimes, they have to leave for the day. They have to cancel meetings, or they keep it together until they get home and then they lose it on their own time. Most often, they continue to work – literally crying or silently fuming while they continue to answer emails, write code, finish that report.
My heart breaks for my clients who go through this, not because I think they have been victimized at work. I’m heartbroken because the suffering is real, it’s chronic and it is needless.
I work with entrepreneurs, IT professionals, engineers, managers, healthcare professionals, and analysts. These are not people easily overwhelmed by life and the pressures of a career. My clients are uniformly smart, high performing, insightful people with a lot of drive. They are the people companies want most – and they are exhausted.
Look, nobody in corporate America is specifically trying to create workplace conditions that foster overwork, inefficiency, employee frustration, and exhaustion. I have never met a single person in authority who thinks it’s a good idea to foster a culture where people are afraid to go home, tied to ineffective teams and management and literally crying at their desks. Absolutely not. Most executives want staff to focus at work, be willing to deliver during project deadlines and figure out how to go home at a reasonable time.
Where is the disconnect?
Here’s my story:
I used to manage a convenience store for a major chain. I worked more hours than I can even speak to. I worked physically and mentally. I was working so much that I literally couldn’t keep weight on my body; I had to borrow clothes from a friend. My husband took a job in my store, just so he could relieve me. One evening, my father called me to say hi. My speech was redundant and non-sensical. All I could say is “I have to feed my son.” I repeated this over and over. My father, worried but out of state, sent my mother to my home. I remember saying to her, “I have to put him to bed. I need to get him ready for bed.” I remember not being able to stop. She had to take me by the hand and physically guide me to bed. The next day, the doctor ordered me out of work for a full week.
Here’s the thing. I worked myself literally to exhaustion. I was convinced everything I was doing was absolutely critical, vital to my success at work and the functioning of the business. And then, I was yanked out of the store for a full week. And you know what happened to the store?
Nothing.
Someone was sent to cover for me. Everything went on.
I was, in a way, irrelevant.
It was a humbling experience. It also made me vow to never work myself that hard again. All that suffering, all that work, had been for nothing. At some point, I had failed to notice the point of diminishing returns and just kept working. Now, so many years later, I can look back and see the cruelest part of all that – in that state of mind, with so few physical and emotional resources, I was never going to bring my store into a state of excellence. I was trying to hit standards, but what I needed wasn’t more labor. What I needed was time and space to network, learn and think about how to do that in a way that brought in revenue. I can tell you for sure, with my mind focused on how to get everything done so I could race home, sleep fast and hustle back to work – I was never thinking about the big picture. I was destined to kill myself in order to be mediocre. Ouch!
Here’s another story:
I used to work with a woman who over-worked herself daily. She insisted that everything with her name on it be perfect, meticulous. She was very unhappy and considering quitting. I remember asking her if she couldn’t just lower her standards for a bit. She was adamant that she couldn’t do a less than perfect job. She expected herself to deliver excellent work. She was unwilling to choose anything to leave undone.
She had a long commute so she rented a room near our office so that she could continue to work late. Her spouse remained at their home. Her unhappiness deepened. I asked again, why not just leave on time and see what happens?
She couldn’t bring herself to try it, even for a week. Instead, she left the company.
She basically drove herself to quit so she didn’t have to fail. The more perfect everything had to be, the further she got from the failure line, the less clear she was about how far she’d gone. She thought failure was one missing comma away when in reality it was a dozen minor details behind her. Diminishing returns are the most expensive.
Think about these stories. Can you see how the actions myself and my friend were taking were actually LESS helpful to our companies, families, and teams than if we’d given ourselves space to stop and take stock, regroup and refocus on what mattered?
Thought errors are easier to see in other people than ourselves.
That’s one reason we hire coaches. Nobody was making me scrub the floor under the shelves in my store on my knees. (Yes, I did that.) Nobody was making my friend deliver suitable-for-framing meeting minutes. Nowhere is this clearer than for my clients who own the business they work in. Everything they’re doing is literally up to them – and they too, suffer.
