Category: Work

To Be of Use

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I’ve always bristled when I walk into an elevator and someone greets me with, “Only two days until Friday.”  The notion that our weekdays are a hamster wheel counting down to time away from work has never sat right with me.

It’s not that work isn’t sometimes hard, or even a drag. And I too love the weekends.

But, if we are lucky, we are often finding the beauty in our work, the moments of connection and self-expression, the pride what we have created, our own job well done.

It’s clear when a potter or a painter creates something that this thing exists because of them. It is the product of their art, their devotion and their vision.

Why any less so for the rest of us?

Last week, a teammate of mine shared this beautiful poem with me: To Be of Use, by Marge Piercy.

It captures the subtle beauty of a job well done, and the attitude it takes to toil every day, while also seeing that our strain and our sweat, and our time in the muck, is what it takes to create a thing of beauty.

“Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.”

Speaking of which, I recently was on the We Are for Good podcast, speaking with Becky Endicott and Jon McCoy. It was a joyful conversation about philanthropy, nonprofits, and the people who work in them and give to them. At the end I go on a bit of a rant about finding connection and meaning in our work. Enjoy.

 

To Be of Use, by Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Predicting the Future

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

More often than not, when we’re predicting the future, we think something along the lines of:

“Because I feel like this now, I’m sure that I’m going to feel like this later.”

 This is the biggest trick our mind plays on us, based on the fallacy that there’s some inexorable link between my today experience and my future experience, whether that future is next week or next month.

The relationship between these two things is almost nonexistent, but this simplistic, misleading thought is the source of countless cycles of stress and worry.

As in:

“I feel stressed and overwhelmed now, and things are only going to get busier, so I will surely feel more stressed and more overwhelmed in a month’s time. And I won’t be able to handle that.”

There’s a reason why every athlete’s post-game/match interview is so unrelentingly boring, when they talk about “I just tried to approach the match one point at a time, and I kept fighting until the end, knowing it wasn’t over until it was over.” The only answer is to have this moment be this moment, and the next moment be the next one.

Today I feel the way I feel today.

Tomorrow I will feel another way.

If a strong pattern emerges that connects these two things, and it’s a pattern we don’t like, then by all means we need to make a structural change.

But a few days when we’re dragging can become an unbearable weight if we convince ourselves that the way we feel now is the way we’ll feel forever.

We’re terrible at predicting the future, so the best thing to do is to stop pretending otherwise.

Open Mondays, Open Fridays

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

18 months ago, I made a structural change to my calendar that I love: leaving Mondays and Fridays (nearly) free of meetings, so that each week has a No Meeting Monday and a No Meeting Friday.

These days are dedicated to ‘doing’ rather than to talking or reacting. What’s valuable is not simply the number of hours available, it’s the large blocks of time every week: enough time to create, and the requirement to face a blank page.

How to Make it Happen

Most of my meetings are external, so I’ve set up my Calendly to only show free time on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Beyond that, it’s up to me to stay disciplined when someone asks me if I can meet on Monday at noon. (“No!”)

(Though, in truth, a short meeting here or there doesn’t materially impact my flow, since I do need some breaks.)

The Flow of the Week

On Mondays, I’m setting up for the week and laying the foundation for things that I need to move forward. This allows me to maintain some control over my (and the company’s) direction of travel rather than constantly being in responsive/reactive mode.

Fridays are for closing everything that came up during the week, including ensuring I’ve properly followed up on the many (many) external conversations I had on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

In addition, to make things really hum I also:

  • Us the end of the day on Friday to make a short list of Monday morning priorities. This helps me ensure I don’t lose any threads from the previous week.
  • Find time on Sunday to clean out my Inbox / Slack from the weekend. This way I don’t lose my Monday morning to responding to inbound traffic (but this is a balancing act because it’s also important for me to keep my weekends free…).

The Great (and Hard) Parts

The obvious challenge of this schedule is the hyper-full Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursday that can feel overwhelming.

