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Most Thursday mornings you’ll find me in a co-working session with members of the Productive Flourishing Academy.
Part of the routine in our coworking sessions is to start off with a word pulled from a deck of motivational cards. My friend, the group leader, pulls the card, and the idea is to use the word that emerges to create alignment or a point of focus throughout your day.
When my turn came, she pulled the word “Relaxation”.
Ummm… no.
“I have a mountain of tasks ahead of me and I don’t have time to relax today,” was my instant reaction.
Luckily, I have my own set of this particular card deck, so before diving into the task I had planned (which ended up turning into this piece of writing) I decided to pull a new card. Take that, universe!
So what card did I pull?
“Risk.”
Well-played, universe. Well-played.
What am I supposed to do with these mixed messages? These two words — that are now at the forefront of my mind — seem to be at odds with one another.
As I moved into the work I had planned to do during this co-working session (namely a speech I had to give the following week for Toastmasters, a public speaking and leadership club I’m a part of in NYC), I couldn’t get these two words out of my head.
These ideas, risk and relaxation, don’t seem to fit together. More than that, they seem to be on opposite sides of the spectrum.
When I heard the word relaxation, what came to mind was an extreme state of rest, inaction, becoming sloth-like.
To enter a relaxed state is something too often we feel we need to earn. I’m allowed to just relax? Without doing anything or accomplishing anything first?
So when my friend pulled that card for me, I rebelled. Because I have a too-long list of things that need to get done (yep, violating the 5 Projects Rule) before I can even think about allowing myself to relax. Calm will have to wait.
I recognize this mentality runs counter to a lot of what has been written about here at PF, including pieces I myself have written. It just goes to show, we’re all in a constant state of learning and unlearning.
Still, relaxation is a self-care practice — and a necessity — we can all get behind. But risk? Risk seems to imply anything but rest and relaxation, and seems, well, downright dangerous.
Risk implies action, making a change, getting uncomfortable, and putting yourself in a position to fail (the horror!).
It’s inevitably scary to take a step in a new direction. Our minds and bodies perceive this newness as danger and set off all sorts of alarms to try to get us to do anything but this risky behavior — fight, flight, or freeze.
Taking action, no matter how big or small, is inherently risky.
But what happens if I put these two words together? What if relaxation didn’t need to mean a full and complete stop to any activity, but instead it could mean an easing in?
And what if risk didn’t require actual danger but simply meant trying something new? What if it was just about easing into the discomfort of putting myself in a slightly different position than yesterday?
And as I was thinking all these thinks, and most definitely not writing my Toastmasters speech, it dawned on me that the exact combination of these themes — getting more comfortable (relaxation) with being uncomfortable (risk) — is one that continues to show up in my life.
A recent example: I’ve been starting to get back into writing. More specifically, I’m starting to share my writing more frequently. Risk.
I’m leaning more and more into my instinct, and how it relates to both writing and sharing; this article is an example. Relaxation.
Ease can be about letting go. Letting go of expectations, of perfectionism, of the outcome. And that is inherently risky. Where are you holding on too tight? What small action can you take today to move yourself closer to where you want to be?
The post Relaxing Into Risk appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
This morning, I realized how much of my current suffering is grieving the lost time from when Dad passed about a year ago. I had already incurred enough distraction and time debt before that, but Dad’s passing pushed me over the edge. This was also about the time Cory exited the team. We’d brought him on to help with Momentum growth, and with his departure, it left me with two big growth projects to juggle — and I couldn’t push the book forward and grow Momentum at the same time.
The residue of those losses lingered on everything. I hadn’t seen the residue because it’s not about the losses themselves, it’s about the time debt and tough choices they created in the midst of those two major projects.
In a beautiful irony, it was reading Michelle Varghoose’s reflection about how Start Finishing helped her that helped me see what was going on with my own journey. She wrote that letting go of projects as part of the life projects exercise freed her to focus on the projects that really mattered. In a LinkedIn comment on Isabeau Iqbal’s post, I mentioned that the underrated gift of getting to good enough is the freedom it brings.
Both threads were about the freedom and peace that comes from letting projects go.
This morning, I realized that it wasn’t the projects that I needed to let go of, but my story that I could do anything about being behind and recovering the lost time since Dad’s passing. I’ve been doing the best I can every day to do the essentials, reduce the scope of the business, and slowly reabsorb the rest of the work that’s come back to me. Most importantly, I feel like I’m doing all this in an integrous way and asking for help and grace from teammates in ways I never would have before.
Lost time can’t be found; our best is all we can do. Sometimes, our best is not enough to catch everything that’s coming our way with the time, energy, and attention we have in the moment.
Those are the breaks and are the occasional pains of being human. We can’t change those breaks and pains, but we can change the suffering we add to the pain.
And, by ‘we’, I mean ‘I’. And, if this is hitting you in the feels, I mean ‘you’.
I wrote in Start Finishing that to trade up, you have to let go. In that context, I meant trading up to better projects. In this post, I’m taking a broader perspective on trading up.
Trading up to freedom and peace is even better than trading up to better projects. It’s easier for most people to entertain trading up projects because projects = doing = contributing = being valuable = deserving (love, respect, pleasure, etc.). Choosing freedom and peace is harder because it makes you center yourself and your needs. (Reminder: you and your needs matter, regardless of the doing you’re doing.)
I’ll leave you with three questions:
Life presents us with enough to carry all on its own. Careful that you don’t add more to it than needed. There’s an important person who has to carry that additional, needless burden.
The post What Do You Need To Let Go Of? appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
Post #5 in our symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River, from Dr Giulia Carabelli. Giulia is a lecturer in Sociology and Social Theory in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. She is interested in affect theory, nonhuman agencies, and social justice. Her current research project, Care for Plants, explores the shaping of affective and intimate relationships between humans and houseplants during the Covid-19 pandemic.
There are three protagonists in The Ideal River: the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo. We meet them at different times in history when they become crucial agents in the (re)making of international orders. These three rivers illustrate different yet analogous processes of intervention aimed at domesticating what escapes human control (nature) to establish order as a matter of “progress”. As Yao argues, the taming of rivers exemplifies the “fulfilment of the Enlightenment promise that humanity stood together as masters over nature”, which is rooted in an unquestioned “optimism toward international progress” (186). The Rhine is the “internal European highway”, the Danube “the connecting river from Europe to the near periphery” and the Congo “the imperial river of commerce” (10). From the outset, the book sets expectations for nonhuman actors to take centre-stage in the recounting of history and to reveal their obscured roles in the development of global (human) politics. My reflections thus aim to discuss how the book foregrounds nonhuman agencies and to advance an argument for centring care and love to appreciate the potentially disrupting roles of rivers in reshaping political imaginaries, which become more and more urgent as that optimism towards human control flails.
1. The image of the river
I start from the cover of this book; an image taken by NASA/USGS Landsat 8 depicting the Mackenzie River in Canada. From above, this river is rendered through solid shades of blues, browns, and greens. This river does not flow. Similarly, when we imagine rivers on a two-dimensional map, they appear as homogeneous streams, whose ability to connect and serve human settlements we value. Such rivers become boundaries, obstacles, or opportunities to facilitate the movement of people, goods and capital, while ignoring their much more complex life as eco-systems in a constant process of change. These static representations of rivers, so instrumental to human life and its “progress”, become protagonists of the historical conferences discussed in the book. These rivers are ideals of what a river can become when understood as precious, yet disposable, resource.
Rivers on maps are what humans have long attempted to tame, because, as Yao discusses, to exercise control over nature ultimately proves, and provides, human progress. It drives and tests advancement in technology whilst gratifying the assertion of moral superiority. Clearly, this perspective results from thinking “human” and “nature” as dramatically different whereby the former is always standing above the ‘Other’; and to tame the Other for the sake of progress. The history of global politics, as shown vividly in this book, can be framed as the history of taming rivers. This is also the history of human faith in science and technology as the desperate attempt to prove that rationality is what sets us above all other species. It is the history of “transform[ing] irrational nature and society into economically productive and morally progressive units of governance” (200).
