Category: Work

You Can’t Rush Deep Work

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Deep work isn’t just about setting aside time in bigger blocks, or about putting down the phone and turning off notifications—though those are good places to start.

Deep work is about the qualities of this sacred time you’ve set aside.

Think of the adjectives you’d use to describe deep work: focused, calm, exploratory, curious, lateral, creative, settled, playful, generative, spacious.

While there’s some overlap with how we’d describe our “non-deep” work— with words like efficient, bounded, clear, pace, and decisive—this overlap is probably small.

When moving between the two types of work, I sometimes struggle with how I experience time.

In regular work, time comes in small(er) increments. It exists as a helpful constraint to drive clarity and decisions. I’ve trained myself to get a lot done in 10 or 15 minutes, and that feels both comfortable and normal.

For deep work, I create blocks of time, but that’s just the beginning. My job is to hold the space I’ve created: the larger block of time is permission, so when I enter that larger space, I have to adhere to a different set of rules. I’m not checking the clock. I’m not looking for efficiency. I’m not thinking about what came last or what comes next. I’m not judging the success of the last moment against any criteria other than presence and engagement. This is a big shift, and it can be difficult to maintain.

Paying attention to how time feels is a good clue for whether we’re “in it” or not.

For “regular” work, time keeps us on task. It is a metronome that drives forward progress. Quality and quantity play together, and both are equally important.

For deep work, time is a buffer that protects us, creating the space we need for exploration and for leaps. The quantity of our insights and decisions does not matter; what matters is quality. Our job is to force ourselves to slow down, to move deliberately, to sit with what we’ve come up with and keep asking “is this good enough?” Our goal, for a block of deep work, is one great outcome, not 5 or 15 small but (only) good outcomes.

Here’s a hint: if you’re 10 minutes into a deep work task and you notice you’re 10 minutes in, you probably haven’t fully shifted gears yet.

Dress Up

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Each day, as we get ready to go to work, we put on an outfit. It symbolizes something—to us, to the people around us. It’s the role we will be playing for the day.

It’s not only clothes that convey a story. Consciously or not, as we transition from home to work, we are putting on our work identity as surely as we put on an outfit. A lot of that identity come from the narrative that we tell ourselves.

“This is who I am in this situation. These are the contours, these are the expectations, these are the likely behaviors.”

Shifting that is not as easy as changing our shirt, or our hair. But it’s not as different as it seems.

What if you decided to wear something different today?

Fast, Intentional, and Grounded

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I keep on thinking about the question Abby posed last week: how do we move quickly without rushing?

The dilemma, and the assumptions behind it, can be illustrated like this:

We all know the Fast and Rushing quadrant well.

It’s a version of “OMG I have SO much homework…” “No I have SO MUCH HOMEWORK!” that surfaced sometime in school. Busy becomes a way of life, and we get hooked on the buzzing tension. That rushing, frantic feeling can accompany getting a lot done. But often, we start to unconsciously equate fast with frenzy, and it’s no surprise that we often end up at a breaking point.

Ironically, it’s also possible to take that same energy into the “slow” quadrant: fear takes hold of us, and we cannot face reality. The tasks we are able to  accomplish pale in comparison to everything that needs to be done, so we do less. Yet we still find ourselves expending a tremendous amount of energy on worry and fear. We are paralyzed.

That, to me, is the main difference between the top and bottom half of this graph: not the amount we get done, but the amount of mental energy we spend cycling through worry.

We know how it feels to end up in this place: no matter how much we accomplished, it’s feels impossible to truly stop at the end of the day.

We can’t stop our minds from churning even when we’ve closed the laptop.

We’ve gotten on such a stimulation high—maybe, even, from crushing it all day—that we spend the rest of the night stimulating ourselves more, scrolling or finding other ways to get a dopamine hit.

As our brains gets used to this pattern, the pattern itself strengthens. We get to a point where, thanks to long stretches (months, years) of both moving fast and being frenzied, we assume that “fast” and “frenzied” are inseparable.

Think, for a moment, what fast and intentional looks like: maybe a professional athlete, or an animal in the wild that knows exactly where it’s heading.

