Tag: Work

The Tyranny of Outlook

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

Last week, as I rushed, apologetically, to start a meeting five minutes late, the person with whom I was meeting nodded knowingly and said, “hey, it’s OK.  That’s the tyranny of Outlook.”

Thank goodness for a bit of perspective.

As I reflect on the ineffectiveness of trying to transition from one meeting to the next in a matter of seconds, I’m contemplating a different approach.  One idea is to schedule all of my meetings to start at 10 past the hour.  (I think this would work better than scheduling them to end 10 minutes before the hour, because then they’d just run over).  10 minutes to shift gears, or to prepare, to take a step back, and also not to run late.

Manually retooling each outlook meeting would create more work, and it would probably take a while to explain to everyone that I’m serious that I really want to start at 10:10 (or, more importantly, 4:10).  Most important would be my holding up my end of the bargain by being on time for 95% of the meetings.

Has anyone out there tried these sorts of scheduling hacks?  What have you learned?

If you can’t take the heat

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

A little while back I decided to make breaded, baked zucchini “chips” at home.  My mother has made them a bunch of times, and when she makes them they rarely make it to the dinner table because everyone (including the kids) nibbles away at them like they’re French Fries.

It’s a very simple recipe: slice zucchini thin (like coins), dip them in eggs, then dip them in seasoned bread crumbs, then lay them out on a baking sheet and bake them at 425 degrees for about 30 minutes.  The clunky bit, I discovered, is the painstaking, one-by-one dipping of the zucchini.  I started doing it one slice at a time, and was going well at first.  Then the bread crumbs started to get messy, and I started getting cement-like globs of egg-and-breadcrumb mixture on my fingers, nearly doubling the size of my thumb and pointer finger.  Frustrated, I started experimenting with different approaches: dipping five zucchini slices in the egg at a time, then dropping them in the bread crumbs, then shaking the whole thing around a bit.  That sort of worked, but it made more of a mess, the breading was inconsistent and I’m not sure it sped things up much.  I kept on fiddling with my approach, but nothing seemed to make much of a difference.  Mostly I was slow, messy, and either got too thick or thin a coating of bread crumbs on each zucchini slice.  It took me nearly a half an hour to get through three zucchini’s worth of chips (filling up two full baking sheets) onto the pan, and I’m sure that someone out there could do what I’d just done in one-fifth the time.

“If you can’t take the heat…” is a phrase that is at least 50% metaphor: professional kitchens are hot, sure, but that’s as much about the intensity of cranking out each dish quickly, all night long, as it is about the actual temperature back there.   Kitchens are a (high-class, sometimes) assembly line, and all new cooks learn that the quality of what they’re able to produce is meaningless if they’re too slow and they mess up the line.  If they can’t produce at a high quality, with a high degree of consistency and a high speed, they won’t last long.

In professional environments there’s little talk of how fast people do things.  Yes, there is vague hand-waving around the notion of an 80/20 rule (that you can accomplish 80% of what you need to with the right 20% of the work), which is an acknowledgment that what you choose to work on is the most important leverage point you have.  But we rarely talk about how long it took to produce ______ (that email, that document, that strategy)?  Or, likely a more productive question, are you getting better at taking the core parts of your job that aren’t going away and doing them as efficiently as possible, to create space for yourself for the non-repetitive, value-added work where you’re really going to make a difference?

It seems somehow belittling of the important work we’re doing to ask how long it took us to do it.

In a kitchen, the chef stands over you and barks out orders, tells you what’s wrong and right.  Your speed and quality of workmanship are both out in the open.  In an office, only you know how long it took you to get that email just right, how much you dawdled before picking up the phone to make a cold call, how many hour-long meetings could have taken 20 minutes if you and your team had approached them differently.

I’m not advocating for rushing all day long – indeed the point is to be fast in some places so you can be slow in others.  But when I watch the demands on many of the top professionals in today’s world, I see that in order to survive and create space to do the real work, they have to get really good and really fast in areas that might seem like they should be hard and slow.  That requires nothing short of mastery – you get neither good nor fast at things if you don’t do them often and if you don’t focus on getting them right (and getting them fast).

