Michael Hyatt's Blog, page 9

Why Your Story Should Shape the Way You Lead

You are leading a team aimed at achieving lofty goals. You want to help them be stronger and healthier together, so you can reach those goals. You’ve heard that fostering personal connection is key, but you don’t want to inadvertently step over the line. How do you know what to say and what not to? 

 

3 Ways to Create More Margin in Your Personal Life

We all need margin to live productive and fulfilling lives. It helps us perform at our best and be fully present. But what happens when you lack margin at home?

Just like at work, we have long to-do lists at home. From laundry to cooking, to cleaning and shuffling kids to activities. Not only can it be difficult to keep up with all of it, it can feel like you’re never actually resting when you should be.

Here’s the good news: you can end overwhelm at home by applying the same principles you do at work. By doing so, you’ll create more margin for the people and activities that matter most. Here are 3 steps to doing just that:

Determine what matters most at home. We’re often in a reactive state, trying to put out one fire after the next without thinking about where we add the most value. Our personal resources, energy, and attention are finite. So instead of trying to get everything done, ask yourself what the most important things are that will have the most impact. And how will those things impact the people around you, like your children, spouse, or roommate?Filter your household activities to see where you add the most value. What do you enjoy doing that you’re good at and also needs to get done? It might be meal planning and cooking, lawn maintenance, or cleaning. Try making a list of all the tasks on the docket, paying careful attention to the ones where you add the most value.Eliminate, automate, or delegate the rest. Looking at your list from the previous step, eliminate anything you neither enjoy nor are good at. It could be that those tasks are ones your spouse or partner actually enjoys and are skilled at. Or, maybe you find another way to get them off your list. If managing your budget is a headache, consider automating some of it. You can set up auto-pay for different bills or use budgeting apps with reminders. If groceries are a pain point, consider using a shopping service. If you can swing it, it’s a small price for the amount of time you get back. Or, try a menu-planning service that sends recipes and the ingredients to make them. Personally, I hate yard work, so we’ve hired a service that comes and takes care of everything. That once would have taken me hours on a Saturday, but now, I get to enjoy my weekend instead.

It’s easy to feel guilty and to think that, because it’s your home, you should be the one doing everything. If you take that approach, you’ll go back into your workweek just as exhausted as when you left. By applying the suggestions above, you can do the things you enjoy, have margin to spend time with the people you love, and get the rest you need.

What needs to get done at home that you truly love and are good at? What tasks can you eliminate, automate, or delegate?

How to Integrate Encouragement into Your Leadership

You work with a great team. You’re all running hard toward your goals, but lately people seem to be flagging. As a leader, you want to step up to reinvigorate them. But you don’t want it to be empty fluff or surface-level rah-rahs. Are there concrete ways to encourage your team effectively?

3 Benefits of Team Training

Whether you’re a business owner or work for a company, attracting top talent can be a real challenge. But once you find the right people, how do you proactively equip them to do their best work? And how do you retain them as time passes? This can be an even greater challenge. The best thing you can do is invest in the development of your team.

Unfortunately, many leaders view training as a waste of time and resources that ultimately detracts from business goals. I believe the opposite is true. When you invest in your team, you invest in your business. Here are 3 ways providing ongoing training for your employees benefits you—and them:

Training increases morale. The more you equip your employees, the more their confidence will grow. Increased confidence leads to increased morale. Everyone has probably felt like they don’t have what it takes to get the job done, or felt the imposter syndrome creep in with every new challenge. But the more you provide training for your employees, the more those feelings will subside. They’ll feel empowered to execute and advance the company goals—and be happy while doing it.Training reduces turnover. Without a clear and compelling company vision, employees will become confused and leave. The same is true with training. Training ensures continued alignment between a company and its employees. Ultimately, it makes employees feel more connected to the company’s vision and where things are going. No one wants to remain stagnant. Growth is part of who we are. If employees don’t feel like there are adequate opportunities to develop their current skills and learn new ones, they’re likely to leave for a place that does offer those opportunities. By training your employees, you’re communicating to them that you’re interested in their development and you’re in it for the long haul.Training advances company growth. Continued employee training is necessary to further the company’s goals. As you develop new products, you’ll want to ensure your employees can sell, market, or support those products. Training helps make that happen. It improves your team’s skills and job performance, which directly impacts company performance. And you’ll be able to trace the efficacy of your training to how well your products perform and move you forward.