Even in endurance focused cultures where those who “sleep under their desks” are cheered, the rubber hits the road right under our own chair. Can we prioritize our work well? Can we tell people no? Can we accept some sub-par performance in less critical areas so we can deliver on the important stuff? Have we even stopped to think about what the most valuable work we can do today is? Can we just go the heck home when there’s still some work left to do? For many of us, we could, but we don’t. We want to please people, feel important and be excellent. Some of us are waiting for people above us in the chain to notice that we need relief and give us permission to stop the madness.
I’m not saying that we should never put in overtime. I’m suggesting that we set some guidelines for ourselves. I’m saying, figure out what you want to try, tell your manager what you’re doing and then do it. For a week. See what shakes out. And then try something else.
Don’t ask your manager to solve your work-life balance issue – quite frankly, they can’t. They can help, but in the end, you still have to do the important work and then get up and go home.
That, my tired friends, is having mercy on yourself –
And that? Is OK.
If you would like to have someone to bounce ideas off of – I’m here. Sign up for a free 25-minute session – Here. On me, no strings.
Try telling this guy he’s not happy. Interest and Pride make the top ten of positive emotions. Who’s farting rainbows now?
Right. Everybody’s supposed to be happy all the time. That’s what all these airy-fairy life coaches are all about. Right? Right?
Get over yourself. That’s so 1999. Happiness is the powerhouse of innovation, curiosity, and dedication. Success is not an easy feat to achieve. You’re going to need some serious mojo to get there. Check out the list below.
The Big 10 Positive emotions:
Joy.
Love.
Gratitude.
Serenity.
Interest.
Pride.
Hope.
Amusement.
Inspiration.
Awe.
Positive thinking gets a bad rap in STEMcircles.I mean, we spend all day writing test scripts and providing evidence for stuff… like our code will actually deliver the right result, or that dam will hold water for instance. We’re not big fans of “thinking will make it so”.
Look at that list. Really look at it. Which do you think makes more sense –
You work really hard, become successful and then you find meaning in your work, new ideas, and curiosity?
OR… You have an abiding love for what you do, you are interested in what works, inspiration strikes and then you’re successful?
If you define happiness as the set and the 10 big emotions as the subsets of happiness, it’s pretty easy to see that if you’re happy, success is pretty much coming down the road to meet you.
Chicken, my friend, the egg was first. Happiness drives success. So figure out what puts happy on your face, and go for it, even if that positive expression looks a lot like an alert pit bull.
If you want to find out ways you can feel happier at work, book a free session with me – here.
Sandra Day O’Connor said “Slaying the dragon of delay is no sport for the short winded.” Neither is the game of time management.
My Clients All Want to Know the Secret.
Yep. I feel for them. They want to know the three things which will solve the problem of work-life balance once and for all. For the first few sessions, they think we’re not talking about time at all.
I keep asking them to put names to emotions, remember thoughts, separate facts from fiction. They want a detailed plan on how to be more productive. They want to know how to finish their to-do lists in seconds and plow more work into less time. I keep trying to show them their thoughts.
I know how they feel. I analyzed every sentence in First Things First by Covey, Merrill, and Merrill. I spent a weekend pulling apart my filing system and making little labels after listening to, and then reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I made boatloads of time maps, trying to follow Julie Morgenstern’s Time Management from the Inside Out. I learned a ton by reading these works and much of it I kept.
If you can do it in 2 minutes, do it – is a keeper (David Allen)
I kept Urgent V Important, and Put The Big Rocks in First – Covey, Merrill and Merrill
I gave up being a Conquistador of Chaos and took up Time Boxing – Morgenstern
I calendar and habit stack. I pomodoro ( – thanks Francesco Cirillo ) and I use Trello.
I’m an A+ Time Management Student – but nothing stuck until I understood one thing: I’m Worthy.
