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How to Tame Those Gazillion Ideas

idea capture

Summertime can present an interesting tension for many of us.

On the one hand, we spend more time enjoying the world and the people we love, away from screens. On the other hand, those screens are how we often capture the gazillion ideas running through our heads.

For what it’s worth, many clients and readers have told me that part of their anxiety about going without a device for a few days (or longer) is they don’t know where they’re going to capture ideas and to-dos. Even when I remind them about notecards and little notebooks, they feel overwhelmed at the prospect of getting all of those ideas and to-dos from analog into whatever digital tool they use to capture and track them.

In a post for another day, I’ll tackle what’s really going on with this “capture everything” anxiety, but, for today, I’m going to focus on toolsets rather than mindsets.

What you’ve probably experienced is that the problem with loose tasks and ideas isn’t how much time they’re going to take to do, but that a) they don’t have a default home and b) they keep nagging you to remember them. By “default home,” I don’t mean the 82 sticky notes all over the place. Those sometimes cause more swirl because you have to remember which ideas are on what stickies and where those stickies are.

Being away from your default home (and toolsets) is what makes the summertime especially spacy and ball-droppy for so many people. Per the usual, whenever you have a major change in context, you probably need to update your habits and tools to compensate.

Here are some tools that will help you find a home for those loose tasks and ideas:

  1. The Action Item Catcher worksheet – This free download tells you exactly what it does. Consider printing a few extra to have in your car, purse, bike bags, or wherever’s handy outside of your office. Keep them in a default place, so you know exactly where to go when that idea hits you.
  2. Momentum – A few weeks ago, we released Momentum’s Action Item Catcher feature, just in time for the summer. While many people love using Momentum on the desktop, remember it’s also built to be used on the go. When you’re out and about, this handy feature is another great place to jot down those ideas you don’t know what to do with (just yet), and then when you’re ready, you can “promote” those ideas to tasks and projects and schedule them.
  3. A “new task” bookmark on your phone’s home screen – Most work management tools have a web link that goes right to creating a new task, but their mobile apps often require too many steps to get there. Rather than fighting with their apps, you can bookmark that new task link to your phone’s home screen. (We recommend the same thing for Momentum, and have how-tos to make those home screen shortcuts for Apple and Android.) The major upshot of doing this is it helps avoid getting sucked in when you just need to drop something off, for yourself or your team.

When in doubt, go with the simpler option.

Printing out the Action Item Catcher so that you have a default home for those loose ideas and tasks may be more inefficient than 2 and 3 above, but it’s far more effective at making time and space than opening your phone, in most cases. Opening our devices is far more likely to lead to  being sucked into work when you’re out or accidentally falling into social media scrolling when you just meant to drop off a task or deliverable.

Whichever tools or methods you choose, focus on the capture aspect and save the sifting and sorting of those ideas for when you’re really back at work. The purpose here is to ease that “capture everything” anxiety in the moment, and get back to enjoying your time away.

The post How to Tame Those Gazillion Ideas appeared first on Productive Flourishing.

Reboot Your Week with a Mid-Week Reassessment

planning reassessment

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:

🥳What did you get done? Celebrate those wins, especially since you made them despite your distractions.

🙀What emergent projects popped up? Remember: emergent ≠ urgent. Projects can be things like managing illness, inlaws, and other surprises that have nothing to do with your work or business. But they take time, energy, and attention, so they’re projects.

⏭What projects got displaced / delayed? Determine where these need to be moved to — is it later this week, next week, or further into the future?

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. 

↩ Have your priority projects changed? Try not to get caught up in the urgency spiral here. Take a moment to look at your monthly projects to remind yourself of the bigger picture.  

👣What steps are needed to move these forward? Chunk them down into 2-hour blocks or 15-minute tasks that can be done this week.

1⃣What needs to get done first? Remember first in priority doesn’t always mean first in sequence.

🍪What tasks make sense to batch together? Reduce the amount of time you’ll spend context switching by pairing similar types of activities together, or combining a series of tasks related to the same project. 

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. 

🧩What can you shift around to give yourself time to get momentum on your priority projects? 

📢 Is there anyone you need to tell about any change in plans?

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.

Does Your Team Really Need a Daily Stand-Up Meeting?

daily stand-ups

Most daily stand-up meetings make whatever they’re trying to solve worse as a result of eating up team time and focus.

First, let’s look at real meeting math. The daily stand-up isn’t just the 15-30 minutes of the stand-up — when we talk about meetings, we also need to include the prep, post, and slack time. That stand-up meeting eats up at least one hour of teammate time — so if you have five teammates, that’s at least 5 hours of team time. 

Five hours of team time per day per week adds up; given that the average knowledge worker makes ~$30 per hour, that’s $3,000 per month in wages for just this meeting, for five people.

