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March 5 - March 11, 2020
If you keep playing without any time-outs, your game starts to slip.
it’s our routine (or lack thereof), our capacity to work proactively rather than reactively, and our ability to systematically optimize our work habits over time that determine our ability to make ideas happen.
The biggest problem with any routine is that you do it without realizing it.
The biggest problem we face today is “reactionary workflow.”
Are “you” saying this is an individual problem, and not a cultural one? Recationary workflow... I’m intrigued to get away form that.
audit the way you work and own the responsibility of fixing it.
You’ll likely find that your work habits have drifted to accommodate your surroundings rather than to meet your preferences.
Work habits determined by surroundings? Is that not an organizations culture? How do you change this without changing the culture of the organization?
the requests of others, leaving no room for the work you consider important.
But it’s better to disappoint a few people over small things, than to surrender your dreams for an empty inbox. Otherwise you’re sacrificing your potential for the illusion of professionalism.
You’ll know it’s effective when your daily schedule starts to feel less like a mundane routine and more like a creative ritual.
But I don’t have a daily routine. Work feels too seasonal and sporadically inconsistent.
do the work
What does “do the work” look like for inconsistent checkbox type work?
The second key finding is that our bodies follow what are known as ultradian rhythms—ninety-minute periods at the end of which we reach the limits of our capacity to work at the highest level. It’s possible to push ourselves past ninety minutes by relying on coffee, or sugar, or by summoning our own stress hormones, but when we do so we’re overriding our physiological need for intermittent rest and renewal.
He leaves his smartphone at his desk to avoid temptation.
arrived at work already feeling tired,
Zeke now begins his days by tackling his most important task first. He focuses for sixty to ninety minutes on the challenge he believes has the greatest likelihood of adding long-term value. “These are the things that I should be doing as a leader,” he says. “I just didn’t get around to them before.”
Because of this lack of clear metrics, we’ve sunk into a productivity morass, where the focus in adopting a new administrative practice is on short-term convenience rather than long-term value.
This is the essence of our convenience addiction: because we lack clear metrics for these behaviors’ costs, we cannot weigh their pros against their cons. Therefore, the evidence of any benefit is enough to justify continued use. Though group e-mails might be costing a company thousands of man-hours of value-producing deep thought, this mind-set argues, if such e-mails occasionally make an employee’s life easier, they should be allowed to continue.
Convenience addiction... interesting concept. Easy to ignore engagement to consider opportunity cost in the face of convenience.
We are left then to consider individual habits that will preserve our ability to apply undistracted focus to valuable problems while still making us available enough that we do not annoy our coworkers.
What are the “valuable problems” of Crier Creek?
The key twist is that you mark this time on your calendar like any other meeting. This is especially important if your organization uses a shared calendar system.
What does my manager think of this idea??
Blocking off time for uninterrupted focus, however, is only half the battle. The other half is resisting distraction. This means: no e-mail, no Internet, and no phone.
The key, however, is to never allow distraction.
there is really no such thing as multitasking, only task switching—
It can feel as though we’re super-efficiently doing two or more things at once. But in fact we’re just doing one thing, then another, then back again, with significantly less skill and accuracy than if we had simply focused on one job at a time.
The very act of resisting temptations eats up concentration and leaves you mentally depleted.
But remain on guard from one temptation to the next. Constant vigilance!!
strive to remove them entirely
This applies to resisting sin too I think.
And tasks that take, say, fifty hours—which could be how long it takes you to complete a meaningful creative task—don’t naturally get represented in that calendar.
the environment in which we make decisions tends to have a lot to do with what our final decisions are.
the world around us,
is all about trying to tempt us to do things right now.
The basic combination of these three things: (1) that the world around us tries to tempt us; (2) that we listen to the world around us (e.g., choice architecture); and (3) that we don’t deal very well with temptation… if you put all of those things together, you have a recipe for disaster.
waiting for everything to be perfect is almost always an exercise in procrastination.
we must learn to be creative amidst chaos.
develop a seemingly unrelated habit,
creativity and efficiency can be enhanced over the course of a workday when workers alternate between mindful and mindless activities. To relate it to physical exercise, the human mind is better suited for running sprints than marathons.
Keeping track of when energy levels rise and fall
These in-between moments used to be opportunities to pause and reflect.
preserving pockets of time to unplug—perhaps a couple of hours in the morning a few days a week—can be transformative.
The greatest value of any experience is often found in its seams. The primary benefits of a conference often have nothing to do with what happens onstage.
Remember meeting John Hamilton... I don’t remember anything about CCCA that year, other than running with Matt Lance.
Become more aware of the insecurity that pulls you away from the present. You cannot imagine what will be if you are constantly concerned with what already is.
Nothing should resonate more loudly than your own intuition.
You are the steward of your own potential.
Why
approach e-mail and social media mindfully?
The reason is that e-mail has become our primary input/output mechanism for conversation, ideas, reminders, information, events, video, images, and documents. In our physical absence, it is a digital representation of us, a permanent location for the rest of the working world to drop their needs at our feet.
The bottleneck occurs because our digital selves—you@gmail.com—can handle far more input than our physical selves.
I want to ensure that the time spent with my e-mail adds up to something—that it helps me achieve more.
KNOW YOUR COMPLEX GOALS
Your inbox is a treasure trove of possibilities. To a creative mind, that’s very enticing.
It’s easy for an optimist to keep fifty, a hundred, or even a thousand e-mails hovering in their inbox in the hopes that, someday soon, they’ll get a chance to give each opportunity the precious time that it deserves. But guess what? That’s never gonna happen.
The most important rule in achieving your goals via your inbox is that distracting opportunities have to die for y...
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If not, or if you’re not sure, decline graciously and live to fight another day.