Did you just groan? Just a bit?
I know – it sounds trite and you can’t buy it at the store and take it to work to solve all your problems. Sorry.
M. Scott Peck said it this way: Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.
Here’s the deal: You’re never going to be any more valuable than you are right now. There’s no such thing as self-improvement if we’re implying that we become more worthy, more important or more valuable when we change or grow.
You’re as valuable as the next guy, you’re as important as your boss and you have as much right to make decisions about your time as the CEO does. You have your own allotment of time on the planet. Nobody is going to stop you from spending it all at work – not in America, not in this century. The only person who can decide how valuable your time is – is you.
You still have to deliver value and results to the company that pays your salary – on the regular and in good faith, but as long as you think there is something more important or someone more important than your own decisions about what you’re going to do with your next 24 hours? You’re sunk. You’ll waste time, give up time and let work slide into personal time and personal time slide into work time.
You have to value yourself before you can set up a time management system that works.
It’s not easy to put a high value on yourself. You have to be very brave to do it. You have to have the courage to try it, to be willing to let people think stuff about you – to be willing to make mistakes. You have to be one tough lady, one strong dude to reign in time and make it take you where you want to go. The good news is – you can learn to value yourself and your time.
And that? Is just good to know.
If you would like to figure out how to stop seeing yourself as someone who needs fixing and start realizing that you are fine, right now – as you are, it would be my great honor to work with you. Before I worked with my coach, I really didn’t see myself as worth much. Now? I’m absolutely committed to modeling self-appreciation and helping others find their own self-compassion. Book a free session here.
Hey Neo, are you sure you took the red pill? Sometimes, you don’t have to be stuck in the Matrix to be misinformed.
I’ve got bad news.
Your brain – is lazy – but in a good way. It’s efficient. It conserves its resources and wastes no time on stuff it can automate. It’s like the best I.T. department ever and it’s in your head. All of which ought to be a good thing, but if you don’t understand how it’s running things – your brain can pull a fast one on you. And that’s bad news.
There’s hope.
The good news is that you can figure out the rules to the game and start to get the renegade department back under corporate control – and working for you.
Rule #1 – Separate the Situation from Your Thoughts About It
Here’s the deal. We think that our situations cause us to feel things. But between the situation and our feelings about it, there’s a thought. It’s our thinking about situations that causes us to have feelings. That’s important because our feelings drive our actions , and our actions are what create results. If you’re not aware of the thoughts you’re having, you can’t work with them, alter them or control them. So the first order of business is to get in the habit of separating out Facts from your Thoughts. To do this, start free associating, writing down random sentences that come into your mind. Do this for about two minutes. Now go back and circle the things that are facts. Ask yourself – would everyone agree to this sentence? If the answer is no, that’s a thought. It’s not a fact. Do this every day for a month and you’re going to notice something profound. There are not lot of facts floating around in our minds. We’re mostly tossing around opinions. This is good news because facts are really hard to change, but thoughts? Well, let’s just say we have some control over those.
Rule #2- Don’t Just Take What Your Brain Hands You
It’s disappointing, I know, but your brain isn’t actually spending a lot of time picking just the right thought for you in any given situation. Actually, it’s spending almost no time deciding what to think. David Rock, in his book “Your Brain At Work” did a great job hammering home the point that the ideas in our frontal cortex are a limited mix of whatever we thought most recently and whatever is emotionally charged. Basically, all that mind chatter you’ve got going on? It’s just random. These aren’t great truths about who you are. These are a convenient and easy-to-find mix of thoughts that happen to be quick for your brain to grab onto and toss into your conscious. I remember the day I first really got that. I was so angry to think I’d been treating all that negative and frankly, confusing, stuff like it was important. Those ideas in my brain weren’t important. They were just the things I’d thought most recently.
