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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.
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.
I’d like to float the idea that self-worth is a fundamentally different thing from self-esteem or confidence.
People talk about these ideas as if they were each one and the same. But self-worth, I would argue, is our essential value as humans — our internal sense that we’re good enough no matter what happens on the outside. Ultimately, we need to be looking at our self-worth — our inherent value — if we want to fuel our best work.
This is also relevant when it comes to teams, even if folks may think self-worth is always a personal development discussion. Teams can also struggle with the gap between their abilities and the level they’re achieving at as a result of invisible floors and ceilings.
Over the years, in all the time that we’ve been running the Monthly Momentum Calls, I’ve often used the floors and ceilings metaphor for this catch-22 about our self-worth and ability to achieve at the level of our potential.
Ceilings are false limits that are imposed on us from outside, which we eventually accustom ourselves to, and which limit our ability to rise to the natural level we might belong at.
But the floors part is where things get interesting.
Floors equal our stabilizing force. We’re talking about the base of the house or structure you have built for yourself to live inside. That’s to say, what you built to keep you safe and comfortable, also limits you. (That’s a different take than the typical one on confidence, self-worth and limiting beliefs.)
It’s good to have stability, and to have safety, and especially if you had an experience where you lacked that, it will seem reaaally appealing to stay where you are rather than take any risks — except when that structure also starts to limit your growth and ability to do your own highest value work.
The problem with remaining just safe and comfortable is eventually, we forget that we’re the ones determining the confines of our lives. We wonder why we aren’t living and working at the level we are dreaming of.
Sometimes those limits are built for us by others, and sometimes we are the ones responsible for them. That can be a tough pill to swallow.
In a lot of cases, people have outgrown certain limits but still abide by those earlier limits without noticing.
Our issues with self-worth, and trust — and how this impacts our floors and ceilings — can arise no matter what stage or level of success we’re at in life.
Some people would probably call this “imposter syndrome.” Essentially though it’s all the same thing, where we haven’t done the necessary work to develop our sense of our intrinsic value.
Issues with our self-worth often show up especially when we run into big challenges.
Our courage to break through our floors and ceilings often shows up in relation to whether we let ourselves be seen and heard.
Big challenge moments, or leading through a turnaround, can change your life if you’re willing to embrace those challenges, rather than balking and backing down out of fear, and/or the desire for ease and security.
Those challenges can arise for us in different ways over time, depending on the point we’re at in our career, whether that’s as an individual employee, freelancer, leader or business owner. It can be uncomfortable to push your boundaries — which is usually a good thing — but the resistance comes when you don’t want to break the stability you’ve created within certain parameters.
For introverts this might become about protecting their privacy, or for many folks, we end up resting on the financial stability we’ve worked so hard to create — and in the process we end up having difficulty pushing beyond our comfort zones.
The point of course is that sometimes it’s the externally imposed ceilings that are holding you back, but other times it’s you that’s holding you back — out of fear of unmooring yourself from your stable ground.
If you’ve recognized that these forces influence you, and you’re ready to push outside your comfort zone (but maybe still encountering resistance), it may be worth asking yourself some questions:
What is hiding protecting you from? Is it a fear of burnout? Of being unmasked?
In order to break out of this pattern, we have to remind ourselves that there’s also pain or frustration — and often an even greater, deeper, and longer term sense of disappointment — in knowing what you’re capable of, but not ever reaching for it.
If you’re aware of what you don’t want to compromise on, it becomes a question of creating better boundaries.
You can think of your new boundaries as a new house, or structure with floors and ceilings YOU have chosen, rather than ones that have been chosen by other people or by your subconscious.
You’ll want to create boundaries in terms of how much space you want to give other people’s thoughts about you. You might not want to live within their idea of you anymore.
If you work in a particular industry, or with a particular type of client, for example, you might not immediately want to quit what you’re doing.
But you’ll want to ask yourself: What’s the floor? That is, what is the minimum amount of time or energy I can keep spending on X? What’s the ceiling? What is the maximum amount of energy I’m able to spend on it?
When you’re clear on your floors and ceilings, and you know you want to attend to all the things, you can also rest in the knowledge of what the limits are for the amount of time or energy that you are going to be able to put forth.
You’ll also need to know when to let it go and walk away. Knowing when to walk away is different than never standing up, and never letting your light shine.
For a lot of people I’ve worked with, the floors and ceilings we’ve grown accustomed to can be really difficult to shake, because they operate on autopilot. Even when you’re trying to change your behavior around self-worth and your boundaries, you might only realize two hours later, “Oh shoot, I did the thing again!”
Or sometimes you know in the moment that you’re playing it safe.
Sometimes you might be able to rely on someone else — a trusted friend or advisor — to see these dynamics with more clarity than you can yourself. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an adult you trust either.
Kids, for instance, are incredibly intuitive. If you have them, you’ll know that to be the case. And they pick up on everything. That means that when you’re planning and leading in your life, and through your work, you want to be thinking about what you’re modeling for them on the day to day.
Modeling often means showing them how they can live their hopes and dreams. So when you see the ways you’re modeling, try to consider shining as you really are. You don’t want to just pass down the stories that we got when we were kids, which might have been limiting — whether about our abilities, creativity, abundance.
When teams run into their floors and ceilings in terms of their performance, managers often look at what or who on the team is broken and needs to be fixed or replaced.
In my forthcoming book, Team Habits, I take a long hard look at that knee jerk reaction within companies. One of my basic assumptions is that people are not broken, incompetent or lazy.
Teams have the same capabilities as individuals when they dig deeply and help transform their floors and ceilings. If you have a rapport and trust with the four to eight people you work with on a daily basis, this is a conversation you might want to consider having.
Human talent can shift quickly when it’s given space to thrive. You teammates can rise to the occasion in ways you, and they, individually, could not.
The primary way you can start to shift your team’s floors and ceilings is through team habit shifts. Probably the first habit you might think about is how to increase team belonging and performance.
Belonging is the habit that most closely links to trust, which is the foundational issue when it comes to floors and ceilings.
Many teams will need to learn how to trust each other before they can perform. Their ability to excel beyond expectation will mean breaking through floors and ceilings that have been imposed from outside, or higher ups — or as a result of their individual doubts.
But trust and belonging is the key that will get them there. Once we start to figure that out, the bonding starts happening more, which means the performing starts happening. Then you get a reciprocal spiral in action. And that’s how you get on the road to having a great team.
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 Self-Worth and the Floors and Ceilings Metaphor appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
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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