The catch is that it’s going to be rare for anyone but you to have enough visibility into your day and your workflow to help you set a new standard for the pace of your work.  It’s also up to you to figure out what needs to be faster, what needs to be slower, and what work you’re simply not doing because your day is too full of everything else.  I’d just encourage you to remember that fast is your friend, when you apply it in the right places.

 

(Addendum: not only did my chips take forever to make, they also came out a bit dry and salty.  I later revived them by throwing them into a lasagna the next day.  Nothing wrong with salvaging a failed first attempt.)

Are you a fundraiser?

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

There’s an old line that parents swap, and it goes something like:

People who aren’t parents think that there’s not a chasm between people who are and are not parents.  People who are parents know that there is one.

It’s not better or worse to be a parent, it’s just a different worldview and state of mind, a line that you cross and can never go back.

I think fundraisers experience something similar.  A good fundraiser is just as smart and savvy and capable and strategic as non-fundraisers – indeed much of what motivated me to start this blog was how frustrated I was to see that the nonprofit world sidelined fundraisers and fundraising and then wondered why it was so hard to scale things that work.

But there is something different about being a (good) fundraiser.  It means that at any day, at any moment, on some level you’re thinking about that revenue line, thinking about where you are in the year, how much time you have left, and what it’s going to take to get there.

This, too, isn’t good or bad, it just is.  It’s something you feel in your bones and in your gut.  And living with that feeling and that stress does take some getting used to.  I think the challenge of living with that discomfort is where lots of the burnout for fundraisers comes from.

My hope is that if we acknowledge it, if we say it out loud, if we share that this is something we are all holding, the weight that we are bearing gets just a bit lighter.

When I grow up

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

It wasn’t until three or four years ago that I figured out what I wanted to be when I grow up. Not what specific job, not each twist and turn of my career. The characteristics of a job that is right for me: my strengths, where I shine, where and how I can deliver value to an organization.

While I’d feigned clarity and direction in countless prior job interviews and graduate school applications, I felt like I didn’t know in any real way where I was headed. I knew I’d been good at school, and since graduating college I’d managed to figure out a lot of things I didn’t like. But I still had a pretty limited affirmative understanding of what I was put on this earth to do.

No doubt our educational institutions are a huge part of the problem. Even in graduate schools, which are meant to prepare students for the next stage in their careers and to help them get there, I spent 99% of my time “learning stuff” and 1% of my time trying to figure out who I was and what made me tick. That can’t possibly be the right balance, yet that’s how nearly all of these programs are structured. (Sure, part of this is on me. I made the mistake of thinking Business School was school when it didn’t need to be.)

I can’t overstate how many incredible people I meet who have no idea what they’re supposed to do with their lives.

So, first and foremost: it’s OK that you don’t know. It takes time.

Second, this notion of figuring out exactly what you want to be when you grow up is an anachronism. It’s time to dispense with the preschoolers’ notion of careers (doctor, lawyer, footballer, firefighter) which is pretty much the only mental model we all have. Instead, the work begins with exploring questions like: what am I best at? What things seem really easy for me that are difficult for others? When do I shine? What kinds of problems do I like solving? How much uncertainty makes me comfortable/uncomfortable? How much recognition do I need? From whom? Why? How much do I like risk? Am I more conceptual or concrete? Do I love ideas or execution? How am I at building relationships? Am I creative? Do I like to teach others?

I think we knew all this stuff once, and we forgot it.

A short story: weekends in my house are a juggling act bouncing between three kids. Yet last weekend I managed to get a few uninterrupted hours with my 8-year-old son, and I’d told him we could do anything he wanted. While all the kids in his class would likely use that time to play soccer or baseball (and yes if I’d let him we’d have played video games), his idea of a perfect afternoon was to go to a craft store, buy a box of popsicle sticks, a package of pipe-cleaners, a piece of green foam, a piece of Styrofoam, some Elmer’s gel glue, and, as a bonus, a packet of fake moss, and then spend a few house building a model playground from scratch in our basement. Voila:

I have no idea what my son is going to be when he grows up, and I don’t suspect that he’ll know that for a while. But I know that he gets joy out of creating things and out of using his imagination. It engages him fully. In some way and in some form, he’s going to have to make stuff if he’s going to be really happy.