2. To tame and to care
Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s metaphor of European modernity as the impulse to “weed the social garden”, which engenders modern imperialism, scientific racism, and the Holocaust (31), Yao draws parallels between the taming of rivers and the taming of nature in the garden (Bauman 1989). The gardener becomes the emblematic figure of modernity – the one who transforms the wild into the familiar through a process of weeding. Crucially, to tame nature in the garden means to organise space according to a specific aesthetic that builds order by planting, pruning, or extirpating plants. What drives the gardener is the desire to make plants work and to become more efficient and productive. Yet, as many of us would know from having gardens or houseplants, it is by tending plants that we discover what the garden is, and what makes a garden a garden: a space we cannot fully control but that can surprise and mesmerise us.
The activity of caring for plants enables us to develop intimate relationships that are easily understandable through love. This is a love for disorder. It is a love that grows by letting go of control and accepting that the making of a garden is a collective activity where plans are shared and built with the plants. The garden is a story of compromise, conflict and love. The garden shapes us as gardeners, as much as we shape the garden to reflect our inner desires.
So how does it relate to the river?
3. On Love
What happens when we care for the plants in the garden, and to the life in the river, is that we appreciate them differently because we develop intimate and affective forms of attachment to them, which transform these nonhuman beings from objects to interlocutors. And here, I wish to focus on the tensions that love generates – between the love for order that comes from domination and the acceptance of disorder spurred by another kind of love.
As Yao highlights in her introduction, “to tame nature has not been confined to rivers and forests but also extends to ‘untamed’ elements in human society – indeed, to civilize the savage beyond the pale has long been a central aim and justification for colonial and imperial practices” (7).
I wish to connect this point on taming as a matter of civilisation with another argument made by Carolyn Ureña (2020), for instance, about colonialism and love – the coloniser/ the missionary are bound by the love for the uncivilised and it is their love that moves them to re-shape Indigenous lives to become more modern/ more rational/ more right. Thus, she concludes, love needs to be decolonised for love to be freed from desires of control. If we understand love as an affect that shapes relationality, the revolutionary potential of love exists in the possibility of love to make us realise that we cannot be in control.
To appreciate the river could become an act of love only if we switched our goals towards observing, listening, and learning rather than projecting, assuming, and directing.
If the modern love for rivers reflected the love for progress and order, which translated into a desire to tame them, how can we love rivers otherwise? Or, what makes a river a river?
4. Who is the river?
If only we immersed ourselves in the river, if we entered the water, we could see the plants, the animals, the limestone, soil runoff, sediments, minerals, and algae that colour rivers, making them blue or green or yellow and brown. The river is always changing; it moves, it transforms, and it does so relationally to the multiple human and nonhuman beings that coexist within its eco-system. Thus, to tame rivers can but be a delusion. We can only tame rivers when they are deprived of their life on flat maps.
Immersed in the river, we can create new connections that are affective, visceral, and potentially transformative. What, then, does the international look like while immersed in the river? What if, instead of drawing on rationality and science to transform the river into the ideal river, which means to cure the river from “its uselessness, laziness, and waste” (207), we could engage with the river by listening to what the river can teach us.
The book has started answering this question by accounting for Indigenous populations living with the rivers who nurture different relationships with their non-human kins. For example, for Native Americans activists at Standing Rock, the river is a nonhuman relative, who cannot be sold (214). Yao warns us from the dangers of essentialising Indigenousness “unfairly making them the bearers of responsibility for saving the destructive modern world from itself” (215), yet re-valorising Indigenous knowledge allows for important interventions in policy making. For example, the rights given to nature in Ecuador and Bolivia or those granted to the Whanganui River in New Zealand or the Ganges and the Yamuna in India (215). Although granting rights did not, especially in the case of Ecuador and Bolivia, stop extractive practices (Valladares and Boelens 2017), it remains a space where to start a conversation about “unlearn[ing] the ideational legacies of colonialism” (216) and the challenges faced when encountering the state in the process.
Crucially, the desire to tame rivers went along with the process of subjugating communities that stood by and with rivers – the “unimagined communities” that stand “on the way to progress” (208) . As the examples of the Narmada project in India and the Aswan Dam in Egypt illustrate, altering rivers destroy places “of cultural and spiritual importance and [the] communities that depend on them” (208). Yet, these colonising projects also serve as platforms to nurture river-human solidarity for mutual survival. Thus, rivers can become allies in resisting the violence of colonialism.
5. Conclusion
The nature we wish to tame is also the nature we come to love and desire. To tame nature becomes one with our love for an idealised form of nature that we wish to preserve and care for as a matter of ethics, and which becomes urgent at a time of environmental crisis.
Lesley Head (2016) discusses this as the paradox of the human in the Anthropocene;
“a time period defined by the activities and impacts of the human […] [and yet] a period that is now out of human control”. And for Head, the issue of climate catastrophe is emotional as we grief “our modern self, our view of the future as containing unlimited positive potential. We grieve a stable and pristine past” (Ojala 2017)
Thus, the importance of this book is not only in bringing attention to the historical contingencies that shaped human desires to tame rivers as part of the making of global orders. As Yao writes in the conclusion, the “climate crisis has highlighted [..] the catastrophic disconnect between the dream of Western modernity and the nightmare of ecological collapse”, which has been long in the making (219). Thus, the book should also be appreciated as a cautionary tale for imagining our future on this planet at a time when our society has become “disenchanted with the politics of climate change precisely because we are losing faith in the [promise of the] Enlightenment” (221). If we live in a time of change, one that brings more focused attention on the relational modes of worldmaking, we are then tasked with reflecting on what it means to engage with rivers, and by extension nonhuman actors, as political agents.
I conclude with a question: can our reflection on the international order ever account for the river as the river – without objectifying it but rather embracing the vitality of the river, its visions, needs and life?
disorderedguests
The second post in our symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River.
This one is from Dr. Cameron Harrington, an Assistant Professor in International Relations at the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. His research centres on the shifting contours of security in the Anthropocene, with a particular focus on the concept and practices of water security. His work has appeared in journals such as Millennium, Global Environmental Politics, Environment and Planning E, Critical Studies on Security, and Water International. He is the co-author of Security in the Anthropocene: Reflections on Safety and Care (2017, Transcript), and is a co-editor of Climate Security in the Anthropocene: Exploring the Approaches of United Nations Security Council Member-States (forthcoming 2023, Springer).
While studying at my alma mater, Western University, in Canada, I would frequently run into the same graffiti scribbled across bathrooms, classroom desks, library walls, and study spaces.
ERTW.
It wasn’t a secret code or the mark of an exclusive academic society. In fact, you could see it emblazoned on the back of t-shirts handed out to hundreds of freshman students every year.
Engineers Rule the World.
The idea that engineers – and by extension engineering – are, in fact, responsible for holding society together, is a powerful boast. It certainly helped young undergraduate engineering students construct an image of their studies as immensely important. While the rest of us spent our days studying the words of long-dead philosophers or burrowing deeper into arcane debates about “the international order,” these intrepid future engineers would learn to do the real work of building the world that we all inhabit. No engineers, no world.
I was reminded of this slogan – ERTW – as I read through Joanne Yao’s book, The Ideal River: how control of nature shaped the international order. Yao’s book is a richly detailed examination of the various imaginaries, schemes, and tools that propelled European efforts across the nineteenth century to tame – to engineer – nature. Yao argues that the desire to control nature reflected and refracted a larger modernist “faith in science and rationality to conquer the messiness of entwined social and natural worlds…” (pg. 36). This ability to control a wild and unpredictable nature was one key standard by which civilization could be judged. Her account focuses on the social and material construction of three specific rivers: the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo. Though each river was imagined uniquely, they all became embedded within a larger modernist political project of world-building. From these rivers emerged the first modern manifestations of what we now term international organizations.
This is, then, another story of Enlightenment-bred confidence in the ability to overcome nature’s “limits”.