There’s an efficiency of movement, a calm focus, no wasted energy, and a power that comes from a lethal combination of relaxation, clarity, and aggression.

“How much we do” and “how we do what we do” move on independent axes.

To be clear, I’m as likely as the next person to get caught up in worry, in unproductive cycling through “what if’s,” of a sense that if I slow down for even 20 minutes to sit and really think about something that I’ll have fallen behind.

But that mode makes me neither more effective nor happier, so I’m trying to observe it to see if I can let it go.

When I come up short, bouts of intense exercise and moments of unbridled laughter and joy with loved ones are a great way to reset.

What Are We More Afraid to Miss?

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Which scares us more:

  • Missing something, or
  • Not devoting enough time to the important things.

To explore this question, here’s a short parable of modern work life: how I manage my Inbox.

Starting 15 years ago, I established my current approach to my Inbox. It is based on the philosophy that there are two kinds of emails:

  1. Ones I need to act on
  2. Ones I don’t need to act on

The approach is brutally simple:

  1. The first group is unread
  2. The second is read.

No filing of any kind. Search works great. Zero inbox is meaningless; zero unreads is not. Voila!

This approach, plus ruthless use of the “mark as spam / block sender” functionality in my Gmail interface, has served me well for years.

Last week, for the first time in ages, I decided I needed to adjust my system.

I think it’s because of an explosion of workflow-related emails: Calendar updates, Calendly updates, Zoom meeting updates, Docusign updates, Box updates, AI recording updates, etc.

Combine this with the general flotsam of subscriptions of varying degrees of usefulness, and the ratio of must read:optional to read emails in my Inbox had gotten out of whack.

My solution to this is that I caved in to using filters in Gmail (I’m sure there are many better solutions (Superhuman, etc.).

What’s interesting is the experience of setting up those filters: it’s the task of taking every nonessential but interesting email and putting it somewhere other than my Inbox—the only part of my email world that I’ve looked at consistently for more than a decade.

The feeling is the same one I have when there’s an “internal meeting I could join but maybe don’t have to join.” You know the one: the content is important, you will probably learn something and maybe will make the meeting a little better. But do you absolutely need to be there?

The same goes for the Slack channel that’s been there forever that I rarely read; the client call that might be helpful to join even though someone else is running the meeting; the conference that I always attend, even though I can’t show concrete business results.

Most of us feel short on time—including time to be unproductive. We ache for open space, time to be generative, time to do the things that matter most… “once all this stuff is out of the way.” We tell ourselves that there’s no real way to create this kind of space.

One way to explore if this is true is to experience the fear of missing something: that essential email, that meeting where a wrong decision gets made, that photo op at the conference….

Perhaps that fear is justified, and the consequences would be significant.. Maybe success is defined by you getting to everything right on time; you being present to optimize each and every decision; you seeing all the edge cases and fixing them immediately. That might be what we need most from you.

Or it might be that there’s more resilience in the system than you expect.

That the cost of tracking and sifting through everything is real.

That setting a different bar for “what requires me” would create such a seismic, structural shift in your days and your weeks that it would be a little bit, or even a lot, disorienting.

This is what the sixth stage of Kevin Kelly is all about: “finding those things to which you are uniquely suited, and doing only those things.”

Not the places you can add value, not the things you are best at. The things that only you can do.

It’s a really high bar, and it cuts against the culture in most organizations.

It’s also worth exploring.

On Interviewing Well: Intention

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Why are you here?

In this interview, I mean, on this day, talking to these people?

If you have taken the time to apply for a job, to get invited for these interviews, to prepare, to spend your time in these conversations, then you must carry a singular purpose: to get this job.

That may seem obvious.

The reality is, it’s easy to lose track of your purpose in the artificial setting that an interview creates. The questions you’re being asked are all over the place. There’s a mutual dance going on of we-are-being-totally-genuine-with-each-other but also…not.

Nearly 30 years ago, in one of my early job interviews to be an Analyst at an investment bank, I was asked what would motivate me to stay past midnight night after night in the midst of a big deal. In a moment of regretful honesty, I replied, “I’m not sure, actually. Can you tell me what motivated you to do that?” Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.

