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Consider two truths: (1) it’s usually easy to tell what the next step of a project is at the end of a working session, and (2) it can be incredibly hard to figure out what the next step is at the start of a working session. Part of the reason we can get entranced with our best work is that, once we get on a roll, it’s really easy to keep it up. Likewise, part of the reason we avoid our best work is that the colder the project is, the harder it is to get started.
Charlie shared this in Chapter 9 of Start Finishing before he went on to explain the idea of leaving yourself breadcrumbs (thanks, Hansel and Gretel) as a way to address this tension.
For me, it’s always been a core piece of the book but also how I now approach my work (well, try to). I recently shared this with Charlie along with my frustration that we didn’t have a blog post about it so he challenged me to write one. So here I am.
Like many of the concepts we share here at PF, the practice of leaving yourself breadcrumbs is a relatively simple one to apply and a powerful tool you can use to move your best work forward.
I found the power of it lies in three areas: 1) there are different times you might put this into practice, 2) the many (some surprising) benefits it brings, and 3) learning the art of leaving yourself effective crumb trails.
Here are the best times to leave yourself a crumb trail. (If you think of others, let me know in the comments!)
At the end of a focus block
As Charlie mentioned in Start Finishing, knowing your next step is easier at the end of a working session than the beginning. Yet, often we run out the clock (sometimes overrun the clock ) and jump right into our next thing. Breadcrumbs can ease the transition between working sessions. The key is intentionally leaving time at the end of a focus block to do so.
Trust me, I know how easy it is to fall into “but I just need to do ONE more thing!” (It’s never just one more thing and likely you won’t finish it in the next five to ten minutes anyway.) We think we’ll seamlessly pick up where we left off because it’s clear to us now. Because we won’t have that same clarity later, we’re better off stopping and leaving notes to come back to.
When you need to put a project on hold
It happens. You’re into a project and then plans or priorities change, new circumstances pop up, something happens that means you need to hit pause. Whether you know when or if you’ll be able to come back to your project, leaving yourself notes before you file it away will help ease the process. When you pick up the project again a week — or year — later, those notes will help you more easily dive back in.
And in the event it becomes a dropped project, your notes can serve as the After Action Review that might inform another project down the line. Either way, the act of capturing notes will allow you to set the project down to focus on the project that needs your attention now.
You have a “not yet active” project
The Five Projects Rule states “no more than five active projects per timescale”. But what do you do about those miscellaneous thoughts, ideas, and tasks that come to you related to a project you’re not actively working on but hope to in the future?
A client recently asked me what to do with character and plot points for novels she wants to write but simply doesn’t have capacity to work on right now. (The creative muse does not often follow the Five Projects Rule.) This is where breadcrumbs can be incredibly useful. The client created a folder where she stores the notes as they come to her and built a monthly routine to go in and sort through, connect pieces, and leave herself notes on where her characters might go next. Now when that novel project is ready to move into “active” she’ll have a great head start.
Before AND during vacation.
Breaks between work sessions are sometimes extended breaks with the intention of disconnecting from our work. During these times it’s especially beneficial to leave our future selves notes so we can pick up where we left off. But as Charlie has shared, your mind can have a hard time slowing down even when (maybe especially when) you’ve slowed down your physical pace.
Don’t fight it; plan for it. Have a space to drop these thoughts quickly and get back to your vacation. When you return to work, add these notes to the breadcrumbs you left yourself prior to vacation and smoothly transition back into work mode.
How often have you spent half (all?) of a focus block trying to retrace your steps? Trying to figure out where you saved that file? Or maybe most frustrating of all, spending your precious time, energy, and attention (TEA) redoing all that work you either forgot you did or can’t find? When done consistently and with intention, crumb trails can save you not just time but a lot of frustration, too.
Accelerates your path to Flow
You’ve built focus blocks into your schedule (hazzah!!) because you know they fuel your highest-value, deep work. But there’s a caveat here: you need to be able to get into that deep focus to move your project forward. If you spend too much time figuring out what you need to do or retracing your steps, you’ll find it really hard to get into that blissful state of flow where you tune everything else out and hone in on the work. Crumb trails guide you straight back to the work, which means you’ll be less likely to wander off the path, get distracted by something else, and get to the end of your focus block dissatisfied that you didn’t actually do what you intended to do.
Use your precious TEA on the work, not figuring out what the work is.