Yet Yao’s nuanced account pushes further. She shows how geographical imaginaries of nature and civilization propelled Europeans and their allies to not only bend the rivers to their needs but also shaped the ideas of what a civilization’s needs were in the first place. The effects of this interplay are now deeply rooted within key IR concepts and institutions. They frame a dominant understanding of political purpose and state legitimacy as the fixing, controlling, and defending of territorial boundaries (cf. Ruggie 1993). The cases also show how a vision of political authority legitimated through the control of nature became universalized at the same moment it was dispersed unequally around the world through a hierarchical relationship between core and periphery. Yao’s archival research, which she combines with gothic literary criticism (yes, really), shows how imaginaries of the ideal river – wild entities tamed through science and engineering to serve human progress and economic development – drove the formation of the first modern international organizations. While Yao is careful not to draw a straight line from the 1815 Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine to the creation of the United Nations, the international agreements and Commissions which formed along these rivers do expand our understanding of the history of global governance. Yao concludes her book by connecting these stories to the contemporary shape of water security and ecological sustainability as objects of contemporary global governance.
This last point is perhaps the book’s most ambitious and compelling. Today, frequent alarms are raised about the perilous state of global water resources and the inherent risks to human, national, and international security which emanate from this. The dominant governance discourse surrounding water, despite a number of alternative interventions, continues to emphasise its potential as a driver of either conflict or cooperation in a world of worsening scarcity. We are frequently warned that water’s volatile mixture – its importance, scarcity, and its failure to respect political boundaries – means conflict will inevitably emerge. That, or humanity’s shared reliance on water can lead to the interdependent peace we’ve been promised again and again. All we need to do is get the right institutions in place or start valuing water properly. In both cases, water – whether it is to be fought over or shared via institutions, laws, and balanced economic valuation – is rendered as timeless, natural, and inert. There is an ontological stickiness to water and waterways which holds them as distinctly modern entities.
The concept of “modern water” has been developed by critical geographers over the last two decades. It explains how our contemporary understanding of what water is represents only one, albeit hegemonic, way of knowing and relating to water. According to Jamie Linton modern water is a “pure hydrologic process” (2014, 113), which has roots “originating in Western Europe and North America, and operating on a global scale by the later part of the 20th century” (2014, 112). Modern water is divorced from any social or ecological context, existing as a singular, pure resource that is available to be exploited.
Much of the recent western academic interest in the ontology of water can be traced back to an influential article published in 2000 by the science historian Christopher Hamlin. In it, Hamlin showed how this master narrative of modern water emerged at a specific time and place, namely in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. “Premodern waters” were diverse, heterogeneous entities which could never be found pure in nature. They displayed infinite “aspects of the histories of places” (Hamlin 2000, 315). One need not read deeply across classical and medieval history or religious texts before coming across references to the varied properties of different waters found in rivers, streams, mountains, wells, etc.
Two key events mark the emergence of modern water. The first came in the 1770s when work by scientists such as Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley showed that all waters were in fact derived from a single compound of oxygen and hydrogen. The second moment arose when John Snow famously discovered he could arrest the spread of cholera in London in 1855 by removing the handle of the water pump on Broad Street. In so doing, water became a simple substance, “whose most interesting quality was its pathogenic potential” (Hamlin 314).
These two moments alone are, of course, insufficient for explaining the shift to modern water and should be situated within the larger geohistorical context. Yet, in Europe by the end of the 19th century, the premodern idea that waters were many had clearly been supplanted by a new type of water: singular, knowable, manageable. This shift was propelled by a larger Enlightenment ethos that placed its faith in science to overcome a messy and irrational world. As Jeremy J. Schmidt describes it, “out went water sprites and multiple ontological kinds of water, and in came chemistry, physics, and engineering” (2017, 28).
The contours of this paradigm shift drive Yao’s narrative. She draws from James Scott’s seminal work, Seeing Like a State, to show how the emergence of the modern state arose through techniques that made irrational nature legible to new forms of governance. The Rhine, Danube, and the Congo rivers were each brought under the calculating eye of the state (and empire) through various bureaucratic and engineering practices. The engineers straightened the Rhine to improve its commercial potential. The geography of the Danube offered the opportunity to expand western European civilization to its near-periphery, taming the physical danger of flooding while also securing it from the moral dangers emanating from the distorted, semi-familiar frontiers to the east. Finally, European bureaucrats and diplomats thought it their moral duty to impose a colonial system of control over the Congo that would enable free navigation and trade. This depended upon infrastructural projects like ports, roads, and railways that would transform the Congo (and Africa) from a conceptually empty space into one bursting with European free trade and civilization. Together the cases show how water became modern and the modern state (of IR) became riverine.
While not using the concept explicitly, Yao’s book is a rich historical account of the formation of what critical geographers call hydrosocial territories. According to Boelens et al (2016) these are the spatially-bound, multi-scalar, socio-ecological networks of humans and water flows. The consolidation of a hydrosocial territory is mediated by a complex interplay between social imaginaries, political hierarchies, and technological infrastructure. Hydrosocial territories consolidate a particular order of things. In 19th Century Europe, they emerged from various techniques, including the deployment of specific geographical imaginaries and vast engineering projects to position and order humans, nature and thought within a global network of modern water. From this process emerges the early forms of global governance.
One of Yao’s key arguments is that this process of hydroterritorialization was deeply contingent upon the political activation of specific geographical imaginaries. This is because a river’s geography must be imagined before it can be governed.
Yet, at the risk of contradicting myself, the reliance on imaginaries is troublesome. Conceptually, imaginaries are often left underdeveloped and the power attributed to them overstated. They are relied upon to account for an awful lot. This may be the point. The sociologist Johann Arnason (2022, 13) has called them “a crossroads concept”, able to tie together and anchor a variety of metaphysical and political concerns. Charles Taylor famously developed the idea of social imaginaries as an answer to the problem of explaining “that largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of the whole situation, within which particular features of our world show up for us in the sense they have” (2007, 173).
Imaginaries are increasingly used by IR and politics scholars to explain diverse phenomena and across vastly different contexts. Their power and influence almost limitless, imaginaries can travel back and forth across time and space, moving in almost quantum-like ways to mimic or create different realities. The Rhine was imagined as economic highway, the Congo as an abstract, empty colonial space. Yet, these seemingly vastly different imaginaries led to similar political projects and the first attempts at establishing modern international organizations. If imaginaries truly play such a decisive role in the political processes of institutionalization, then more explicit theoretical and empirical work is needed that shows how and why. Or, put another way, a key puzzle presented in The Ideal River is how the endless creative potential of the imagination was so narrowly expressed through political, institutional, and infrastructural expressions of modernity. Thus, further work might explore how the imaginaries themselves are transformed, oppressed, modified, or contested through the genesis of specific political and material projects.
As it stands, in all cases and across time periods, imaginaries make everything possible, including every subsequent practice and process. Their malleability is alluring but that same flexibility risks conflating a number of other dimensions of social and political life. They all get ensnared in the net of the imaginary. Do these engineers, artists, policymakers, and colonial bureaucrats always, necessarily require a geographical imaginary to get on with other things like practice, habit, prejudice? There is a distinct risk from scholars fixing an ontological permanence to imaginaries as a constitutive energy and thereby inadvertently reinscribing the same totalizing logics of modernity.
Near the end of The Ideal River, Yao (207) quotes the German engineer, Otto Intze, who proclaimed in 1902 that the key to taming a river was presenting “water with a battleground so chosen that the human comes out the victor.” The battleground would be large dams, built to discipline the river and physically bend it to the will of civilization. From this martial framing sprung the still-dominant approach to modern water management. All the dams subsequently constructed around the world thus represent the apotheosis of modern water and its conquering of alternative water ontologies. These hydraulic infrastructures are the “technological shrines” (Kaika, 2006) to modernisation and scientific progress. But one need not gaze upon these massive infrastructural shrines to understand the creation, spread, and influence of modern water. Instead, you need only look at the scribblings on creaky desk at the back of a university classroom.
ERTW.
They say that no river ever really ends. The engineers probably agree.
Bibliography:
Adams, S., & Arnason, J. P. (2022). A Conversation on Social Imaginaries: Culture, Power, Action, World. International Journal of Social Imaginaries, 1(1), 129-147.
Boelens, R., Hoogesteger, J., Swyngedouw, E., Vos, J., & Wester, P. (2016). Hydrosocial territories: a political ecology perspective. Water international, 41(1), 1-14.
Hamlin, C. (2000). ‘Waters’ or ‘Water’?—master narratives in water history and their implications for contemporary water policy. Water Policy, 2(4-5), 313-325.