That’s the only level at which I’ve been able to figure out what I’m meant to do in the world. It’s not a shingle I can hang on the door or a defined career in any traditional sense of the word. What it is is a first-time understanding of who I am, of what the organizations I’m part of seem to need from me, of roles I continually find myself playing whether I choose to or not.

Slowly, the outline started to form, and once I saw that initial outline, my job was to keep trying to get the picture into sharper focus. Still lots of work to do – a lifetime of work – but it feels a lot easier than groping around pretending that I’m supposed to fit myself and my career into some little box I first heard about when I was a little kid.

There are fewer and fewer boxes out there, and you probably don’t want to fit into any of them anyhow.

If only that job were…

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

…bigger here and smaller there, just a bit more senior, with more (less?) supervisory responsibility, had a bit more of this and a smidge less of that, and it paid a bit more…well then it would be the perfect job.

The perfect job is one where you make an imprint, first on the job and then on the world.

Not the other way around.

The transitions

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I had a yoga teacher who loved to rib the class about all the activity that would start after (or before) a really tough pose:

“It’s amazing how thirsty everyone gets, how it becomes time to fix your hair or tuck in a t-shirt or towel off…”

He liked to remind us that yoga was all about the transitions – that anyone could muscle through a pose and hang on for a few seconds or a minute.  Yoga is about what comes in between, what comes before and after, as a reflection of who you are in the pose.

Taking that out of the studio….

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I’ve made the miniscule commitment to stop automatically looking at my iPhone every time I get in an elevator.  What bothered me about it was the “automatically” not the “looking.”  That is, the troubling piece is a reflexive notion that time in an elevator or on a train platform or (much worse) walking down the street is down time with nothing to do, so the only sensible thing is to check your email.

Let’s be real about this: there’s a mountain of work to do.  Furthermore, since you’re doing something worth doing that means you want to put your heart and soul into this work.  So you work hard, you give more, and you want to and should keep up.

But that’s not the same thing as: “every ‘free’ moment I have is best spent chipping away at an unconquerable mountain of email.”  That’s the professional equivalent of muscling through the pose – the notion that you’re going through the world forever struggling to keep up.   Plus, take that to its logical conclusion and at some point you’ve given up on every last moment of quiet, of reflection, of noticing the day and the sun shining and other human beings walking down the street or riding the subway with you.  There’s something real there too.

I struggle with this tremendously and I fall short often.  What I strive for is being intentional and being present.  That’s not never using my iPhone, nor is it mindlessly app-flipping every time I have 30 seconds to spare.

*sigh*

Your job, and leverage

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

If your life is one of service, then the one question to ask yourself when figuring out where you are and where you’re going is:

What role, what organization, what situation allows me to maximize the impact I’m having on others?

Most organizations find good people and ask little of them them.  Some organizations, sadly, even find great people and ask them to do mediocre work.

The best organizations take great people and help them be extraordinary.

It’s possible.

And the best part is that extraordinary feeds on itself.  Extraordinary creates more extraordinary.

The risk of being a bull

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

Time is the scarcest of all professional resources, yet we never seem to get enough of it.  A recent conversation with a friend and advisor helped me understand that one of my greatest professional strengths and joys might be exacerbating my time problem.

Earlier in my career, success was doing the right thing in a challenging situation.  Then later on success becam: me, my team, or my organization doing the right thing.

As my span of responsibility has grown, I cannot do everything and I can’t be – and shouldn’t be – involved in every step from here to there.  Obvious enough.  So, outside of work that’s on my plate, I focus my energies on helping those around me solve problems.  I love doing this and I’m generally pretty good at it, which makes it both is intellectually and emotionally rewarding.  I get to problem-solve (fun!) and help a colleague (fun! fun!).  Bingo!

The helpful but very sobering insight is that my enjoyment and capacity at this kind of problem-solving might not be the right end-game.  Because it is so rewarding and because the outcomes are (often) positive – both practically and emotionally – have I created a learned response and, like the proverbial bull seeing a waving red cloth, do I, when presented with a situation in which I might be helpful, just jump in and help?

Why might this be a bad thing?