If you’d like to learn more about how to work with your mental chatter and get it singing in tune with your best self, sign up for a free 25-minute session. https://RockYourDayJob.as.me/free
Rule #3 – Follow Ideas Through to the Results Before You Decide to Believe Them.
If we confuse facts with opinions and attribute our feelings to our situations rather than to our thoughts, then we’re ceding control of our actions to our environment. In no way does that put us in the driver’s seat. If I think my boss is making me upset and hurting my feelings, then there is very little I can do about it. But if I acknowledge that it’s my thoughts about my boss that are making me upset, I suddenly have a lot of control. Ergo, it’s to my advantage to start to prove to myself that those thoughts I’m having are the cause of my feelings. Why? Because then I can get control of my feelings and if I do that? Well, then my actions are suddenly under my control and, because actions are what get me results…my results are in play too. A very good place to be.
We also confuse the random thoughts that pop up in situations with logically selected ideas. When I offer up my new idea in a meeting and everyone laughs, my knee jerk response is going to be to tell myself never, never to speak in a meeting again. But if I recognize that never speaking again is just what my brain handed me when people laughed at me, I can start to figure out if that tactic is going to get me the best result. It might be that even though people laughed, they did hear my idea and I might use that in my favor. But if I never get past “don’t speak in a meeting ever again”, then I won’t have any other, better ideas.
So, with any thoughts about subjects that are important, make sure you’re asking yourself if you are looking at a fact, or a thought. If it’s a thought, ask yourself what result this thought will get you and, if you don’t like that result, ask your brain to get busy finding you some better thoughts you can believe.
Now, who’s calling the shots? Not some guy in the Matrix. Not on your watch.
We all have the same twenty-four hours… But someone is trying to steal yours.
Everybody Wants You
Look, time is the one thing that you can’t get back after it’s gone. You’re not going to earn more time. You don’t even know how much you’ve got. You can trade some of it for money by going to work and putting in your steady eight plus. You can trade even more of it for money by doing for yourself what you could pay someone else to do, like mowing the lawn or washing the car.
If you’re like most people, you watch TV. You’ll trade a big eighteen-minute chunk of your time to advertisers for the privilege of trading forty-two minutes for entertainment.
You’ll pick up your cell phone and flat out give the thing 20 minutes just scrolling between apps and emails.
Let’s face it. You? Are getting ripped off.
And that’s not all. The way you’re thinking about time at work isn’t helping you any either. We’ve all been conditioned to think in dollars per hour. If you want more dollars, you have to work more hours. But that’s not actually what’s happening at work, is it? Some people at your shop are bringing home more dollars for that hour. Why? Because of what they can deliver during that time.
Believe me, your company is certainly paying attention to the amount of money they are willing to pay for different types of work … delivered within the work day. Your company is paying you cash for results per hour. No mistake about it.
You should be looking at your time the same way. What results would you be willing to give up an hour to get? If you said you’d like to trade an hour of your life for the chance to eat four twinkies and watch one episode of “Badly Dressed Unhappy People” – I wish you well.
On the off chance that you have better things to do with your time, start taking it seriously.
At work, there’s a version of reality shows and smartphone apps too. It’s called interruption. Emails coming in, people stopping by your desk, the idea that you should get another cup of coffee or a maybe go find a bit of chocolate all conspire to keep you from delivering the results per hour that both you and your company want.
For most knowledge workers, we are being paid to do work that requires concentration and focus. If we’re not careful, those interruptions will suck up our work day and leave us working far into the night to catch up. Here’s four ways to take back your time.
1.
Spend the majority of your day doing the work that is most expensive or most skilled. Let’s face it – you want them to hire someone else to do the inexpensive stuff you can’t get done – not the other way around.
Once you get your head around that, it’s a lot easier to say ‘later, baby’ to the quick to get done, but not so challenging work of answering emails or filling out forms.
2.
Plan results – not time. That’s right. Don’t decide to spend three hours on coding. Decide what blocks of code you want to finish, then figure out how much time you have to do it. Push hard and settle for B- work until you get that amount of work done in the expected time. You can always come back and polish later during unit testing.
