Marinating

March 22, 2022March 21, 2022 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

A little while back, a dinner I made was a bust.

It was a steak taco that required marinating meat for “2 to 24 hours.” With only 2 hours of marinating, the meat barely had any flavor.

Fortunately, I learned my lesson, and marinated overnight the next time around.

You can see the punchline easily enough.

The harder question is: what parts of our work (and home) life are like marinating?

Where will doing the same activity sooner create 10 times the yield?

Things like:

First drafts
A half hour with a pen and a blank piece of paper jotting down first thoughts about a thorny problem
Reading together at bedtime
Feedback given right after something happened
Coaching
Problem-defining (versus problem-solving)

Often, we find ourselves stuck in a vain search for more time, when we don’t need more time at all.

We need time well spent, invested early, so that the seeds we plant have time to grow.

Terror/Freedom, Calm/Structure

February 1, 2022January 31, 2022 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I was talking with a colleague about what makes us most productive, and we came up with this fun 2-by-2.

We were discussing whether he was, in fact, most productive in the top-right corner: namely, when he’s got as much Freedom as possible, and has massive, important goals that are so big that they’re Terror-inducing.

We had a chuckle about this—it’s a caricature, to be sure—but it did get me thinking that this simple 2×2 might be a great shortcut for getting to know each others’ work styles.

For example, I’m also at peak productivity (though not sustainably) when I’m somewhere in the middle of the ‘Terror’ quadrant. A bit of fear leads me to crank out a ton of good work, whereas if things are too calm for too long they feel flat to me.

That said, Terror for too long does wear me down. What’s best for me is hanging out somewhere between Calm and Terror, with enough Calm for predictability and self-care and enough Terror to keep me motivated.

Similarly, I’m comfortable with, and like, a strong foundation of structure; and I find too much structure stifling. I need to be in the middle of that axis to thrive: structure as a jumping-off point for the freedom to dream about and create new things.

I find this 2×2 diagnostically helpful. For example, when I think about work groups that have trouble, the four that jump out are:

(Usually) One high-Structure person and one high-Freedom person. The exception is if this high-structure person is an awesome, self-aware supervisor who knows how to give their freedom-seeking team member tons of white space and motivation, while not constraining her too much. Conversely, a high-freedom person managing a high-structure person seems particularly hard to pull off. The high-structure junior person often ends up confused, stressed out or frustrated.
(Always) One strongly Structure/Calm person with another strongly Freedom/Terror person unless both are super-self-aware. These two environments are so different that these pairs struggle to find common ground.
Too many high-freedom people working together without someone to create structure. Also known as “chaos.”
High-freedom people who have been forced into high-structure roles. This is a tricky one because we naturally associate seniority with more management responsibility. That’s why we give management job to successful high-Freedom folks, and then get confused when they (and their teams) struggle.
Finally, I wonder if the High Structure / High Terror profile exists and, if it does, what makes that person thrive.

A parting thought, lest we lose the nuance here: maximum productivity does not equate to maximum well-being.

I expect everyone wilts eventually when they feel too much terror for too long. However, I do believe there are folks who have higher ‘terror’ thresholds and who find low-to-medium levels of terror exhilarating rather than off-putting.

We all surely inhabit parts of the framework in different settings and moments. The useful point for introspection is to explore our emotional reaction to each of the four quadrants, and unpack how that reaction impacts our energy levels, our focus, and our productivity.

Reclaiming Monday Mornings

February 12, 2019February 11, 2019 ~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

I’m a big believer in weekends.

Rest, recovery and unplugging allow us to clear our minds of the dross and stress of the previous week. If we truly let ourselves recharge, we find ourselves with both more energy and creativity on Monday mornings.

However, work still happens on the weekend: emails still arrive, questions need to be answered, calendars get shifted around, Slack channels come alive.

It’s tempting to wake up Monday morning and see this influx as a weedy undergrowth that needs to be hacked away immediately. With this mentality, we choose to start our Monday morning with a few hours of routine, mindless tasks.

A great trade is to find just one hour over the weekend for simple, menial work: delete spam and respond to spam-like work messages; check over to do lists for the week and add/delete items; look at and adjust calendars. These tasks carry a light mental load and ticking them off lets us start the week calmer and more grounded because we are on our front foot.

Then, the payoff: use the first two hours of Monday morning for something creative, important, scary, or fun. Maybe it’s a project you’ve been putting off, or it’s one you’ve not yet discovered. Perhaps its lying hidden on a blank sheet of paper, waiting for you to find it.

This small, stolen hour of catch-up work can recast Monday mornings: instead of “here we go again” we start the week with “finally, a few precious hours to do important work before I get sucked into the week.”