Be ready no matter your mode
We can’t always dictate the type of work we’ll be primed to do when we come to a focus block. As much as we can do to plan them around our typical energy cycles, sometimes we hit up against resistance and no matter the effort, we just can’t seem to make ourselves do the planned activity.
Making a practice of leaving yourself breadcrumbs gives you options.
Feeling creative? Open up that writing project and pick up where you left off.
In more of an intake vs. outtake mode? Grab that list of items you wanted to research and hit the books or one of those YouTube videos you’ve bookmarked.
Just need to do something but don’t have creative energy? Find one of those admin projects that you never seem to get around to, consult your notes to figure out the next steps, and get going.
See your projects from a new perspective
When you come back to your project (and breadcrumbs) fresh, whether that’s an hour or a month later, you may just see things you couldn’t while you were in it.
This is especially true when we take an extended break from our project like a vacation or longer. That time away can be a blessing, allowing us to come back to our project(s) with a clearer head and a lighter heart. We can more easily prioritize next steps and projects without worrying that we’ve forgotten something.
Put down the (mental) load
Our minds, our own personal supercomputers, don’t like open loops. So while you may have stopped working on your project, your brain has not.
While I can’t promise this practice will completely stop you from waking up at 3am trying to solve a problem, it will drastically reduce the occurrence. Leaving yourself crumb trails frees up your attention so that you can be more present for the other projects, people, and experiences in your lives. And it gives you the ability to come back to this project at an appropriate time (hopefully allowing you to sleep a little more soundly.)
Put your subconscious to work
Crumb trails not only reduce our conscious cognitive load, they also free our subconscious minds to work the problem, turning information over and looking for new connections.
When we create crumb trails we’re also leaving ourselves mental notes to come back to. We can rest easy now that the project is no longer front of mind taking up valuable processing space. That doesn’t mean our minds aren’t working in the background.
Those ideas that come in the shower or washing dishes? That’s the work of your subconscious.
Helps us see what needs to be deferred, delegated, or dropped
Capturing breadcrumbs forces us to think through our next steps. Doing so, we may find a blocker or new opportunity that could impact the project plan and timeline.
A crumbtrail may reveal a need for resources or another project standing in your way that require you to put the current one on hold (defer). Or maybe you’ve hit a roadblock you don’t have the capacity or capability to overcome, but you know someone who does (delegate). And sometimes, our breadcrumbs give us insight into projects that we’re holding on to because they serve a past version of who we are but don’t serve us today (consider dropping).
Now that we’ve covered when to leave yourself breadcrumbs, and why it’s a valuable practice, let’s talk about how to do it effectively.
Find your Goldilocks level of information
The amount of detail you’ll need to leave yourself will depend on two things: 1) what serves you, and 2) the length of time between work sessions.
We all have different thresholds for just how much information is helpful vs. overwhelming.
Speaking of “future you,” consider when in the future you might be picking this back up.
If you’re planning to come back later in the afternoon, a few quick bullets will suffice. But if you’re putting this down for the day or week (or longer) make sure you capture:
Make a habit of it
As I shared above, there are a lot of different times and uses for breadcrumbs. The more often you do it, the easier and more intuitive the practice becomes. Try adding it in as a regular feature of your day:
Experiment with different capture and storage methods
Breadcrumbs are only useful if you can find them when you need them. The method you use to capture them and where you store them may depend on the type of project you are working on.
But Maghan, what about those miscellaneous ideas and tasks that pop into my brain at random times? We’ve got you covered here too! Our Action Item Catcher (in PDF, and now a feature inside the Momentum app) allows you to get these out of your head and into a central place. Then when you have time, you can move these notes into your relevant project plan or project breadcrumb list.
Like I shared at the start: simple concept, powerful tool.
What’s one small way you’ll incorporate breadcrumbs into your day today? Future you will thank you!
The post Breadcrumbs: How to Find Your Way Back to Your Project appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
Routines. We all have them, both for work/business and for personal life. While we spend a lot of time at PF talking about projects, we can’t ignore the routines that help our businesses and lives hum along.
As time goes on, though, we tend to pick up routines, much the way we (at least we Americans) tend to collect stuff. And while we can fill our closets and garages and basements — and even rent storage units — to accommodate all the extra stuff, our time is limited. Cluttering it up with lots of routines keeps us from being able to apply that time to our most important, best-work projects.
This isn’t to say that some routines aren’t important, even vital, to our work, business, or life. But all of them? Doubtful. That’s where a routines audit comes in.