The suggestion was that consistently helping to solve a set of problems keeps me in the business (forever) of being involved in helping solve those sorts of problems – without ever asking the question: what sort of problems do I want, in the long run, to be in the business of solving?  For example, it could be that I always want to have a role to play in key hiring decisions or important strategic choices, but is there another set of situations that other people are better equipped and better positioned to resolve in the long term?

If so, when I’m presented with a cool, fun, challenging and interesting situation, the first question I should ask myself isn’t “what should we do here?” but rather “is this the kind of problem I should be in the business of helping solve in the long term?”  If it is, great.  If not, how would I act differently?

Whenever I’m looking for advice about a tough situation, working through the solution with a respected colleague teaches me something.  But that process of osmosis could be accelerated by a much more explicit, meta-conversation about how I’m engaging with the problem and how my more experienced colleague is coming up with different and better approaches and solutions to that same problem.

That’s the conversation I suspect I need to be having more often.

Harder, requiring different muscles, and, toughest of all, forcing me to look at all that great short-term feedback I’m getting and say: this thing that I love doing might just be part of the reason I have too little time on my hands.

Meeting math

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Not so long ago I strong-armed a bunch of my co-workers into reading one of the Domino books,  Read This Before our Next Meeting (free for Amazon Prime members).  The book is a diatribe against the meeting culture and all the associated time that’s wasted in poorly designed, poorly conceived, poorly run meetings.

It’s a book that you don’t necessarily enjoy reading, because the author, Al Pittampalli doesn’t care much if you like what he has to say, spending most of his energy hitting you over the head with anti-meeting diatribes without making the medicine go down too easily.

That said, the conclusions are hard to ignore: most meetings are inefficient, we are lazy about them, and we could be drastically more productive if we approached them differently.

My starting point is that we underestimate meeting time the way we underestimate the impact of copying 10 people on an email: it doesn’t feel like having 6 people in a 30 minute meeting is three hours of productive work that’s we’re using up.   But it is – so shouldn’t the organizer be obliged to spend at least a half hour of prep time each and every time he proposes to use 2.5 hours of his colleagues time?

The most aggressive suggestion in the book is that we should not use meetings to make decisions, we should use meetings to ratify decisions that have already been made.

The building blocks underneath that recommendation are: no meetings without prior agendas, no meetings without significant work done in advance by the meeting organizer, and no meetings without a proposed decision for the group to ratify.

Easy to say, but how often do we get a group together and someone says, “OK, we’re here to talk about…..”  That’s not the same as, “We’re planning to do _____, and this meeting is being called to ratify that decision.”

If that is the bar, you get a lot fewer meetings, a lot more preparation, a lot more time to do real work rather than sit in a room and talk.

(Bonus: the next time you get 20 people in the room for a 30 minute meeting, make sure you’re getting 10 hours’ worth of organizational impact out of that half an hour).

Labor versus work

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World for that last couple of weeks.  It is providing context and depth to my intuitive understanding of generosity and gift-giving, helping me to appreciate the rich history of gift-giving, which, I had forgotten, forms the social underpinning of most societies throughout history (except for today, of course).

Hyde is very specific with his language, and in his chapter on The Labor of Gratitude he is quick to clarify the difference between “labor” and “work.”  There’s enough great stuff here that the right approach seems to be to quote liberally:

Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will.  A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor.   Beyond that, labor has its own schedule.  Things get done, but we often have the odd sense that we didn’t do them.  Paul Goodman wrote in a journal once, “I have recently written a few good poems.  But I have no feeling that I wrote them.”  That is the declaration of a laborer…

…One of the first problems the modern world faced with the rise of industrialism was the exclusion of labor by the expansion of work.”

Labor isn’t better than work, but it is characteristically different, its product is different, the conditions for creating it are different.

The simple question for reflection is: will your success (short and long-term) and happiness require you to labor or just to work?  And if labor is part of the equation, do you create the conditions in your life that will allow you to labor?  Are you not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor?”  Has your work grown so much that it has essentially crowded out every last moment you had to labor?

This is one of the big fights of the modern era.  Email, meetings, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, jokes from your buddies, news and TV and, of course, all the actual work you have to do….these mountains are big and growing, and we’ll never finish scaling them.

I for one feel like I’m in the trenches every day, fighting to labor.  Some days I win, a lot of days I lose.  But I’m positive that I have to keep on fighting.

You?