While I don’t think you’ll make this kind of novice mistake, there are lots of smaller ways that you can express doubt and, inadvertently, undermine your candidacy.

Hence the importance of anchoring your intention.

For example, the best public talks I’ve given are the ones where I know who I’m speaking to. Not in a generalized way—I think of an actual person who I’m hoping to connect with or persuade.

Even if I’m extremely well-prepared and I’ve learned (most of) my talk by heart (aside: I never memorize the whole thing), my inflection, the bits that I improvise, my cadence, my presence…it is all impacted by who I’m imagining I’m speaking to.

The cumulative effect of each of these moments being tailored to the right person is a much more effective talk. Everything lands more, and the result is a more powerful, more persuasive story.

It’s the same when you sit down to interview: clarity of intention.

“I am here to get this job. To do that I will convey my strengths as a professional, my maturity, why I am a great colleague, and how I can fit into this team to help it play at a high level.”

Our job is to hold that intention strongly, while also being nimble enough to incorporate the new information that comes at us over the course of the day.

It’s a subtle shift, but it’s one that makes all the difference.

 

 

Other posts in this Series:

On Interviewing Well: Introduction

On Interviewing Well: Convey Deep Self-Knowledge (3-3-2)

On Interviewing Well: Owning Your Agenda

On Interviewing Well: Owning Your Agenda

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

We are at our most effective when we have a clear sense of purpose.

Heading into a job interview, that sense of purpose is captured in three sentences:

This is what I want them to know about me.

This is the work I’ve done that will convey why I’ll be a great member of their team.

This is what I want to learn about them.

It’s easy to get unmoored in interviews: it’s an artificial situation and we can revert to the person we were years or decades ago—when we had our first interviews—instead of the more intentional, confident person we are today.

The most important thing to remember is: the dutiful question-answerer is not the person who gets the job.

The person who gets the job is someone who comes in with executive presence that is communicated through a clear sense of purpose. That purpose is manifested by conveying a clear body of work that shows why you’re the right person for this job.

This is a delicate rebalance of the power dynamic that typically prevails.

As you walk into the room, the interviewer has all the power: you’re one of hundreds of candidates aiming to “win the bake-off.”

But if you enter with strong presence and clear intent, and you focus on communicating your relevant body of work, that balance starts to shift towards one in which two people are having a conversation to discover if working together will meet both of your goals.

Of course, you’re walking a fine line here. While you want to come in with a clear purpose, you can also push too far. If you communicate that all that’s going on for you is evaluating them, you’ll probably come across as arrogant and get passed over.

But clarity about why you are here and fidelity to those goals will infuse all your responses with additional crispness. You will convey the points you need to get across even in the face of a barrage of surprising questions. And you’ll be more likely to stay grounded throughout this grueling process.

In summary:

Their agenda is: to assess me and find the best candidate for the job.

My agenda is: to clearly convey who I am, why I’m here, and what I bring to the table; to understand who they are and whether they’re the right place for me.

Attitude matters as much as what you say in any job interview.

 

Other posts in this Series:

On Interviewing Well: Introduction

On Interviewing Well: Convey Deep Self-Knowledge (3-3-2)

A Place to Do Your Work

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The perfect pencil, or chair, or lighting aren’t required.

But we all need a place to do our work.

A place that says to our unconscious mind: this is where I get it done.

Our tools are close at hand.

Our mind clicks into gear.

And, because we are here, we get to skip the discussion with ourselves about whether we feel up for it today, whether we are inspired, energetic or motivated.

This is our workplace, here we are, so we work.

None of this guarantees an outcome—having the right place is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition.

Meaning that if we don’t have a place we do our work, our job is infinitely harder.

Here’s hoping that you had your place in place in 2023, and that it was a productive year for you.

And here’s wishing that you create that place for yourself in 2024 if you haven’t yet.

The world needs the best from you, the things that only you can produce.

So do us all the favor of giving yourself your best chance to produce your best.

To Be of Use

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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.