A routines audit is pretty much what you think it is: it’s reviewing all of the routines you do daily/weekly/monthly/etc., and determining which you need to keep doing, which you need to change up, and which you probably should stop doing altogether.
Why is this important? As I said above, routines tend to collect over time. And so we end up with this “routines bloat” we’re likely not even aware of that’s costing us precious time (and in our businesses, dollars) that could be spent elsewhere. That’s why it’s important to periodically question the importance of the routines you’re doing.
You might also discover several “ghost routines” — recurring tasks that you or someone on your team is still doing, which were important three years ago but have little bearing on your situation right now.
For your business, think of things like:
On the personal side, it might be things like:
When you’re ready to audit your routines, here’s a simple process to follow.
Part 2: Analyze
Go through your list. I suggest using a modified version of the 4Ds of time/task management (Do, Defer, Delegate, Drop) to parse your list, which I call the 4Rs: Reduce, Reassign, Reschedule, and Recommit and Reconfigure.
Once you’ve done these steps, you’ll have a smaller list of routine tasks you (or your team) are managing. Bonus points: go back over your time estimates and calculate the savings, both in time and dollars.
One additional benefit of a routines audit: it can also identify tools, services, and software you’re paying for that you no longer need. Take the opportunity to eliminate or downgrade those tools. Add that to your list of savings, too!
There are several good times of year to conduct a routines audit for yourself or your business:
In your business or work, these might be:
In your personal life, these might be:
Like everything else that takes time, energy, and attention, a routines audit is a project.
Depending on the number of routines you have and the size of your family or team, a thorough routines audit will take you a little while to do. Plan for at least a week, maybe two, depending on the other projects you have on your plate, and how much of step four (recommit and reconfigure) you have to do at the end. If you have a team, they likely need to make a routines audit a component of their subtraction habits.
If you’re just doing this for yourself personally, you might be able to knock it out in a couple focus blocks.
Regardless, I think you’ll find the time doing a routines audit well spent — and well saved.
The post Is It Time to Rethink Your Routines? appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
Much like the mid-month review is a great time to assess progress and reconfigure your plans for the remaining weeks of the month, doing a mid-week reassessment has many of the same benefits for the remainder of your week.
Let’s say you made your weekly plan as you closed out last week. Or perhaps you did your planning first thing Monday.
But now it’s Wednesday morning (or maybe Tuesday evening), and you’re starting to get that feeling: I’m behind, I’m not going to get all this done, I haven’t gotten to my important projects yet, and the days are getting away from me…
That exact moment is a great time to see how you’re doing with your projects, observe what else popped up in the first couple days of the week, and determine what you might need to do to reassess and redistribute your projects. (Real-life examples of emergent projects might be: enduring a stomach bug, dealing with a visiting sister whose return travel was delayed, or multiple Slack tag-ins requiring your attention.)
You may already know that because of everything else going on, those lovely focus blocks you’d set aside Monday and Tuesday for moving your top two or three projects forward got eaten up. Now you’re looking at the remaining three days of the week and wondering how you’re going to get everything on your weekly plan done.
First hard truth: you probably aren’t. At least not without some extra hours, Dunkirk spirit, or pushing yourself beyond your regular limits. Which may be necessary once in a while, but in the long term is a recipe for burnout.
So instead of just buckling down and “doing more,” now’s the time to reassess and replan your week.
Step 1: Review your week. Here’s a quick list of questions you can ask yourself as you’re reviewing your previous weekly plan and retooling it for the days you have remaining:
Step 2: Revise your plan. Now that you’ve taken stock of what has happened so far, you can look forward and make any necessary revisions to your weekly plan.
1⃣What needs to get done first? Remember first in priority doesn’t always mean first in sequence.
Step 3: Renegotiate. Chances are there is going to be some level of negotiation (with yourself or others) needed in order to clear space in your schedule.
For the projects or tasks that need to get deferred, remember to leave yourself breadcrumbs (be kind to your future self). Leave yourself notes that will help you easily get back into the work later without spending time figuring out what you were doing, where you were, or why you were doing it in the first place.
Didn’t do your weekly plan yet? Then today’s the perfect day to create one. This way you’ll make sure you’re not running around the next three days chasing the urgent and missing the important.
