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This morning, I realized how much of my current suffering is grieving the lost time from when Dad passed about a year ago. I had already incurred enough distraction and time debt before that, but Dad’s passing pushed me over the edge. This was also about the time Cory exited the team. We’d brought him on to help with Momentum growth, and with his departure, it left me with two big growth projects to juggle — and I couldn’t push the book forward and grow Momentum at the same time.
The residue of those losses lingered on everything. I hadn’t seen the residue because it’s not about the losses themselves, it’s about the time debt and tough choices they created in the midst of those two major projects.
In a beautiful irony, it was reading Michelle Varghoose’s reflection about how Start Finishing helped her that helped me see what was going on with my own journey. She wrote that letting go of projects as part of the life projects exercise freed her to focus on the projects that really mattered. In a LinkedIn comment on Isabeau Iqbal’s post, I mentioned that the underrated gift of getting to good enough is the freedom it brings.
Both threads were about the freedom and peace that comes from letting projects go.
This morning, I realized that it wasn’t the projects that I needed to let go of, but my story that I could do anything about being behind and recovering the lost time since Dad’s passing. I’ve been doing the best I can every day to do the essentials, reduce the scope of the business, and slowly reabsorb the rest of the work that’s come back to me. Most importantly, I feel like I’m doing all this in an integrous way and asking for help and grace from teammates in ways I never would have before.
Lost time can’t be found; our best is all we can do. Sometimes, our best is not enough to catch everything that’s coming our way with the time, energy, and attention we have in the moment.
Those are the breaks and are the occasional pains of being human. We can’t change those breaks and pains, but we can change the suffering we add to the pain.
And, by ‘we’, I mean ‘I’. And, if this is hitting you in the feels, I mean ‘you’.
I wrote in Start Finishing that to trade up, you have to let go. In that context, I meant trading up to better projects. In this post, I’m taking a broader perspective on trading up.
Trading up to freedom and peace is even better than trading up to better projects. It’s easier for most people to entertain trading up projects because projects = doing = contributing = being valuable = deserving (love, respect, pleasure, etc.). Choosing freedom and peace is harder because it makes you center yourself and your needs. (Reminder: you and your needs matter, regardless of the doing you’re doing.)
I’ll leave you with three questions:
Life presents us with enough to carry all on its own. Careful that you don’t add more to it than needed. There’s an important person who has to carry that additional, needless burden.
The post What Do You Need To Let Go Of? appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
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:
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.
As much as we tell ourselves that multitasking is productive, we know at an intuitive level that it’s not. The lie of multitasking is that, if we just do it well enough, we’ll be able to get All.The.Things done.
Unitasking forces us to accept that we’re not going to get to all the things we want or feel we need to. That’s a hard truth that we’d rather negotiate with than accept.
But even after we accept that truth, there’s another hard part about unitasking: holding boundaries.
This is coming up for me because, as I type, I’m on a family trip. After spending too much of too many days working during family trips in the past, this time, I decided that I’m not doing that anymore. I neither work well nor am the son/brother/husband I want to be. Nobody and nothing gets what’s needed, including myself.
Because of the nature of my work, being present with family includes not having devices on me. Yes, not having devices on me is about not mindlessly grazing and checking email and Slack, but even more important is it keeps me from starting to write or getting wrapped up in an idea so much that I’m half-hearing conversations and half-present — which means not being present.
To my left, Angela, my sister-in-law, and my mother-law are getting pedicures. They are oblivious to my presence because they’re in pedicure bliss getting their toenails painted, something which I opted out of, which gave me this little bit of focused space and time to write today’s Pulse.
Don’t get it twisted, though: I did get a pedicure.
They’ll be done soon, which means I’ll be done here soon, too.
In the table-setting portion of our last Level Up Retreat, we informed our participants that we would not have devices on us during the week and we had built the design of the retreat so that none of us would need devices. We let them know that, if it supported them, we would hold their devices for the week so they wouldn’t be distracted. Our rationale was that we wanted to be 100% present for our participants and wanted them to be 100% present for themselves and each other.
No one took us up on the offer, but most of the time, no one had devices on them. The exception was in the evenings because #IslandSunsets.
Many participants commented that they’d never really had a restorative trip before. They thought they had, but then they experienced real presence. One participant realized that just the thought of emails “being there” on her phone made her anxious; she removed her mail client from her phone and hasn’t added it back.
I’m sharing these stories because I hope they’ll get you to think about how you can be more present during the upcoming trips, vacations, and moments ahead of you.
What might you experience if you were 100% there? How would it feel to not half-do and half-be in the moments you’ve set aside to be with the people you love?
Yes, it’s hard to assert and hold that boundary. But it’s worth it.
My time’s up. I hope it helps you enjoy yours more.
The post Boundaries & Presence: The Myth of Multitasking and What It Costs Us appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
I’m equal parts excited and trepidatious to announce that I’ve started a new publication on Substack called Better Team Habits. As I mentioned in my first post there, the intent is to create a more focused and fresh space for content and conversations about teamwork, leadership, strategy execution, and organizational dynamics.
I’ve long resisted separating team topics and conversations from individual topics and conversations. Since the early days of Productive Flourishing, it’s been a both/and conversation in my mind. Since most people work in teams and many of our readers start as or inevitably end up in leadership and management positions, it’s made the most sense (to me) to keep it as one global conversation.
A few different forces came into play that prompted me to think harder and make the different and harder choice to split the spaces:
I often say “When in doubt, choose the simpler option.”
The far simpler option compared to all that repositioning, shoehorning, rebuilding, and segmenting was to let Productive Flourishing be what it’s become — a site that helps creative types thrive in their individual work and lives by focusing on foundations — and to build another space focused on thriving with and in your team.
In another post, I’ll talk about why I chose Substack over some of the other options, but as soon as I made the decision that this was the next step, I felt a relief I hadn’t felt since 2015. I don’t have to hold back in either space. I can go full-in to my body of work in the team, leadership, and org space on Better Team Habits and I can go full-in to my body of work in personal foundations here.
Better Team Habits is new and doesn’t yet have much content. Between the book, content from here that I’ll revise, and what’s coming up from my fieldwork every day, I have a lot I’m looking forward to sharing. If you like watching things evolve and don’t want to feel like you’re catching up, you can join the journey now.
And, as far as what’s going to change here on PF, expect more resources that will help knowledge workers, creators, and entrepreneurs do their best work. PF has always served the creative class and we’re going to get better at doing that.
It’s too early to tell how it’s all going to work out and whether I’ll wish I had done this a long time ago or if I’ll wish I’d never done it. But I’m most engaged when I’m actually exploring and figuring it out rather than wondering, hedging, and holding back. So it’s time to experiment. And I’ll be sharing what I’m learning along the way here and on Better Team Habits.
The post Launching Better Team Habits on Substack appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
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:
Here’s what TO do:
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.
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.
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.
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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