I have pretty good endurance but there’s a limit to how many productive hours of conversations I can have (my max is 5). And even 3 or 4 hours of meetings is too much without great notes. I use Notion, with clear next steps documented at the end of every meeting. Otherwise, by 3pm I’ve forgotten what I agreed to do in my 9am meeting.

The more important, and subtle, challenge is starting the week off with blank space.

If I’ve caught up on Friday (and, when needed, over the weekend), then Monday morning is all mine. Forcing myself, nearly every week, to face that down and decide for myself what’s most important for me to do, feels a lot like staring at a blank page and needing to write a blog post: humbling, often intimidating, even spilling over into a bit of soul-searching….

What is my job when I’m not frantically responding to the things that everyone else needs me to do for them?

It’s a good question that we all need to ask ourselves regularly.

And I’ve found that without this sort of structure in my days, I can go weeks, and even months, without asking myself this question.

The fact is, it’s a question we all need to answer for ourselves, regardless of how ‘senior’ we are in the organization.

We all have unique talents and a unique perspective. We all, therefore, need to have our own agenda: the work we do when it’s our time and not someone else’s.

To Be More Productive, Limit Your Time

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

There’s a lot of talk about shorter work weeks. This is a natural outgrowth of the acceleration of remote work over the last two years.

The thesis, as I understand it, has two parts:

  1. Most/all employees can get the same amount done in 32 hours that they can get done in 40 hours.
  2. Doing so leads to an overall increase in well-being for everyone

I have no idea what the long-term data are/will be on the first point, but my first reactions are:

  • I’m sure most people waste a ton of time at most jobs. This  means there’s a lot of slack built in. So it’s believable that some people can work 20% fewer hours and get the same amount done.
  • I am curious about whether this impact is temporary or permanent.
  • And, more fundamentally, I wonder what happens in people’s heads when they feel they only have 4 days in which to get 5 days’ worth of work done.

Does our time being (or feeling) constrained lead us to be more productive?

I think this is entirely possible. When our boss, at 10am, tells us we’re working until 10pm today, most of us will find space for a longer lunch and a few other distractions.

Conversely, I’ve found (particularly during the pandemic) that knowing that I have a set of end-of-day obligations at home (driving the kids somewhere, cooking dinner) keeps me hyper-focused on getting everything I need to get done in the (shortened) available time and I am more productive.

You might experiment with juicing your output by, counterintuitively, constraining your time. Create your own strict deadlines for projects—“I’ll get this done by 5pm” rather than “by tomorrow”—and see if it creates a positive cascading effect in the hours leading up to that deadline.

The fact is, we all have moments when our energy lags throughout the day. The question is: what do we do in those moments, how do we manage them?

Do we consciously take productive breaks (getting some fresh air, walking around a bit, getting a glass of water and sitting quietly without our phones)?

Or do we dither and get pulled into (online) things that can spiral and that sap our energy?

For most of us, in the last 60 minutes before a deadline, we’re hyper-focused and spending 0% of our time doomscrolling.

The trick is to harness a sustainable version of this feeling over the course of a day, so we have a sustained sense of focus and urgency and, as a result, are much more efficient.

And, lest we forget, whenever we hit our own early deadline, we have to remember Jerry Seinfeld’s advice to give ourselves a (figurative) cookie. The reward for 4, 5 or 6 hours of super-productive, focused work has to be…rewarding! And that probably isn’t jumping immediately to the next task.

The bonus is that, not only does this behavior make us more productive, efficient and happier, it’s also an opportunity to practice being accountable to ourselves (and not just to other people).

The muscle of self-accountability is a blog post for another day, but the short version is this: the better we get good a keeping the promises we make to ourselves (along with, not instead of, the promises we make to others) the more chance that we’ll use our newly-found free time for projects that really matter.

 

Math Class

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

In most of my math classes growing up, you’d get partial credit for showing your work. This was a boon for me because I was sometimes prone to careless errors.

Giving credit for the work makes good sense in grade school math: the concepts matter more than getting the arithmetic 100% right.

Along these lines, working hard each and every day—what used to be face time in the office—can also be a way to show that you care, that you’re trying your best.

On the other hand, this can go too far.