Both Wednesday morning and Tuesday evening are good opportunities to do your weekly reassessment. Reinstitute your 10/15 split, do your check-out or check-in, and use that time to reconfigure the rest of your week to make sure your priority projects are getting the love they need.
And lastly, if your plans change, don’t beat yourself up. As Charlie says, that’s the nature of planning: if you’re planning effectively, you’ll always be changing your plans.
The post Reboot Your Week with a Mid-Week Reassessment appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
Enlarge / If this road is your only route to the outside world, it might not matter that your house didn't flood. (credit: Maurice Alcorn / EyeEm)
Climate change produces lots of risks that are difficult to predict. While it will make some events—heatwaves, droughts, extreme storms, etc.—more probable, all of those events depend heavily on year-to-year variation in the weather. So, while the odds may go up, it's impossible to know when one of these events will strike a given location.
In contrast, sea level rise seems far simpler. While there's still uncertainty about just how quickly ocean levels will rise, other aspects seem pretty predictable. Given a predicted rate of sea level rise, it's easy to tell when a site will start ending up underwater. And that sort of analysis has been done for various regions.
But having a property above water won't be much good if flooding nearby means you can't get to a hospital or grocery store when you need to or lose access to electricity or other services. It's entirely possible for rising seas to leave a property high, dry, but uninhabitable as rising seas cut connections to essential services. A group of researchers has analyzed the risk of isolation driven by sea level rise, and shows it's a major contributor to the future risks the US faces.
How much time do you spend each week working through the important, deep, and future-building work? How much time could have been spent on the significant, strategic change work that often gets lost — either in routines or in the swirl of urgent items that seem to appear out of nowhere?
Take a minute to look back at your schedule over the last few weeks if you really want to get a clear picture.
Chances are you’ve been caught up in a strategic-routine-urgent logjam.
If you’re seeing this play out on your schedule, consider the compound effect of this playing out across your team – those four to eight people you spend 80% of your working time with.
When you look at teamwork, you’ll find that collaboration mostly falls into one of three buckets:
Strategic work: work that is longer term and catalytic for an important objective or issue
Routine work: tasks that pop up regularly, such as weekly reports
Urgent work: time-sensitive and important tasks
We can’t control the urgent things that come up, and hopefully the routines we have in place are set up to support those moments when they arise. Where things tend to get slippery though is how we spend the time we have (or think we have) for that important, future-building strategic work.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the “father of flow,” once wrote about how, if you look at your schedule from two weeks ago, unless you make specific, instrumental changes during your week, your schedule two weeks from now is probably going to look the same.
We have this myth in our brains that two weeks from now is wide open. That we don’t have to worry about it now because in the future we’ll have the time.
Except… it’s not really that open, not when you think about it.
At the team level, you’re rolling in routine stuff, things you know are just gonna happen, but they still take up time to do. And there’s probably going to be something that’s urgent, right?
And that’s not even counting meetings, which usually fall into the routine bucket, but require urgency every so often.
So how much time do you actually have for the future building work? Time to:
When I’m consulting on strategic planning with a client, one of the first things I’ll come in and say is, “What’s our actual capacity for change here?”
I’m not talking about the emotional capacity, which is also important, but what is the actual capacity on schedules?
This is where the disconnect often comes in on teams. Managers and leaders expect a lot more of the strategic future building work to happen. That’s natural — we (hopefully) take pride in our roles and company vision, aiming to elevate what we stand for, and push our boundaries beyond the limits of success.
However, most managers and leaders don’t have a firm grasp of how the routine tasks and the urgent stuff dominates the team structure.
If the routine tasks and urgent work items are taking up 110% of people’s time, we have to do something different.
We can’t just assume that we’re going to put more units of stuff in a bag that’s already overfilled.
I was recently talking to a CEO who was frustrated that an important project didn’t seem to be getting the attention it deserved. I pointed out that prioritizing the project meant there is work that will need to live on someone’s schedule.
Which led me to ask “Is there any room for this to go on their schedule?”
And followed by:
Are there enough focus blocks to move this strategic work forward?
And if not, what are we gonna do about that?
This is where on the individual side, the five projects rule is super helpful. It’s the sort of thing that it’s really a gauge for what you can fit in and what your capacity really equals out to be. Projects have to move out before new ones can be moved in.
And at a team level, it’s especially important for managers and leaders, but it’s really all of us at a certain point. You have to honor that you’re not going to get everything done, and that something either has to be dropped or pushed forward in an imperfect state.