If you’re a manager, plan to get a specific task completed in a fixed time. Once you start planning results, you’ll be amazed at how it will bleed into the way you think about meetings and your personal time.
When you’re working toward a result instead of just burning time, it’s a lot easier to say no to interruptions. Combine that with the dopamine hit you get when you complete the result and you’ve got a big win.
3.
Refuse to work at the expense of yourself. Once I got serious about my time, and the way I want to spend it, I stopped tolerating my tendency to sit for hours at night doggedly trying to catch up. The more I insisted on treating myself decently, the more work I got done during the work day. I’m no where near perfect at this and I still have plenty of days when I get distracted and fail to deliver on my highest priority for the day, but I’m improving every day and it feels – GREAT.
4.
Stop using work to escape your life. You heard me. Work-a-holism is no joke. Our culture loves to applaud the guy that sleeps under his desk. Your mother will forgive you for missing her birthday if you “have to work”. You don’t have to come home, you can get away with just about anything if you’re working. After all, this is American and we love us some crazy hard workers.
It takes one to know one, and for sure, I used heroic work effort to avoid a lot of stuff in my life. And now? I can’t get that time back.
If you would like to have help figuring out how to conquer chaos and get yourself hitting your goals, sign up for a free 25-minute session with me. I would love to take this work further. Click the link below to get started.
Face it. Getting all caught up isn’t really the point.
If Friday leaves you feeling like you have an anvil hanging over your head and Sunday evening feels as if you’re standing under the shadow of a grand piano – like some kind of cartoon sad-sack – you might want to try thinking about work a little differently.
Secret #3
Your Company Isn’t Paying You For Inbox Zero
If you’re like most of us, you spend a lot of mental energy trying to figure out how to get it all done. I blame primary education for that because, heck, what’s easier than that? Seriously though, we are taught in school, and at home, that completing everything assigned, or eating everything on our plate is the key to being done. Right?
You know you’ve finished your work for the day, the semester, or the year when everything is complete. There’s nothing wrong with that – except when you get into the working world, there’s no clear definition of done and the tasks before you change every hour. If you have an instant messaging system at work, the news is even worse…the list is changing every second. All of that can leave us feeling dejected, stressed, overwhelmed, or worse yet, like failures.
You are never going to be caught up – and it’s OK.
Let’s face it. The goal in life and at work isn’t to be caught up. We all have different goals in life overall, but for sure, your goal isn’t to just stop doing stuff. Your goal in life and at work probably looks a lot like engagement. At home, that means staying present with your people, being curious and doing the things that have great meaning for you.
If you don’t know what your priorities are, I feel you. I have a fabulous exercise that can clear that up for you in an eye-opening way. Schedule a free 25-minute session and I’ll take you through it. It would be my honor. https://rockyourdayjob.as.me/FREE
At work, engagement looks a lot like bringing your best self to the job and tearing into the stuff that will have a significant impact on your company, your team, your boss and yourself. And before you fight me on that, really think about where that stack lines up.
You want your team and company to succeed – of course, you do. So does your boss. What nobody wants is for any of us to spend all day distracted from the most important work and delivering on the urgent but not important.
What does that look like? One word answer, baby.
RESULTS
So start asking yourself what is that thing, that if you don’t do it, nothing else you do will matter? Check your answer. If you answered every email, but you didn’t do that one thing, would anybody care that you answered all those emails?
On our team, we denote that on our priority list with a row of stars -like this:
The Big Thing
****************************
Everything else
That way, we all know that anything below that line is in play. Anything above it is the top priority. It doesn’t mean we slack off, don’t respond to emails and generally muck around. Of course not. We take pride in our work and so do you. What it means is, we don’t beat ourselves up for not hitting everything all the time.
When you start to judge your own performance on the results you’re delivering and not your ability to swat at a barrage of incoming information – you start to own your time.