Kaika, M. (2006). Dams as symbols of modernization: The urbanization of nature between geographical imagination and materiality. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96(2), 276-301.
Ruggie, J. G. (1993). Territoriality and beyond: problematizing modernity in international relations. International organization, 47(1), 139-174.
Schmidt, J.J. (2017). Water: abundance, scarcity, and security in the age of humanity. New York University Press
Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Harvard University Press.
disorderedguests
As much as we tell ourselves that multitasking is productive, we know at an intuitive level that it’s not. The lie of multitasking is that, if we just do it well enough, we’ll be able to get All.The.Things done.
Unitasking forces us to accept that we’re not going to get to all the things we want or feel we need to. That’s a hard truth that we’d rather negotiate with than accept.
But even after we accept that truth, there’s another hard part about unitasking: holding boundaries.
This is coming up for me because, as I type, I’m on a family trip. After spending too much of too many days working during family trips in the past, this time, I decided that I’m not doing that anymore. I neither work well nor am the son/brother/husband I want to be. Nobody and nothing gets what’s needed, including myself.
Because of the nature of my work, being present with family includes not having devices on me. Yes, not having devices on me is about not mindlessly grazing and checking email and Slack, but even more important is it keeps me from starting to write or getting wrapped up in an idea so much that I’m half-hearing conversations and half-present — which means not being present.
To my left, Angela, my sister-in-law, and my mother-law are getting pedicures. They are oblivious to my presence because they’re in pedicure bliss getting their toenails painted, something which I opted out of, which gave me this little bit of focused space and time to write today’s Pulse.
Don’t get it twisted, though: I did get a pedicure.
They’ll be done soon, which means I’ll be done here soon, too.
In the table-setting portion of our last Level Up Retreat, we informed our participants that we would not have devices on us during the week and we had built the design of the retreat so that none of us would need devices. We let them know that, if it supported them, we would hold their devices for the week so they wouldn’t be distracted. Our rationale was that we wanted to be 100% present for our participants and wanted them to be 100% present for themselves and each other.
No one took us up on the offer, but most of the time, no one had devices on them. The exception was in the evenings because #IslandSunsets.
Many participants commented that they’d never really had a restorative trip before. They thought they had, but then they experienced real presence. One participant realized that just the thought of emails “being there” on her phone made her anxious; she removed her mail client from her phone and hasn’t added it back.
I’m sharing these stories because I hope they’ll get you to think about how you can be more present during the upcoming trips, vacations, and moments ahead of you.
What might you experience if you were 100% there? How would it feel to not half-do and half-be in the moments you’ve set aside to be with the people you love?
Yes, it’s hard to assert and hold that boundary. But it’s worth it.
My time’s up. I hope it helps you enjoy yours more.
The post Boundaries & Presence: The Myth of Multitasking and What It Costs Us appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
Guest post by Patricia L. Sullivan
During her recent trip to Africa, US Vice President Kamala Harris announced a $100 million commitment over ten years to West African Nations to fend off the increasing threat of extremist groups. The announcement followed President Biden’s pledge of $55 billion to the continent for the next three years. While these promises reveal a US commitment to greater engagement with African states, the often-dodged question is whether citizens of these states will benefit. Will US security aid improve human security in fragile and conflict-affected African states? How is US security assistance likely to affect governance and state repression for citizens that often suffer at the hands of both extremist groups and their own security forces?
The empirical record is mixed. Between 2002 and 2019, the US spent almost $300 billion on security assistance and trained at least one million foreign military personnel. In some countries, such as Ukraine, these programs have improved both the capability and professionalism of the state’s armed forces. In others, they escalated human rights abuses and increased the risk of coups d’état. Take the example of Kenya—one of the largest recipients of US military training and equipment in East Africa. The state’s security forces have been found to engage in torture, extrajudicial killings, mass arrests, and forced disappearances. Or the Philippines, where President Duterte employed the country’s military—armed and trained by US aid programs—in a brutal war on drugs that took the lives of thousands of civilians.
Although some studies have found that security assistance can reduce civilian targeting by state security forces, there is mounting evidence that it often fuels human rights violations. Recent research suggests that the risk of civilian harm is greatest when donors transfer weapons to postconflict states or provide aid to states with fragmented, “coup-proofed” security forces. On the other hand, effective institutions to constrain executive power in recipient states, and the provision of some forms of “nonlethal” security assistance—like military education for officers and defense institution building—appear to mitigate the potential for civilian harm.
As the War on Terror spread from Afghanistan to the African continent, the US greatly expanded the use of security assistance—funding, weapons, equipment, and training provided to a state’s security sector by external actors—to build the capacity of weak states to take on the counterterrorism mission without sacrificing American troops in ground combat. According to data collected by the Security Assistance Monitor, funding to train and equip foreign security forces increased more than 300 percent in the ten years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Over the past two decades, the US has provided security sector assistance to more than two-thirds of the sovereign states in the world. Between 2015 and 2020, $4.8 billion in security aid went to sub-Saharan Africa.
While the goal is to reduce the threat posed by violent non-state actors, Kristen Harkness at the University of St. Andrews points out that most aid went to “repressive, heavily coup-proofed authoritarian regimes,” even though boosting military capacity in non-democratic states can fuel grievances that drive recruitment to extremist groups and increase political violence.
When “lethal” aid—weapons, military equipment, and combat skills training—reaches countries that lack effective institutional constraints on executive power, as in many autocratic and anocratic regimes, the risk of extrajudicial killings at the hand of security forces spikes, according to data that follows low- and middle-income recipients of US security force assistance between 2002 and 2019.
In the absence of effective legislative or judicial constraints, leaders can use military aid to buy the loyalty of their security forces and incentivize compliance with orders to repress dissent. Of course, lethal aid also directly increases the capacity of state security forces to quell civilian threats to the regime with force. Security assistance signals that a foreign patron is invested in regime survival. While soldiers ordered to use deadly force against the civilian population might experience moral conflict, or fear facing consequences for targeting civilians if the regime is overthrown, foreign security aid increases the odds that repression will succeed, the regime will survive, and soldiers will be rewarded for their loyalty.
One way to avoid the risk that US assistance increases human rights violations is to provide aid only to countries with effective legislative and judicial institutions. But many regions where extremist groups are active would offer a limited menu. An alternative is providing safer forms of aid.
Separating “non-lethal” security aid—a broad category encompassing professional military education, security sector reform, defense institution-building, and a variety of other types of assistance—from “lethal” aid—which includes material aid, direct combat assistance, and combat training—reveals divergent effects on state violence. While increasing lethal aid significantly raises the risk of extrajudicial killing, non-lethal aid appears to have a dampening effect. The exception is authoritarian states in which leaders have created overlapping and competing security institutions to “coup-proof” their regime. In these states, all forms of security assistance are associated with civilian harm. In post-conflict countries, one study shows that while weapons transfers and military aid increase human rights abuses, levels of Official Development Assistance (ODA) are associated with improved human rights protections.
Moving forward, as the US promises a new wave of security assistance to African states, it has a choice. Considering the recipient country’s institutional context, the state of its security forces, and the type of military aid, can decrease the risk that those resources are used to commit human rights violations.
Patricia Lynn Sullivan is an associate professor in the Department of Public Policy and the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies.
Today I spent a wonderful afternoon with colleagues engaged in the Pathways to Presencing Fellows program talking about our projects and sharing ideas. The fellowship program gives “space and time” for us to engage in ways we are enacting the Charting Pathways to Intellectual Leadership (CPIL) framework.
CPIL seeks to “empower staff and faculty to put their values into intentional practice by aligning institutional practices with the values that animate university life” (Fritzsche, Hart-Davidson, & Long, 2022). Empowering all members of our community to engage in this endeavor requires us to develop a framework for individuals in a variety of university roles to excel in their careers by identifying their core values, setting career goals aligned with their values, cultivating pathways toward those goals, and enabling them to seek support along the way.
My project for this fellowship has been the development of the Formative Annual Review (FAR) Framework. While CPIL itself is a framework, the FAR framework actions CPIL into an academic reporting apparatus that facilitates formative feedback and growth. FAR helps to balance future aspirations with current needs, goals, and requirements by helping to situate what we are currently doing within our short-mid-long term goals while also acknowledging and showing our contributions and impact to our current jobs and
unit. This is especially important for those of us in positions outside of the tenure system, and doing jobs that combine applied work on our campuses, alongside more traditional scholarly endeavors such as teaching and research.