Understanding your capacity for change starts with understanding how much room in your (your team’s) schedule there is to take on strategic work. If it’s just filled with urgent and recurring work, take a look at all the routine tasks and projects and ask yourself the following:
From here, you’ll be able to build in space for strategic thinking that will expand you, your company, your team and more, to the next level of success — without compromising the essence of what makes you flow.
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 Change Work Is Strategic Work appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
Having experienced Elon's Twitter, you may soon have the opportunity to live in a city run on his logic. The Wall Street Journal reports Elon "Pedo Guy" Musk is looking to develop his own town. Described as a "Texas utopia," I can only guess what that may be! — Read the rest
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.
If you’ve been overwhelmed by trying to figure out how much capacity your team has, and whether they’re focused on what matters most, here’s my take: looking at project lists or time sheets is not really going to help the situation.
This conversation came up recently with one of my clients managing an M&A. It revolved around the difference between capacity vs. utilization. Visionary/expansive execs tend to think that increasing capacity automatically increases utilization, but, if you’ve run an operation, you know that’s not true.
He was getting bogged down with wanting improved visibility on what his team had been working on. He thought if he could get a full Asana setup up and running, that would ensure or provide that line of sight.
But that wasn’t what he really cared about. What he cared about was the team’s capacity and utilization for doing the important strategic work.
That, friends, is an entirely different conversation and need — than whether your team’s Asana ought to be built out more extensively.
Instead of spending months building and tweaking Asana, I suggested something simpler and more relevant: Put the focus on how many focus blocks your team has available.
Understand that most strategic projects require at least three focus blocks per project, per week, to get any real traction on them.
The concept of focus blocks and the principle of three focus blocks per week, per project, comes straight from Start Finishing. A focus block is 90 to 120 minutes of time dedicated to a single project. You can also think of these as deep work blocks, if that phrasing resonates with you.
If a teammate has six focus blocks open per week, the team may have a need for those blocks to be devoted to a single project to get it done faster — or other times there’s a need to spread that teammate’s focus between two different projects for a balanced portfolio.
(Again, for those in the back, at least three blocks per week are needed to find momentum.)
When in doubt, choose to focus on getting one project to the finish line. The real goal is project throughput – or the the amount of material or items passing through a system or process – not project load.
In a team setting, project load amounts to a lot of status/update conversations, shuffling, and emotional labor that makes work suck more.
Putting the spotlight on focus blocks does the real work of showing what your team’s true capacity and utilization is. That’s much better than looking at how projects are laid out in any tool.
It’ll help you see that most likely up to 50-80% of your team’s time is filled up with meetings, routines, admin, and comms.
Seeing this allows y’all to make different choices. Do you just accept that you have, at best, 20% of your team’s time available to do deep/important/strategic work — and use that information to prioritize what deep/important/strategic work can be done?
Or do you work on your team habits in order to create more space in your team’s schedule for the important/strategic work?
Another takeaway: Avoid the “we can just hire someone to do that other stuff” trap.
(Spoiler alert.) Hiring doesn’t necessarily save team time, or free up capacity for the higher level work. Someone has to hire, integrate, and train the new person—in other words, it becomes a project that cuts into the focus blocks you were already short on.
The new person won’t immediately be able to do the work, so you won’t feel the increase in capacity and utilization for a few months.
And if your team – including the managers and leaders who coordinate and allocate resources – is already at 100% utilization and can’t keep up, additional capacity amounts to waste, unmet expectations, and, typically, debt that then sucks away at resources you could use to increase utilization.
My typical approach when it comes to engagements is actually to cut or punt the non-critical “strategic priorities and projects” first.
Most clients don’t want to make cuts on ongoing projects until we walk through the cost of the status quo and how adding capacity (if you take the hiring route) is going to decrease utilization for a quarter or two. In 80% of the cases, we can keep all the people we have and deploy them more effectively and sanely, so it’s not the layoff/fire conversation leaders fear.
With the state of global burnout we’re in, leaders are far more likely to lose teammates as a result of burnout and disengagement — simply because they’re not cutting back to a level of work that normal humans can actually do.
I share more on using focus blocks in a team setting in my forthcoming book, Team Habits. Try using the concept I’ve shared today, but in the meantime sign up to receive more updates about Team Habits, coming this August and now available for pre-order at your favorite bookseller.
The post Using Focus Blocks To Boost Your Team’s Capacity appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
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