Training often involves an opportunity cost. There’s a tradeoff between the training itself and the time spent participating instead of focusing on high-leverage work. But it comes down to taking the longer view. The time spent in training now becomes a game-changer later, as your team hones their skills, grows in confidence, and ultimately pushes the company forward. Trust me, the time you invest in your employees will pay back dividends.

The Key to a More Productive Day

A lot of us start our days with a laundry list of things to do. It’s not uncommon for people to have 10, 20, or even more items on their to-do list. Where do you even start? Even if you accomplish five or six things, it’s easy to feel like a failure at the end of the day because of all the things that didn’t get done. It’s a recipe for exhaustion.

How do you stop the chronic overwork and banish the overwhelm? Narrow your task list. That’s why I recommend starting with one thing: establishing a Daily Big 3.

Your Daily Big 3 are the top three outcomes you need to accomplish for the day to make progress on your weekly and long-term goals and projects. If you lose sight of them, your day will be swamped by things that seem urgent to someone else but not necessarily important to you. You’ll never get anything done that way.

Listing out only three tasks for an entire workday may seem like a cop-out, but it requires more effort and discipline to look at the twelve things you could do and zero in on the three things that really matter. With this newfound clarity on what is and isn’t the priority, your days will no longer feel held captive by an unreasonably long list of tasks.

Narrowing your focus doesn’t just boost your sense of progress—it also fuels better results. When you have a list of two dozen tasks, you might stay busy all day, but that doesn’t mean the important work is getting done or that you were necessarily productive. In contrast, completing three high-leverage tasks every day has a monumental impact. Because when you focus on less, you accomplish more by directing your energy toward what truly deserves your attention. It means you’re actively moving the most important things along.

You can keep your Daily Big 3 on a sticky note, in a notebook, or on the Day Pages of the Full Focus Planner. Wherever you keep your Daily Big 3, let yourself focus only on what really deserves priority and pushes your goals forward.

When you do this every day, you’ll feel a marked sense of control. Work will no longer be overwhelming, but peaceful. Instead of ending your day feeling defeated, you’ll feel like you won the day.

What can you eliminate or delegate from your task list so you can focus on your daily top three priorities?

The Cure for Burnout

Most achievers think the answer to their productivity struggle is to hustle harder and faster. But that only leads to burnout. And in the modern workforce, burnout is a constant threat. We put leaders who never rest on a pedestal. We wear busyness like a badge of honor. Technology keeps us continually connected and always on the alert for the next fire to put out. But we can only float down the hustle river for so long before hitting the rocks.

The costs of burnout culture are so devastating and the causes so deeply ingrained that the cure might seem out of reach. Thankfully, that’s just not true. There is a lifeline we can reach for. It’s actually quite simple: work less and rejuvenate more. I know that sounds easier said than done. But it really is doable. Trust me, I’ve been there.

Here are 5 steps to get you back to your best:

Rest. It’s built into our bodies: we’re made to shut down for a third of the day. But if we cheat ourselves out of this innate need, we’re signing up for burnout. You can practice rest daily through getting adequate sleep, weekly by taking a couple days off, and annually by going on vacations.Reflection. We live in a busy and noisy world that clamors for our attention. That’s why it’s essential that we regularly pull away to a quiet place to pause and reflect. Whether it’s for 5 to 10 minutes or 30, this practice is applicable no matter what season of life you’re in. Slowing down to center yourself and reflect on your life’s direction helps ensure life isn’t slipping past you.Relationships. We’re made to live in relationship with other people. But in a world of social media and fake connections, we have to be intentional about building time for the people in our lives. Quality in-person relationships with others opens up a world of learning, encouragement, accountability, and connection.Refreshment. To be productive, focused, and energetic, we need adequate fuel. Specifically, we need to keep our blood sugar regulated. Because when it spikes and drops, we lose energy and struggle to focus. Don’t skip meals, and be mindful of what you eat. Consume foods that will contribute to your productivity and be good, clean fuel—not stuff that’ll bog you down the rest of the day.Recreation. We need to be restored, not just in mind and emotion, but also in body. When we slow down and create space for ourselves to pursue leisure activities, we engage life as a whole person. For recreation to be truly effective, the activities you choose must be different from what you do professionally. Developing other interests and hobbies gives the rest of your brain the break it needs.