Rather than an end-of-year, reactive (or even passive) process — reporting under the FAR framework happens at one or more of several regular checkpoints during the year as a natural part of the reflective process. Reporting occurs as a function of telling a story of where you are going, what you are doing to move forward, and telling the story about how you got to the space that you are.
My short presentation on the FAR Framework gives an overview of the main components of the framework – Critical Planning, Reflective Practice, and Context Making. These components support identifying and pursuing relevant and meaningful work, redefining what scholarly work is for us, and connecting with individual professional objectives, and unit mission/goals.
I’m in the process of developing a workshop on the framework that can introduce colleagues interested in applying it to their own work. The workshop involves engaging in better understanding your digital presence, doing long-term planning, starting a reflective practice, surfacing your process, and creating artifacts as a way of telling your story, and conducting a short-term planning process.
Modern "word processing" programs can do everything from check spelling and grammar to finishing your sentences for you. This might be convenient for the creator, but some "helpful" upgrades can wreak havoc for manuscript editors. In today's Guest Post, Bruce Rosenblum and Sylvia Izzo Hunter explore the pitfalls of making the comments features less editor friendly.
The post Guest Post — Modern Comments and Their Discontents: When an Update Isn’t an Improvement appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Enlarge / A GitHub-made image accompanying all the company's communications about 2FA. (credit: GitHub)
Software development tool GitHub will require more accounts to enable two-factor authentication (2FA) starting on March 13. That mandate will extend to all developers who contribute code on GitHub.com by the end of 2023.
GitHub announced its plan to roll out a 2FA requirement in a blog post last May. At that time, the company's chief security officer said that it was making the move because GitHub (which is used by millions of software developers around the world across myriad industries) is a vital part of the software supply chain. Said supply chain has been subject to several attacks in recent years and months, and 2FA is a strong defense against social engineering and other particularly common methods of attack.
When that blog post was written, GitHub revealed that only around 16.5 percent of active GitHub users used 2FA—far lower than you'd expect from technologists who ought to know the value of it.
The Levelling Up White Paper makes explicit reference to the Net Zero agenda, stating that the transition “could have large and long-lasting effects on virtually every aspect of the economy, including jobs and skills, infrastructure and technology, and investment and innovation”.
While there are fears that this transition could impose a considerable cost both on society more broadly and also on those individuals and communities that are least able to bear those costs, there is also a very clear opportunity for a so-called “Green Industrial Revolution” to advance the levelling up agenda in profound ways.
Making the transition
The impact can be profound in a number of ways. Firstly, the transition from fossil fuels to clean fuels can produce good-quality jobs in previously deprived areas. Research from the University of Michigan shows that there is a good crossover between the skills required to perform jobs in fossil fuel-based industries and to do jobs in renewable energy sectors.
For instance, they highlight how transferable jobs are in fossil fuel industries to those in renewable sectors. The research evaluated the career options for the approximately 80,000 coal-fired generator workers in the US in case of closure. The results showed that their skills are applicable in renewable energy industries, such as solar. They do find, however, that government interventions are necessary to direct solar investments toward former coal communities.
This was also evident during our research, where participants from deprived communities in France were given the chance to develop skills in vital renewable energies, such as solar power. Not only did these programs provide participants with valuable skills but the resultant solar energy also helped to provide clean, sustainable, and affordable energy to the local community.
Green jobs
The potential for the net zero economy to support deprived communities was reinforced by a recent report from the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit. The report, which was based on data from the CBI, highlights that many of the 20,000 businesses currently operating in the net zero economy are spread throughout the United Kingdom. What’s more, the jobs provided by these businesses are high quality, with an average wage of £42,600. This compares to £33,400 for the average UK employee.
“The economic activity of these businesses brings substantial impacts across the UK,” the report explains. “Areas such as the North East, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the South West have a higher concentration of businesses within the net zero economy, compared to traditional concentrations of activity in London and the South East.”
What’s more, the economic impact of the net zero economy was found to be stronger in each of the regions of the United Kingdom than it was in London. The net zero economy has proven to be highly productive, even in areas with historically low productivity. In the Midlands (East and West), for instance, it’s more than 2.5 times more productive compared to the regional average.
Constituency-level economic modeling reveals the potential for net zero hotspots throughout the UK, with the researchers identifying 20 areas where the net zero economy made a significant contribution to the local economy as measured by GVA. These include a number of areas covered by our own research.
“From insulation fitters to heat pump engineers and agritech pioneers, businesses in the net zero economy are adding £70 billion to the UK economy,” Peter Chalkley, Director of ECIU, explains. “Billions of pounds of private sector investments are being made in net zero with the hot spots of activity being outside of London in places like Tyneside, Merseyside and Derbyshire.”
Part of the solution
A paper for the Economy 2030 Inquiry reminds us that net zero isn’t going to solve the regional inequalities that are at the heart of the levelling up agenda on its own. The report is nonetheless positive about the impact that targeted investment could have to communities that are so often deprived of the support they so desperately need.
“Smart net-zero investment should be embedded in a wider economic strategy – especially as it could have the additional benefit of bolstering the government’s Levelling Up agenda,” the report states.
The broad range of businesses in the net zero economy indicates that as the UK moves towards net zero and more businesses become part of this sector, it will further diversify economic activity.
Currently, regions like the North East, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the South West have the highest concentration of net zero businesses relative to total businesses in the area. Hence, the expansion of the net zero economy holds great promise for regions throughout the UK to drive growth and narrow regional disparities.
We’ve seen firsthand in France how investing in green jobs can provide not only employment but also energy security to deprived communities. If they can form part of the 20 “hotspots” identified by the ECIU then that would help to build some welcome momentum behind the levelling up campaign.
This article was co-written with Professor Zografia Bika
Image credit: Bill Mead via Unsplash
A client recently wanted to problem-solve for working four days a week, but when she started explaining the problem, it wasn’t about the load of her days or how many days a week she worked. Deep down it was about work intensity, or how stressful it was for her to be working “at 100% efficiency” for 5-6 hours a day.
I pointed out that a really common pattern and a byproduct of efficiency crankers are they’re exhausted no matter how much actual work is on their plate. Even if/when we remove 25% of the work from their plate, the typical move among these folks is to then cut the amount of time they give themselves to do the work by 25%.
This has the net result of them being just as stressed about the work, no matter how much work is removed from their plate.
An additional part about this client’s scenario is that, partially because of the work we’ve done together, everything is great for her right now. Her business is working well, she’s getting the right clients, and she loves the work that she does. She has a new perfect-for-her romantic partner. Her health is great and far improved than when we started. She’s happy and doesn’t want much, which itself has become a challenge for her. (We’re working through the way her upper limit responses have gone guerrilla.)
So, in her circumstances, cutting an additional day of work wouldn’t make her better off and would create a lot of stress to get there. She’d work four days, just as intensely, and end up just as worn out.
Instead of cutting work, I asked her “what would you do if I asked you to be 15% slower?” We brainstormed a few “slow practices,” she might do in 5-10 minutes, like:
She’s still exploring whether it’ll be best for her personally to set a timer to initiate her slow practices and self-care or to sense when she’s needing to do one of these practices between tasks. The latter is better for most people after they have been practicing slow productivity for a while, but when folks are addicted to checking off tasks, it’s typically better to start with timers.
On the subject of timers, I happen to know she uses timers for her work. I chose to remind her that if she could use her timers to work, she could use timers to not work.
The obvious difference is that, in the latter case, she’d have to give herself permission to stop working, and that, weirdly, is going to take more discipline for her to do (to use her slow practices) than to work. (I’ve had A LOT of practice coaching folks on this topic, as it turns out, not the least because Angela struggles with this, too.)
This is one of those cases where the normal go-tos of subtraction do not work well. Adding some recovery practices to her day will create more vitality, joy, creativity, and richness in her work and life. Working an hour or day less at the same pace would not get her there.
