Switch off to switch on

Work related stress is an integral aspect of most of our lives. I know it had been one of mine. It led me to bad eating habits, to overweight, to lack of sleep, lack of focus and in general lack of enjoyment of my life. My life was wasting away in front of me, and I was not aware of it. I could not see it because I was really to busy looking at my Blackberry screen. What a waste.

I got lucky a couple of months ago. Thanks to my loved ones I recognized what was happening to me and how self-destructive this had become for me. I had the luck of finding the opportunity to make another choice, and choice for more responsibility but less day-to-day pressure. It enabled me to stop certain practices and start others.

I still have good friends that chase the clock. They are stressed when they call me, they don’t get to dive deep into subject matter, they touch and go without really opening themselves up to the subject matter. They don’t sleep well, they gain weight, their partners are unhappy because they are never there, they’ve lost touch with their children. It’s not what it’s all about.

Looking back over these past five months, in which I have been more productive than before, this is what I learned to do.

Switch off your smartphone

If you can live without one, do it. It may seem alien to most of you, it may seem like a loss of status, but you may find it’s the single best action you can take to lighten the pressure on you now. And let’s be honest … I love my iPhone as much as the next geek, but most of us are not emergency surgeons. Most of our jobs do not require us to react in an instant to any message finding its way to our inbox. Imagine this would be your fixed bakelite home phone of years past. You would not be able to sit down before it rang again … and again … and again. How long would it take you to put that receiver off the hook? Then why do you accept to become a hostage to your blinking blackberry light? And while you’re at it, configure your VIPs, limit them to you next of kin and kill the ringer for any other profile. Have a nice and respectful voicemail message. Then check your voicemails like you do your physical mailbox.

Switch of all incoming message notifications

Do this on both your devices (blackberry, iphone, ipad, or, heaven forbid, Android device) and your computers. Any type of mail notification will rip you out of the zone you’re in and kill your productivity. With lots of people being confronted with 100+ incoming emails per day, not counting spam, that’s one about every 5 minutes on an average workday. If you know that getting into the zone on an excellent day will cost you upwards of 15 minutes, notifications alone kill your productivity. Because subject lines are often so badly written, you’ll want to go and see what it’s all about … and you will get killed. Last piece of advice on this: don’t check your email first thing in the morning. You’ll get sidetracked from the main tasks you’ve defined and you will regain the initiative around lunch, if at all. That’s half a day wasted. Not worth it. Check your mail twice a day, then batch your responses.

Stop wearing a watch

This is a recent practice I started when the battery on my wristwatch ran out. I have an omnifocus task sitting in my errands context instructing me to go and get a replacement, but I wait. Not really being aware what time it is, with good reminders set for meetings in my calendar application (the only relevant notifications I use on my PC) I have become more, not less aware of time passing. It allows me to focus more and yet be more aware of overall time. It’s an excellent practice I expect to start paying good dividends real soon.

End your workday on time

Yes, I am an expert. I have been hired for my expertise, and I am expected to deliver this expertise and create an added value. I’m also a manager of a (small) department and I need to manage the internal audit team and ensure we deliver to specs. But I also am a dad and a husband and a friend and an advisor to other people. So while I owe my employer my employment, I pay him in focus and dedication by turning off my email notifications and smartphone and really focus on the job at hand. I owe my employer my full commitment, but he owes me the right to turn my focus to other things when I am not working for him. Which is what I do when I end my workday on time. When I’m there, I’m there all the way (“When you’re a Jet, your …” ;-)) but when I end my workday, it actually ends and does not extend into my personal life.