The cure for burnout is available now. Whether you take up a new hobby like painting, begin getting adequate sleep, or spend time resting with friends this upcoming weekend, you can begin to move your life away from the overwork addiction. What action will you take today to bounce back from burnout?

4 Questions You Should Ask Your Direct Reports Weekly

Leaders are generally great solo achievers, but they often get one-on-one check-ins wrong. Either they give too little attention to their direct reports or smother them with communications and requests for updates. It’s challenging to find the appropriate level and cadence of interaction.

People need an individual place to connect with their direct supervisor, so it’s crucial to get these meetings right. At Michael Hyatt & Company, we allow 30 minutes to an hour for one-on-ones, depending on the nature of the role. One-on-one meetings are ultimately about accountability and alignment. They’re a time for leaders to give focused time to their direct reports, discuss ongoing or new projects, and establish expectations moving forward.

To ensure a successful one-on-one, structure your check-ins around these 4 questions:

What updates do you have for me? As a leader, you need to keep your ear close to the ground. You’ll want to know what’s going on in the business and how progress is being made toward goals. Since your direct reports are on the front lines, they’ll be your access point for that.What decisions do you need me to make? This is key, because you’re likely the person your direct report is waiting on. Their progress on goals and projects might be impeded by your delay in decision-making. You might not even realize there are decisions to be made, so weekly check-ins give your direct reports focused access to you to keep things moving.What progress have you made on your quarterly milestones? If you have annual goals, you probably have quarterly milestones you’re aiming for. To ensure they’re met, you need to establish a level of accountability toward their completion. If someone within your team or organization is struggling, you’ll want to know before they start falling behind. This gives you and your direct report a better chance of keeping up and hitting the deliverables.What problems are blocking your progress? This is an incredibly important question, because your people have problems. Those problems might be you, a lack of margin they’re experiencing, someone else in the company, or circumstances outside of and unrelated to work. Not only can this be a catch-all question, it demonstrates you’re in their corner and will come alongside them to solve problems.

Using these 4 questions to structure your weekly one-on-ones, you can move from reacting to problems to proactively resourcing your team for success. What questions will you use to guide weekly check-ins with your direct reports?

3 Key Benefits of Daily Rituals

If you’re like most people, your days are filled with demands, distractions, and interruptions. It can be frustrating wading through the never-ending tasks on the table. If you’re to make any headway, you can’t give your attention to everyone and everything. You have to identify exactly what needs your attention and what doesn’t.

One way to handle daily demands without much effort is automation, which is simply a way to put some things on autopilot. But that begins with putting yourself on autopilot, and you can do that through rituals.

A ritual is any practice or pattern of behavior regularly performed in a set manner. For example, most people don’t spend time thinking about how to take a shower. They simply turn on the water, and their subconscious takes over. That frees their mind to think about other things, which is one of the reasons we often come up with our best ideas in the shower. Another example is the athlete’s pre-game ritual. This is a routine they go through to focus and prepare for peak performance.

Rituals set you up to win in all your life domains. Here are 3 key benefits that come from establishing daily rituals:

Increased creativity. It’s natural to think that having a set routine hinders creativity, but the opposite is true. It takes a lot of intentionality to create a good ritual, but once you do, that series of actions runs automatically. You don’t have to think about it again. Instead, you’re free to turn your creative energy to something else.Speedier work. Once you establish a ritual, you know exactly what comes after each action. That makes you much more efficient at that particular set of tasks. Take brushing your teeth. You don’t have to make a decision about what to do after you brush your teeth. You automatically reach for the floss or mouthwash.Mistake prevention. When you set up a ritual, you have to anticipate the different ways something could go wrong. Then you plan around them. Rituals become self-correcting over time.

You can build a ritual around any repeated task in your life. When you do that, you take the brainwork out of routine tasks and free yourself to focus on more important things. And here’s the thing: most of us already have rituals of some kind in our lives. We just have to identify and be intentional about them.