We see many organizations who fumble this, too. Their response to burnt-out, overloaded workers is to switch to 4 days a week, but for many workers, that amounts to having to do the same amount of work in less time — it increases intensity without really addressing the workways and team habits creating more work than people can do in their compensated time. What really needs to be solved for is the load of work, not just the amount of days people work.
A 4-day work week boiled down to 10 hours of work a day can in some cases be a good solution for companies. For example, if someone commutes for an hour or ninety minutes per day, the additional day off makes a real difference.
These same companies would likely see a better result if they encouraged workers to do admin or remote work from home on Friday, or, better yet, to let teams decide when they need to work remotely and when they need to be co-located. No one wants to commute to do the same things they can do from home, and many people wouldn’t mind the commute as much if the work they were driving to do really got done better face-to-face or co-located.
What we really need to consider, though, is the mindset that causes people to work so intensely in the first place. Sometimes it’s what it takes to get the job done but other times there are more insidious things at play. The following are two more common reasons for the intensity, though:
Here’s the takeaway: if no matter how much work you do throughout the day, you feel like you’re panting and rushed, perhaps it’s not the amount of work you’re doing, but the pace you’re working at.
Consider ways in which, rather than just subtracting or decreasing the amount of hours or days you’re working, you can slow yourself down in order to be more intentional and calm about the ways you’re moving forward on your workload. Chances are with less anxiety produced by the high work intensity and overload, you might be more productive anyway.
Team Habits is coming this August and now available for pre-order at your favorite bookseller. And if you’re curious about identifying your team’s strength areas, growth areas, and challenge areas, take our Team Habits Quiz, a free, customized report to help you understand how your team works best together and how together your team does its best work.
The post What to Do When Work Intensity Is the Problem appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
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Recently I joined my friend Eric Zimmer on his podcast, The One You Feed, to discuss how to focus our lives on what’s most important to us, and what blocks us from achieving that.
Too many of us are still stuck looking for a way to really see and access the possibilities right in front of us. So that’s the first opportunity. How do we start where we are now?
We focus far too much on what we don’t have (instead of what we do), or on things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. We know our thought patterns are a huge piece of the puzzle, and that working on our negativity, and transforming it, has huge dividends to pay. But it’s not just about thinking, our actions matter, too.
“The One You Feed” makes reference to an old Native American tale in which a grandmother tells her grandson that two wolves are at battle within every person: a good wolf and a bad wolf.
“Which one wins?” the grandson asks.
“The one you feed,” she replies.
Whenever I personally find myself in a situation of uncertainty or discomfort, especially when it comes to other people, a question I often ask myself is: What’s the most abundant possibility we can co-create together?
If we start there — by focusing on the most abundant possibility of our co-creation, it gets us out of zero sum games. It gets us out of the cycle of feeding the bad wolf. Considering the most abundant possibility we can create moves us into a sense of partnership. It’s a way of guiding myself towards the good wolf, as it were.
Some of our readers may know that I am an avid motorcyclist. In motorcycle riding, as in driving, there’s a rule: You always look first at the place you want to go. You don’t look at what you’re trying to avoid, because that’s the best way to crash into it. When you ride a motorcycle, you look through the curve.
When I’m steering and navigating through life, I hear and feel the bad wolf. But I’m looking at the good wolf and say to myself, “How do I steer towards that?” And I might get it wrong. But in my experience, I don’t know that I have ever regretted steering towards the good wolf. I’ve never regretted at least trying to build the most abundant possibility with other people.
Ideally you end up in the place where you don’t have to ask the question anymore. You’re just always steering in that direction. It’s one reason to think positively about the future. Ultimately we don’t know the outcome, really, so why not imagine it in a way that’s empowering, versus a way that keeps me looking at the obstacles I don’t want to hit?
I’ve said it elsewhere, but it bears saying again: your planning and your schedule needs to include your dreams. If we don’t dream about what’s possible, instead we stay stuck in the world of: what’s the least bad thing that can happen to me right now? And how do I avoid the least bad thing?
So much of the work necessarily involves envisioning, and saying to ourselves: “This is what life could look like.”
You can’t just endlessly settle for what you know isn’t enough — instead, you’ve got to move to “it’s possible” first, and then “it’s plausible”. There’s a pathway to there.
More importantly, that shift does not need us to employ hustle culture to get there. It doesn’t require burnout and maximum effort or Dunkirk Spirit.
There’s a way for us to move where we want to go, but it involves first identifying what the story is that’s keeping us from seeing what’s possible. What can be actualized is often right in front of us, but that’s exactly where a lot of people get stuck.
People get blocked by all kinds of head trash. That’s why giving ourselves permission is such a struggle: it’s okay for us to have the abundance we’ve dreamed of. It’s ok to live in that world, and hope others can live in a more abundant world, where they allow themselves to dream, too.
If you get to that point of fighting the head trash, you may be on the right track. That’s the hard inner work that you have to get through to prioritize your dreams.
This came up with Eric, who, despite success with his podcast, has been wrestling back and forth with the idea of whether he can take a month off and travel when he’s got his own business.
There’s this sense for a lot of folks, when it comes to rest or time away: “That’s not something that someone like me does.”
My thought was, “Oh really? Let’s unpack that.”
If you fundamentally think you don’t deserve rest or a break, or that it’s not possible or not relevant for you, there’s a likelihood you’re going to keep creating a cycle of burnout and frustration. And it’s not because you can’t take a break, or that things would actually fall apart if you did, but it’s because you’re unwilling to permit yourself to take that break. That’s where a lot of the work to be done lies.
For Eric to be able to give himself that permission involved moving away from hustle culture: the idea that more is inherently better, that we need to go bigger, and earn more money constantly.
Instead he tried asking himself, in the context of his life, “What do I really want?” That’s how he realized what he wanted most was to take time off. That’s the one thing he had never felt he had time in his life to do.
I’ll also say that for some folks who may be reading this, it’s not in every case quite as simple as, “I give myself permission.” Yes it’s about acknowledging, “this is what’s possible.” But it’s also about: “This is what’s possible for me.”
Those two words, “for me”, become really powerful. Together knowing it’s also possible “for me” makes the difference in whether you might just start taking whatever your aspiration is, and turning it into a real project, that is central in your life — where you devote real time and energy to it.
When you start talking about something as a priority, or as a project, it has to live on your schedule. A lot of people might be thinking about an idea for years without it ever taking up space on their schedule.
But it’s those projects you’ve dreamed of that are going to create your future self. That’s what we’re talking about here — what really lights you up in a way that only uniquely you can do. Our best projects, as I wrote about in Start Finishing, are mirrors, and bridges. Mirrors reflect your internal landscape: what you think about yourself, what you believe as possible, who you think you are, but they also mirror what’s happening in your external world.
“I’m gonna do the thing.” And we decide to do the thing. But immediately we’re confronted with head trash, limiting beliefs, competing priorities. And thinking… I can’t do this new thing, I was already overloaded with the old thing. How am I going to do the new thing?
But the project is simultaneously the bridge towards your future self, that future work that you’re going to do. The great part about it is, the bridge you’re building can take you a whole lot further than you thought you were going to go.
You can’t imagine, when you really do this type of work, where it’s all going to take you. When you really commit to the path, it can take longer to get there than you thought, or a lot of people get there faster than they had originally considered possible. That’s part of why we created the Start Finishing Field Guide to help you along that path.
We need that spaciousness not just in our individual work and paths, for leaders or entrepreneurs, but in our team work, too. For Eric, when he finally allowed himself to take a break, he came back with a renewed spirit – where rather than dreading getting back to work, he was amazed out how much unfolded that had previously felt stuck or impossible.
So many clients and people in different contexts come up to me saying, “I want to do more, bigger, better.” Mainly because that’s the priming we’re getting from just about everywhere. I hesitate, since I don’t want to say, “sorry, I cannot help you do more.”
Instead, at Productive Flourishing, we’re more interested in helping you focus on the best and right things first, which mostly means doing and committing to fewer things. That’s the reason we have the five project rule. It doesn’t make sense to overburden yourself with more than you can feasibly do in a given time period (day, week, month, or year). If you really focus within limits, that level of commitment does a lot of the groundwork.