Watch less TV

We’re a TV generation. We grew up with color TV in the ’70s and ’80s and are now losing ourselves in hundreds of channels, but nothing on. The growth of reality TV is a sad commentary on our time. Reality TV is a contradiction in terms: reality is what happens when you switch off your TV. We have excellent tools which allow you to capture your favorite shows. Make a conscious selection of what you want to watch and how much time you’re willing to dedicate to that. Then record or retrieve the shows or the programs you want to see and watch only that. Don’t exceed the alloted time you have reserved for that. And don’t overdo it either. It’s a sedentary activity that adds little to no value to your life. How does it influence your life if Brooke has yet again married whomever. My next to last episode of “The Bold and the Beautiful” I saw was in 1993, when my grandmother was dying. Recently, I caught the back-end of an episode and had little difficulty following what was going on. The story never changes. It does NOT make a difference. Hence, why bother. Go and create something.

Go create something

Yesterday I was in the garden, picking up after the kids. They had constructed a camp in the woods behind the house and had a jolly good time with it. It’s been too long since I built a camp of my own. When I was in Benin recently, I took a lot of video footage with my iPhone. I had a lot of fun in the evenings cutting the footage into a short three minute movie of my impressions. It’s not great art, but it’s a highly creative endeavour nonetheless. Find something to do. Write, blog, play with your kids, create … don’t die in front of the television screen. There’s an entire world out there for the taking.

Define three core tasks

A recent practice I adopted which really aids me in defining what is really relevant is the practice of defining three core tasks. I have a multiyear goal set, highly ambitious, which I’ve translated in three objectives which are achieveable in a timespan of about one year and which should lead to getting closer to achieving the multiyear goal set. The yearly objectives I’ve mapped into an OmniPlan structure where I’ve mapped a number of interrelated monthly goals to them. If I hit those goals, I’ll hit the yearly objectives. The monthly goals are broken down into weekly objectives, in turn broken down into daily core tasks. The system is not airtight from a project management view, but it’s not supposed to be. I’ve found out that if I don’t have a larger goal, in a yearly, monthly and weekly context, that I don’t get half as much done than if I have. I need targets, and I need the freedom do freely execute towards them. That’s why only three core actions per day drive me in the right direction while allowing me enough freedom to create and be creative. They may be smaller actions, but they need to bring me towards achieving the goal I have set for that week. A daily core task may be “Sit down with X to talk about Y”. If having that conversation, even for 10 minutes, allows me to go quicker on achieving a broader objective, for example because the talk clarified a lot and allowed that person to give me feedback or to appreciate why we as internal audit adopted a certain position, it’s more than worth it. These things often don’t get done if you don’t specifically plan them. These actions are often born in OmniFocus during a project review but I explicitly put them in my agenda on that specific day to really be able to execute them and mark them as done that same day. I don’t want ten tasks, because then I would just move them backwards and backwards. I don’t want one sole task because I would just procrastinate. Three is the right amount.

In the end

It really is all about focusing on what matters most, and really saying no in a loud voice to all that is not that relevant, but may be enticing. You need to know what you want in order to be able to say no to all the interesting things that lead you away from your goal. Good luck!

On encountering the resistance

Encountering the resistance

There’s in inherent fear in most, if not all of us. I used to define it as laziness, but I understand now that’s not what it is. It’s fear. Sometimes hidden, sometimes very barely concealed, freezing fear. Sometimes it beacons you to walk away from an endeavor. Sometimes it will make you run, as fast as you can.

What fear usually isn’t

Read some of the excellent work from Stephen Pressfield or Seth Godin: they speak about the “Lizard Brain” or about the “Resistance” … They correctly describe it as the place you dread to go. It’s pretty much build into us. A couple of thousand years ago, the place unknown, the place we dreaded to go usually had a couple of meat eaters in it. They ate us. So we stayed away. We became programmed to be aware. It’s only natural selection, in the most direct of manners … the curious ones died. Hence, even while we remained curious, we also remained apprehensive of unknown situations. But fear is not always a relevant indicator of a bad situation. Quite often it’s an indicator of us entering an unknown terrain. A new challenge.

We’re most afraid of going where we can make the most difference

You need to think about that. In essence, as Benjamin Zander said, you need not ask the question whether you will be recognized, or appreciated … you need to ask how you can make a contribution.