As we get grooved into the habit of hard work, we start to measure ourselves in terms of hours spent rather than results achieved.

The hours, once a means to an end, become an end in and of themselves: look how hard I’m working (you say to yourself and others).

The problem is, this can become a negative spiral: we can slip into the bad habit of being less disciplined with how we spend our time, lose sight of the difference between urgent and important tasks, and (ironically, despite all the time we’re spending working) give short shrift to the best things we have to offer.

Letting your work stand there, to speak for itself, is an act of bravery.

Running for the Train

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

As everyone in my family knows, I have a persistent, daily, absurd issue with running for the train.

Each morning, to get to work, I walk a half mile from my house to the train station. At a relaxed pace, that walk takes 12 to 14. Walking briskly, you can do it in 10-12 minutes. Most mornings I do it in 8-9 minutes, and when things get bad, I sprint to the train in 6 minutes.

Mind you, this is all while fully dressed for work. And it’s not because I’ve overslept: I wake up at least 75 minutes before the train, and often I’ve been up for as much as two and a half hours (to exercise).

But here we are in January, and, like any period after a proper vacation, I find that on the first day back I  leave the house “early” and stroll casually to the train. While walking, I inevitably remark to myself how enjoyable this is, not just because I’m not huffing and puffing but also because I’m not starting my day with stress and rush.

Yet, most of the time, by Friday of that first week I’m back to rushing.

There’s a quality that all our days acquire when we get pulled back into the thick of things. For me, that quality is “rushed.” You will have, I suspect, a different default vice than I do.

Of course, it’s obvious that my vice isn’t serving me in a productive way.

Though, strictly speaking, that’s not true—since I engage in this behavior day in and day out, it has to be serving some need. This need seems to be the belief in the importance of the few extra things I do before dashing out of the house, or maybe there’s a bigger story I’m telling myself about how cramming activity into every last minute will sum up to a more productive day or week.

And yet, just imagine if they changed the schedule and moved the train five minutes earlier. I’d adjust, instantly.

While I continue to ponder my own foibles, here’s a question for you: what qualities do you let creep in to your days that don’t serve you—things that cause stress or worry or simply the theater of busyness? What trade-offs are you making that you could let go of? What things about how “busy” feels might be open to questioning? What mindset shift would make that sort of change easy and lasting?

What would be your equivalent of “if they changed the train schedule…”?

Here’s to a great start to your near year and new decade.

Stretch Assignments

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I may be looking at Ye Olden Days through rose colored glasses…

…but I can’t help but notice a difference in attitudes about work today compared to when I had my first jobs 25 years ago.

Back then, my colleagues and I would talk actively about whether our responsibilities would ever extend beyond making copies, sending faxes, and answering the phone. There was enough clerical work and hierarchy that “entry level” was truly menial. When a superior asked us to do anything that involved thinking, we jumped at it. Non-clerical work was a perk, and when it came our way, it was our job to find time to make it happen: do all our menial work, and do this too. These projects were a chance to demonstrate that we could do something other than stand by the fax machine, and each mini-assignment served as a testing-ground of whether we should be given another useful thing to do.

While there are countless flaws in that old system, the mindset around how to approach “stretch assignments” stands the test of time.

A great stretch assignment is a chance to do something new, challenging, and exciting. By definition it’s beyond our current levels of mastery, so it requires additional time on our part to learn and to get it right.

Often, though, I’m hearing just the opposite (including from job applicants): I can only take on that new thing if there’s a 1-for-1 trade of getting rid of this existing thing.

I don’t think it works that way, at least not in environments that are moving fast and trying to grow: the organization only grows its reach, its scale, and its revenues profits and impact, if the things that make up that organization—software, systems, processes and people—can stretch and grow.

Whether it’s a one-off project or an expansion of our role, the best way to take on stretch assignments is, literally, to stretch: our mental capacity, our willingness to be uncomfortable, the number of hours we put in to make the “stretch” possible on top of everything else that’s on our plate. That means finding time around the edges, whether early in the morning, late in the evening or on a weekend, to get that job done. Hopefully the opportunity and learning are more than worth the trade.