The worst case scenario is we end up constantly stuffing things in, and micro-crunching our days and weeks so much that it’s a highway to burnout. We may be ‘getting things done’, but we’re so stressed out about it, that we can hardly enjoy it. The question I always ask is: How do you structure this in a way so that you can actually breathe and enjoy it as you’re doing it?
If it’s always just about crunching it, and doing it in the minimum amount of time and getting the maximum return — all those things that we hear — that becomes really, really unsatisfying.
Like imagine this scenario about your favorite dessert: I say, I’m going to make your favorite dessert for you. I put it in front of you, then I pull out a stopwatch. You get 15 seconds, go. Enjoy it, maximize it. Get it right. That makes no freakin’ sense. We want a certain amount of savoring when it comes to so many things that truly matter to her life.
If you have a bit of autonomy in your day, which is actually many of us in the post-pandemic hybrid work world, there’s not necessarily someone standing over your shoulder observing your work.
But what I’ve seen time and time again, across our audience, is that work can still be too stressful. In that burnout environment, we end up in this state of distraction, with time wasters and fillers, just to give ourselves a bit of emotional reprieve.
If work wasn’t so stressful to start with, we likely would not have need of that reprieve, meaning there would be substantially less chance of ending up in time sucks on social media or email — or whatever it is for you.
More spaciousness, whether on teams or individually, opens up new possibilities in our work and in the range of possibilities for our (or our team’s) success. If you actually take a step back, the likelihood is, your chances are substantially higher to come back recharged and able to really think through whatever problem it is that’s facing you. Slowing down often leads to novel insights. We can quite literally be better humans with the people we spend our days with — our team members included. We wind up not so compressed and snippy.
When taken as a habit, as a practice, that sense of space dramatically changes the quality of your work day in and day out. It means not holding on through an endless slog of painful work — instead it’s about going to work, engaged, energized, filled with a sense of meaning and purpose. Let’s face it, that’s a win no matter what happens.
The chief issue with working on a team (also co-located teams) is that when we’re working with other humans, we end up with some amount of social overhead. You end up in negotiation with others. If I block off my schedule, that impacts you, because now I’m not available for different things.
At most companies, unfortunately, there are the stated values and priorities, and then there’s shadow values and priorities. There’s this other game that you’ve got to play to be successful.
In really well-aligned organizations and really high performance ones, high-performing teams know there’s not so much of the shadow game, like it’s just all on the table. People know how to win. Regardless of the dynamics in specific organizations, the first question in any kind of workplace ought to be: How do I ship the most valuable work that pushes my team forward?
There are two axes of approach here. One is to really reclaim the time, or consider the time you do have and use that more purposefully.
If you’re faced with too much stress, or too many projects, the usual management tip is that you ought to bring the matter to your boss’ attention, and ask, what do you consider the priority is, or where should I start? In the 21st century, because of the way self-managed work has evolved, I would add a slight tweak here.
Rather than saying, “I can’t do these in this timeline,” I would take ownership: “I think these are the five most important. Do you agree? Am I correct about that?” And if they agree, it shows you’ve done that work of translation of your reality to make it legible for them — you’re not just like, “It’s too many things, pick for me.”
It’s the same when it comes to managing something like performance reviews. You get to take the ownership, and say: “Here’s what I’ve done over the last six months. Here are some of the things I know I need to work on.”
Ideally, the lines of communication have already been open with you and your team members or leader on these points. So you can suggest, “Here’s my plan of action for doing that.” And that means you get to have a very short performance conversation. Unless you’re just wildly misreading things. But even if you are misreading things, it’s better to know that sooner rather than later, right?
On the team side of these issues, let me first get a few core concepts out of the way. When I say team, I’m talking about the four to eight people you work with, day in and day out. Most teams are about that size. If you’ve heard me talking about my forthcoming book, Team Habits, it turns out you have an incredible amount of rapport and influence with that smaller core you work with.
The nuance I’m talking about can really be seen when the team as a whole moves and operates in a certain way. That’s just how the team rolls. Then you have a team habit. This is where a lot of the magic unlocks.
But the interesting thing about our team habits is they’re often implicit or unconscious agreements we make with each other. Then we just sort of do them, like any habit.
When I’m out talking to people in the field, leading a workshop for a company, for instance, I might ask, “Hey, did you at some point choose that when the team has an open schedule, that means a team meeting automatically gets scheduled?” The general answer is, “Ah…” and if you go down the list, no one agreed out loud that’s the way things should be.
In a small team, let me give you a scenario for how it can work (especially if we’re wanting to create new habits of highly effective teams), and cover down on a task that keeps slipping. Take managing cc: threads. We can decide that Tim will be the person to read the cc: threads, and he’ll let us know if there’s actually something relevant in that jam. He can also speak on the team’s behalf, like, hey, my team is doing X, Y and Z today. He is the liaison for the team. Maybe Charlie will do it tomorrow.
That gives the entire team of four to eight people freed up capacity. That means only one person has to read this thread to figure out what’s going on, so that the seven other people on that team can get to work. It’s an easily available solution. But we just don’t think of these kinds of solutions often because of the unconscious way team habits work.
It turns out, and maybe this is a fact a lot of us intuitively know: Most change management programs have abysmal success rates. Especially when it comes down from the top down, between two thirds and three quarters of change management projects don’t work, they fail.
When’s the last time from high up, someone’s created a policy that’s actually made your life better? There’s a saying in organizational development, recruiting and workforce management that people don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad bosses.
The fact is that your small team is frequently better equipped to take better care of each other — to build that trust and belonging that can lead to improved performance and results.
As an individual I may love or really dig the people that I work with, but hate working with them. That’s a fixable problem.
What we have to do in that scenario is stand up and feed the wolf. Be better at identifying bad team habits, and creating better ones — actively thinking, what’s it going to take for us to not show up and have the same setbacks day in day out?
In the course of this conversation on how to focus on the most important things with Eric, we touched on the subject of productivity. There are a lot of words in the broader industry that we’re in that I don’t love. But there are useful ideas too, which can play out in how we move on successful team goals. For instance, a crucial insight we might take and apply directly to team performance, is about being proactive versus reactive.
Being proactive takes courage. You might pick wrong, you might spend three months or six months working on the wrong damn thing. But having that courage with your team and as an individual to really say, “Here’s where we’re trying to go, let’s organize ourselves to get there.” It makes such a dramatic difference, because you don’t end up in this place of resignation and quiet quitting.
With bad team habits, and with a lack of courage or purpose, that’s what happens in the workplace. When we disengage it creates an add-on snowball effect, and we disengage again, then others do, too. That’s the path that leads to bad cultures from bad bosses. I get that. I’ve done this work long enough to know that some of us, leaders included, have just not gotten to the place where we see the possibility that’s right in front of us.
Ultimately I’m a team guy. Because when we’re part of a good team, that’s where we have great performance and great belonging, it’s just one of the most sublime human experiences that hits us so hard, and is hard to beat. It’s for that reason I get nostalgia about being in the Army sometimes.
That’s the reminder I’d like to leave us with here — it’s the whole reason I wrote Start Finishing, which is now being played out in Team Habits in a different way. (P.S.: If you weren’t already in the know, Team Habits is coming this August and now available for pre-order at your favorite bookseller.)
And it’s that we’re here to help people get on a pathway to a way of working that makes work a sublime experience. That’s possible with teams, for any team, and we all have the ability to get there.
The post How to Focus on What’s Most Important appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
Enlarge / Aerial view of the exclusive island of luxury hotels and residences of The Palm Jumeirah in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. (credit: Vicki Jauron, Babylon and Beyond Photography)
Each year, humans add a little more land to their coastlines, slowly but surely encroaching on the sea and filling up smaller coastal bodies of water with new developments. This encroachment typically comes as we add luxury waterfronts and extend ports farther out to sea. In all, since 2000, coastlines around the world—specifically in urban areas—grew a whopping 2,530 square kilometers, according to a new paper.
A press release about the research notes that this is around 40 Manhattans, while the paper itself points out that this is roughly the size of Luxemburg. Neither source said this, but it’s also more than 4,000 Dollywoods.
The paper—which claims to be the “first global assessment of coastal land reclamation"—looked at how human development built land in, or filled parts of, coastal zones. This includes wetlands, which play various important roles like slowing erosion (but humans can just keep building out anyway, right?), protecting areas further inland from flooding and sea level rise, and acting as habitats for myriad species.