Your contribution is pushing through the resistance. Pushing through is doing what you are most afraid of for 10 minutes more. Just 10 minutes. That’s it. That’s where the true difference lies.

10 minutes more

You may find yourself reading technical books with deep wisdom. They may enhance your understanding. They will not make it easier to go out on the plains and face the tiger in your head. You will not find the answer in lofty techniques or the newest tools or whatever. The only way to beat the resistance, every day again, and again, and again lies in giving just those 10 minutes more.

Because usually, after those first 10 minutes, you understand it’s really not that bad out there. Guess what, you may even have fun.

This is something I fundamentally believe in. I also believe that those who beat the resistance (every day again, because it does show up for work, just as you do) are the ones who in the end make the difference and master their own productivity challenges

Better capture, processing and next action organization

I’ve been using mind mapping in combination with with OmniFocus for better capture, processing and next action execution. Let me tell you a bit on how I got there.

My brain is chaos

Sometimes, I have chaos for a brain. I’m not kidding. In the past, this has led to those well known and recognized moments of quiet, significant desperation and the feeling of impeding doom and trepidation as deadlines approached. I hope at least some of you have on occasion felt the sudden realization hit that you completely forgot about one crucial aspect which will be discussed by your boss, peers or colleagues that very same day. That one element that you needed to contribute, and forgot about.

Now, that’s the kind of situation I really wanted to avoid. So I did all the required reading. I started with the 7 Habits. Interesting, but I missed the bullet list telling me what to do. What can I say, I’m an operationally minded guy. I read Getting Things Done, even became a paying member of GTD Connect, and reaped some of the benefits, although I really didn’t use it enough. I filled Moleskine after Moleskine, and still things slipped through the cracks.

The breakthrough

Then I discovered mind mapping. And started to understand some of the power of a tool like OmniFocus.

The capture list - visual thinking applied

Now, I’m a very visual thinker. I think in images. Mind mapping has always helped me to formulate thoughts and ideas. I use it even to blog. Most of my blog posts, even this one, have been at least partly mind mapped before I start to write. Developing my capture list in a mind map was a revelation. Note I call this a capture list, not a next action list. My capture list is about exactly that: capturing.

What I do in this mind map is true brain dumping. The free format works for me. Free thinking about stuff I need to do or deal with, or even not but that is still on my mind. I feed it with notes I have taken when I was not in the opportunity to work on the mind map directly during the day. These notes are in my trusted Moleskines. Hey, I spent the money on them, better use them. So if it doesn’t go directly on the mind map, it goes in the Mokeskine.

Oh, by the way, I use the GTD completion checklist as an important weekly backstop to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything. It’s an excellent tool, and this way it does not get in my way.

OPML as a transition to OmniFocus

After I have done the capture phase, and I try to do this at least every three days (equivalent of twice a week), I open the entire mind map, which I have saved in OPML format, on my Mac. This is still a bit labor intensive but it does the trick on making me focus on processing, I highlight the words/characters of the topic of the mind map, usually at the end of the branch since I find the basis for my capture activity there.

Using services, I can then easily export this to OmniFocus’ inbox or even in a specific context or a folder. Now, and this is an important bit, using the services, I need to rewrite the OmniFocus entry. This is processing as I decide at that moment what I aim to do with this entry. I have the freedom to decide at that point whether I want to file this away for later or even discard it. It is an approach that focuses me on my decisions to define next actions on stuff, as David Allen calls it.

Tools

In terms of tools, I already mentioned OmniFocus. A great tool, I just wish there was a way to work with it in Windows as my most important client uses that platform rather than OS X. The mindmapping I do, I do in Mindnode Pro on Mac and iThoughts HD on my iPad. I save the mind map in OPML on my Dropbox account so I can retrieve the latest version from whatever device I am working on.

There you go. I just wanted to share what works for me.