Should you still decide to do daily stand-ups, despite knowing this, here’s what not to do:

do's and don'ts daily stand-ups

  1. Don’t use stand-ups as a verbal readout of people’s task lists. You’ll get far too much noise and undermine the chances of people actually using their work management software.
  2. Don’t use them to figure out your priorities for the day. This is the surest way to get caught up in the urgency spiral, where the urgent always outweighs the important. The work that would most move the needle gets constantly neglected in favor of reacting to and putting out the next tiny fire on deck.
  3. Don’t schedule stand-ups at a time that makes people end up with incoherent Swiss Cheese schedules. For instance, having a meeting at 9:30 (when people start work at 9) means most people can’t or won’t be able to commit to deep/focus work for the whole morning. They’ll spend the time after the meeting getting re-sorted, doing a bit of work, and then start transitioning to lunch. Better to do it at 11 am so people can have a full focus block in the morning and then transition to lunch, since they’re going to be doing that anyway.

Here’s what TO do:

  1. DO share timely information that requires some conversation or questions for clarification. Playing 20 questions on Slack or Teams all day is worse than having a quick convo to discuss the specifics of a project.
  2. DO ask people to share their (one) priority project or task for the day. This makes prioritization a team habit and ensures folks are aligned.
  3. DO ask if your team has any blockers or support needs. Build the team habit of team members helping identify each other’s blockers and support needs, while normalizing the reality of blockers and needs for support. (Don’t penalize people asking for support or bringing up potential blockers.)

As I write in Team Habits, most bad or counterproductive meetings are a result of other poor team habits. If your team’s habits around decision-making, prioritization, and collaboration aren’t working, you’ll end up having a lot of crutch meetings to address those issues. 

But crutch meetings cost your team’s most precious resources: their time and their attention.

This means that often, the best way to fix bad meeting culture isn’t just to work on improving meetings, and adding new ones. It’s by starting with the root issue with your team habits, that is, working on decision-making, planning, communication, so that the endless unproductive meetings won’t need to keep happening. 

I’ll turn it over to you: if you’re doing daily stand-ups, what are the root challenges or (bad) team habits that are creating the need for the daily stand-ups?

The post Does Your Team Really Need a Daily Stand-Up Meeting? appeared first on Productive Flourishing.

Change Work Is Strategic Work

Understanding your team's capacity for change is vital for strategic work

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.

Why “Two Weeks From Now” is Closer Than You Think

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:

  • dream up the next product offering?
  • dig into that deep problem or question that’s been nagging you?
  • plan an approach to that opportunity you’re trying to advance?

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? 

Prioritization and the People it Impacts

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. 

Where’s Your Capacity for Strategic Work?

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: 

  • Can I/we eliminate it? Would it make any difference if we did? 
  • Can I/we continue intentionally deferring recurring tasks without causing urgent or strategic harm? 
  • Can I/we outsource the task or offload it to another team or function? 
  • Can I/we be smarter and more efficient about the task?

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.

What to Do When Work Intensity Is the Problem

Work intensity isn't always solved by subtracting.

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:

  1. Take a stretch break
  2. Drink water
  3. Walk around the block
  4. Read a selection from a book
  5. Snuggle with her cat
  6. Meditate
  7. Focus on breathing

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.)

Subtraction Won’t Solve the Work Intensity Problem

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:

  • Anxiety: When people have anxiety about open tasks, there’s pressure to close the tasks out, even if they’re harming themselves in the process. Checking off tasks becomes a dopamine hit and to get as many hits as they can, they crunch the amount of work down to as little time as possible, which has the effect of creating anxiety to relieve anxiety. Yes, it’s absurd when said out loud, but it’s a dynamic so many people face day in and day out in the workplace. 
  • Hustle culture: We could also call this the “faster, better, stronger; growth for growth’s sake; more is better” mentality. The metaphor I use here is mucking a horse’s stall. Every day, society puts some mind crap in our stall, so after every few days, we’ll have to clean it out, only to do it again a few more days later. We can’t stop the mind crap and pressure accumulated really, we can only recognize that it’s not ours and have less drama about cleaning it out.

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.

Using Focus Blocks To Boost Your Team’s Capacity

Using focus blocks to boost your team's capacity

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?

But Can’t We Just Hire People to Increase Capacity?

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.

Strategies For Thriving In A Remote Workplace With ADD & ADHD

thriving with adhd work from home remote work

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.

How ADD and ADHD Symptoms Show Up at Work 

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.

How ADD Affects My WFH Routine

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!)

Tips to Manage Your Attention When Working Remote

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. 🙂

  1. Planning is your friend

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. 

  1. Use a Timer

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. 

  1. Block out time on your calendar 

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.)

  1. Establish Space and Boost Energy with Music

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:

  1. Use one of your five senses

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: 

  • Move items on your desk around for a “new” environment and create visual novelty
  • Try a nice scented lotion, a candle, or essential oils to activate your sense of smell
  • Wash your face or do your makeup in the middle of the day to refresh yourself
  • Do a dance, or get some stretching or movement in to boost your endorphins & your dopamine. 

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. 

The Bottom Line

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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