Learning earlier this year that I had Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) changed a lot for me. I finally realized that I was not a “bad worker” or didn’t have a “work ethic”. My work ethic just doesn’t look like a traditional one.
You’re probably aware that increasingly it’s not just adolescents who get ADHD diagnoses — more and older people are receiving a diagnosis of ADHD, or what’s known as adult ADHD. The fact it’s growing in prevalence means it’s also thankfully becoming less stigmatized. It also means a lot of people in the wider working population are looking to find ways to cope.
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (the term ADHD is more widely used now) covers a wide range of experiences and symptoms. The NIH defines Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) clinically as “an ongoing pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development.”
The list of basic symptoms of attention deficit disorders includes everything from trouble focusing and doing one task at a time, to staying organized — but also covers restlessness, mood swings, sleep disorders, problems with executive function, fidgeting, tapping or general impulsive behavior (interrupting people or difficulty delaying gratification). Taken together, any of these symptoms can make life either a little bit, or a lot, harder.
My ADD symptoms may not necessarily be the same as what someone else deals with, but the skills I’ve developed to cope may likely be helpful for attention deficit people, but could also be useful for almost anyone in the workplace. Let me give you an idea of how this might work on a daily basis.
Many people just sit down and get their work done, and it’s really as simple as that. After several hours at a desk, they have likely accomplished what they originally hoped to do – or some large portion of it – and can put their tasks away.
It’s not that the average person is 100% productive on a daily basis — far from it — but when they’re working on a project, the work proceeds in a fairly straightforward way. And it happens without constant worry, interruptions, detours or distractions. Some people do live within time constraints and what’s expected of them, and go about their day knowing it will go roughly the way they expect. Compared to a person who has ADHD, that’s a radically different life. It’s the difference between being able to focus on one item at a time, listen to your body, or move from one thing to the next with ease.
But for those of us in the workforce who struggle with ADHD, it doesn’t go like that too often.
To give you an idea, on any given morning I might sit down at my desk to work remotely, as I usually do — I’ll get up to pee one time at 10 am, realize there is a separate chore that needs to be done, and also that I need to wash my face or brush my teeth.
Some ADHD people struggle more with the tendency to daydream, but in my case, it’s often about fixating on the various things that need to get done. Usually the face washing or teeth brushing feels like it has to happen before the chore, so the chore may or may not ever get done. That in itself isn’t so bad, but the issue is with what happens to the original work I sat down to get started with prior to the bathroom break.
Reading this, you might think this level of distraction is tied to working a remote or work from home (WFH) job. But I’d argue, on the contrary, WFH or working remotely hasn’t caused any more substantial challenges for me as an ADHD person than a regular workplace was, for reasons I’ll get into here.
When I worked with an in-person team, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, I frequently felt overwhelmed. I took on a lot of projects, but rarely finished the ones assigned to me that had no set due date. I would make new to-do lists every day, but it was always easy to distract me if you just passed by the front desk, where I sat.
I loved the aspect of co-located working that involved getting to know my team and our clients in person. But in general it turns out I am much more organized when working from home, because there’s actually less to distract me.
Some basic examples: There’s less to do in terms of orchestrating my morning, or less distraction in terms of seeing coworkers in the physical office space. Our remote team at PF also has multiple modes of communication and context building — which include due dates, the history of the project, and what members of the team need to be included or updated. Having these forms of accountability built in ends up being incredibly helpful.
Working from home isn’t without challenges. It can be a little too easy to get caught up when my phone buzzes, or when it feels pressing to respond immediately to a notification. (We have a great post incidentally on why notifications truly are not your friend, and how blocking them can do wonders to protect your attention.)
Other days in my remote office, I might have 50,000+ thoughts about one project at work, and end up two hours deep into researching or planning – only to realize too late that the work I’m doing may not be helping me get that project done.
If that sounds stressful, believe me, it can be. The good news for anyone who struggles with their attention, or who has a ADHD diagnosis, is that it is possible to manage constant thought-jumping with the help of a few tools and tips.
Currently my biggest source of support is a therapist who helps me with mindfulness techniques to center myself. I’ve also found other methods to help me stay on task and finish my work, like coworking with a buddy. There are plenty of ideas out there that can help when you have that urge to do anything other than what’s in front of you. (And I know it’s not for lack of trying. I see you, ADD and ADHD friends!)
If you have trouble sitting still, getting started, or focusing on something for more than 10 minutes, here below I’m going to offer you some tips and tricks to help. I’ve picked up on a lot of these tips along the way to help me find my focus and do the work in a sustainable way.
Techniques like these can be part of an ADHD treatment plan, and help with building self-esteem, and confidence in your ability to get work done, as well as controlling environmental factors. It also helps ensure you don’t, for instance, get sucked into hours of focusing on a single project, and forget to take care of yourself or the other five projects on deck.
If I don’t have a roadmap for how things are going to go for the day, or for this particular project, I’ll end up getting distracted or demotivated and will choose to do something else. That’s why the roadmap is useful – to keep you from ending up in that tailspin. Creating plans might not be your strong suit, but if you ask yourself “what is the next smallest step I can take to push this forward?” you’ll find that it’s not too hard to set up a great project roadmap.
Tools like Momentum can also be a huge help with managing your lifestyle, work and symptoms — since it offers the building blocks for you to start planning.
I’ve talked about it before. The Pomodoro Technique which popularized using timers for productivity may not be for everyone, but timers as a tool can help a lot with getting started and sticking with tricky projects. Timers are great not just for doing work, but also for managing your breaks from work or schoolwork, so you don’t get too far off track.
I often put on a 10 or 15-minute timer and kick back on the couch with my guitar, or I pull out a book and give myself some time away from the screen. These mini power breaks boost my energy and help me get my creativity flowing again –- which incidentally is also great for getting back into the work.
You might want to consider the possibility of creating a list or menu of things you really like doing to recover on your breaks, so you don’t get stuck in limbo. Setting up reminders for when breaks in your day are coming up can help with this piece, too. You can use your calendar tool or alarms and reminders on your phone or another device.
This list of recovery pastimes and pleasures can include almost anything: meditating or catching up on reading, going for a walk. It could be yoga or video games, or watching a Netflix series you’ve been meaning to binge on. The point is it’s a way to preserve your free time for doing things that you actually enjoy, so it doesn’t get eaten up by other items. (This is a good tip whether or not you technically have an attention deficit disorder.)
One of my favorite ways to control my space and energy is with music. I switch between different genres, but often find myself feeling most content with ambient music and sounds — especially to keep on in the background while I work. By the time afternoon rolls around, in contrast, I tend to need more focus, so I put on some house-electronic music to keep the energy high. Sometimes I use ocean sounds, or “brown noise” when the movement of the music gets too distracting for me.
Here are some of my favorite sounds to put on in the background:
With ADD, your brain constantly craves dopamine, which can cause lack of focus and a constant search for distractions when the project we’re working on doesn’t spark that dopamine. Helping create novelty in your day can actually help boost dopamine, and distract you less!
I got these tips from a few different TikTok creators, and they’ve been super useful:
These are just a few of the ways you can work with your body and attention when you start to lose focus, rather than against it.
There are no clear causes of ADHD, but there are plenty of non-stimulant, behavioral therapy techniques out there that can help you cope. In fact, these techniques can also be super helpful for people who struggle with attention, even without an ADHD diagnosis. ADHD medications can be helpful for many folks too, but it’s only one line of defense when coming up with ways to live and focus better.
Learning about these techniques hopefully shows you how many opportunities exist for you to create space for yourself, and the specific way your brain works within your workday! The simple tricks I listed above take less than five minutes and generally leave you feeling pumped up and ready to continue working.
And, though I work from home and have the luxury to be able to get up, and take regular breaks, it isn’t impossible to do any of these things at your place of work. It might even be fun to get others involved! Consider doing something like a morning stretch circle or an afternoon walk with a teammate.
If you give yourself space to be yourself, you might find that your work comes easier to you. Try sharing these ideas with your friends and family members to see if they find the ideas helpful too – and let me know if any of the tricks worked for you!
The post Strategies For Thriving In A Remote Workplace With ADD & ADHD appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
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