(Better yet, in the process of adjusting to this fuller plate, we often discover a bunch of non-essential things that we were spending time on that don’t require nearly as much polishing).

The reality is, the path to leverage in our job requires us to constantly shift, adjusting to new opportunities and new sets of responsibilities.

Learning the skill of sprinting, and getting adept at shifting and stretching time, is the way that we discover what our maximum output really is. It’s also how we discover where it is that we really shine.

How many times?

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I can’t help wondering: will there ever come a day when we skip all the hemming and hawing and just get on with our important, daily work?

Will we ever, finally, manage to completely ignore all our excellent excuses:

The setting isn’t right.

I have less time than I thought.

I didn’t sleep well last night.

A very important other problem is raging through my head, unresolved.

Something aches–my head, my heel, my heart–and there’s no way I can do my best work today.

The pain of noticing how bad this paragraph seems, of how loud the “stop!” in my head seems, of how far away I feel from “the zone, is real.

That familiar mantra, “this isn’t working this time, why bother?!” is running on repeat at top volume. I could just put this off until tomorrow, couldn’t I?

On and on and on and on.

How many times until this all fades away?

I couldn’t tell you.

I’ve not gotten there yet.

But I suspect that the noise never disappears, nor is it my job to un-see it.

Instead, over time and with enough practice, while that noise remains, it becomes something that IS while I continue to DO.

The real secret is this: the IS and the DO exist on different planes. That’s why they don’t need to fight it out, because they can coexist if we just put our heads down and get on with it.

Nothing needs to be vanquished for us to do important work today.

Seth Godin and Tim Ferris: What’s Your Job?

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

“What I do for a living is notice things.”

That one sentence is the most remarkable statement in the wonderful two-hour conversation Seth Godin has with Tim Ferris in a recent episode of Tim’s podcast.

Seth Godin, the many-times best-selling author, entrepreneur, speaker, teacher, iconoclast, and blogger. His job, in his words, is “to notice things.”

We should all have such a distilled version of the job that we really do (at work, in our families, in our lives).

If you had to boil it all down, like Seth does (“I notice things”), what’s your job?

In addition to answering that question for yourself, you could ask each person in your company to answer, then share those answers and discuss. It would be a great conversation.

(Bonus points for three words or less, but definitely no more than 10.)

 

How to avoid hiring a consultant for the wrong reasons

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Before spending money on a consultant to solve an important problem, ask yourself what would happen if:

Everyone on your team set aside 8 hours to work on this problem.

You all agreed that this work is more important than the other urgent things going on, so you’ll honor that time commitment.

You empowered someone on your team to be the ‘consultant.’ This person has free rein to use the allotted 8 hours of each person’s time as she sees fit.

Those 8 hours can be used for prep time, for meeting time, for brainstorming time.

Those 8 hours have a new set of ground rules, some of which push against the established culture of your team or organization. Cultural boundary-pushing looks like: asking un-askable questions, naming established assumptions, noticing the many elephants plodding around the room.

It’s expected that some of those 8 hours are spent generously reaching out to smart, helpful people at just the right moment to see if 15 to 30 minutes of their wisdom could get you unstuck.

Once those 8 hours are used up, the results will be shared, along with no more than three recommendations for what to do next.

At an agreed-upon date, those recommendations will be discussed, decisions will be made, actions will be taken and resources re-allocated based on that decision.

I’d bet that in 90% of the cases the above exercise gets you better results faster, for much less money, than hiring a consultant. And, better, yet, if you still decide that you need a consultant it will be for one of the only two good reasons to hire one:

  1. The consultant is a scalable resource: the amount of time required to do this work really is more than what your team can spare.
  2. The consultant has unique skills or resources not possessed by your team, and you need those skills to get the job done. These skills could be creativity or design. They could be skills in managing group dynamics and creating space for important conversations. They could be the skill of teaching things your team needs to learn.
  3. There is no third reason, because most of the time you’re hiring a consultant so they can bring the discipline to focus on an important problem. But you don’t need to pay a consultant to do that, do you?