Are you aware of the rituals in your day to day? How can you improve them to maximize your focus on your most important tasks?

3 Ways to Prepare for a Good Night’s Sleep

The health effects of neglecting sleep are no secret. Cardiovascular disease, elevated stress hormones, and reduced immunity—just to name a few. Less noted is the effect skimping on sleep has on our work performance. Have you ever had one of those days when you’re just dragging, when no amount of coffee helps and you can’t seem to get out of the fog and focus on anything you need to get done? Productivity suffers tremendously when we’re not adequately rested.

How many hours of sleep do we need? A third of Americans get fewer than 6 hours of sleep a night. Even that number might be skewed, since we tend to count time in bed, not time actually sleeping. Seven hours seems to be the necessary minimum, but 8 hours is ideal.

Getting into the habit of a good night’s sleep can be tough, though, especially if you’re used to staying up late watching TV or scrolling on your phone. Here are 3 things you can do to overcome those temptations and make sure you get a good night’s sleep:

Prepare the environment. We pick up cues biologically from our environment, so make sure the room is dark. That cues us to go to sleep. A cool room also helps. It’s a personal choice, but some experts say the ideal sleeping temperature is between 60 and 67 degrees. Consider running a fan or sound machine, too. White noise masks outside noise and helps us fall asleep—and stay asleep.Prepare yourself. Avoid caffeinated drinks in the evening. When I was younger, I could drink coffee anytime—even after dinner—and it didn’t affect me. No more. Caffeine is a psychoactive stimulant that works against you at nightime. It might take some experimenting, but find and stick to a cutoff time that works for you. Also, eliminate negative input. It might mean not taking work calls in the evening, avoiding the news, or staying off social media. Try putting your phone on Do Not Disturb, and don’t look at it an hour before bedtime.Go to bed on time. This might be the biggest struggle, but we have to be strict with ourselves. There’s always one more thing to do, even if it’s just one more episode of a show, or another few pages in a book. We have to resist the urge if we want to be on our game the following day.

If we’re not smart about our sleep, we can undercut our productivity, efficiency, and worse, our health. Instead of framing sleep as a “nice to have,” we need to think of it as the foundation of meaningful, productive work and life. How can you set yourself up for a good night’s sleep?

Why You Need White Space

Many of us struggle to disconnect from our work. Even if we manage it, it’s uncomfortable. Because of our always-on culture, we may even feel guilty putting a hard stop on our work day and letting emails go unanswered until the following day. As much as we try, hitting the pause button is hard.

The cult of overwork suggests we should always be busy achieving something. But that emphasis on overwork means we miss the benefits of not working. Having a rhythm of work and rest helps us be our best at home and at work. Because when we take time away from work, we make room for white space in our lives—time for relationships, hobbies, or exercise—and our minds get to wander. This may seem counterintuitive for productivity, but it ultimately pays tremendous dividends.

Do you ever notice some of your best ideas happen while you’re showering or driving somewhere familiar? Strong connections exist between mind wandering and creative thinking, lateral problem solving, and idea generation. Adam Waytz, psychologist and Kellogg School of Management associate professor, says, “When we let our minds drift away from work, we return to our tasks capable of tackling them in more inventive, creative ways.”

These creative breakthroughs can happen through shorter breaks, too. For example, grabbing a cup of coffee, stepping out for a walk, or fixing lunch. Those moments of pause might be the exact reprieve and creative spark you need to complete the task you’re stumped on. Changing out the laundry could actually help you compose the rest of the email or Slack message you’re in the middle of. The key is doing something that removes you from your work context and plunges you into something entirely different. It could be swimming, gardening, or cooking. Or fishing, golfing, or doing a puzzle.

The cult of overwork says if we’re not working, work isn’t getting done. But that’s a myth. The problem with overworking is that we marginalize or completely miss periods of profitable pause, allowing our minds to wander in creative directions. Having that white space for rejuvenation contributes to, rather than detracts from, our work.

Whatever activity you fill your white space with, innovations, solutions, products, even a whole company can come from periods of pause, as you allow ideas to percolate away from work. Where is the white space in your schedule? What can you fill it with, so your mind is given free rein to wander, imagine, innovate, and dream?