Cranking through my inbox for a few hours doesn’t feel like real work.
Satisfying? Yes.
A relief? Yes.
But not real work.
Pretty sure this is a good sign.
Tag: Work
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Which conversation
I bet you had a great year last year. You hit your goals and then some. You checked all the boxes and now you’re thinking about the coming year and ways you’d like to grow as a professional.
Which conversation do you want to have with your boss?
One version goes like this: Hey, boss, great to see you. I’ve been thinking that since I delivered so much last year that I’d like to take on these new projects and be given such-and-such new responsibilities and this new job title.
It might work, but wouldn’t you rather have this conversation?
Hey boss, not only did I ship like crazy last year, but as you know I also was leading up these projects, I’ve been taking responsibility for these relationships and these other initiatives that are underway, and I’m also the point person for this big idea that’s going live in March and it’s going great.
So, boss, which one of these things would you like me to stop doing?
Your choice.
Really, it’s up to you.
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Why are you staring?
Why are you staring all day at your computer?
Is it because you’re working or because you’re trying to figure out what to work on?
They’re not the same thing.
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The work of blogging
The days I’m not ready to write, the days I don’t feel like I have something to say, the days that I have to burn the midnight oil, the days I have to scramble….those are the days I’m doing the work.
What is the work, exactly? Many things, but partly it is earning the right to have the days when lightening strikes, the days full of great leaps forward, the days it comes easy.
This is how it is with everything: we do the hard work in between the peaks, we toil along, even when it isn’t pretty. And when we get to the top, the view sure is beautiful, all the more so when you can share it with people that matter (all of you)
So thank you for helping me do the work. I’m positive I wouldn’t do it without you.
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Which purpose?
Having started my professional life as a management consultant, I’m all too familiar with the snarky refrain of people exiting the sector, “I got tired of flying around the world to make the world safe for Fortune 500 companies.”
Clever enough.
What’s perplexing is that when you’re making a shift from something you did for some extrinsic reason (it appeared safer, more lucrative, was what everyone else was doing, was what you thought people around you wanted you to do) to an intrinsic reason, it can be hard to make out exactly what kind of “purpose” you’re looking for.
Put another way: “purpose” and “social purpose” are not the same thing.
Right now, in US at least, there is a supply/demand imbalance in the “social purpose” sector. The number of positions in high-performing organizations in the social sector is a lot fewer than the number of people looking for those jobs.
But opening the aperture a little further to organizations with a purpose…I bet there’s a lot more out there.
Every entrepreneur worth her salt has a purpose, and most of the people who join their cause sign up for that purpose. Every organization that sees the world one way and wants to look another way has a purpose.
Purpose creates passion and zeal and focus and fun. Purpose gets you out of bed in the morning. Purpose is not apologizing for what you do when you explain it to others. Purpose is knowing that, even if the thing you’re fighting for blows up tomorrow, you’ll walk away and say “that was worth fighting for.”
There’s a lot of purpose out there, if you look…with purpose.
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90% or 5%
I recently heard a speaker who suggested, to a roomful of hyper-productive multitaskers, a radical reorientation of how to spend time. This speaker, a successful investor and investment adviser, doesn’t write emails, doesn’t multi-task, and doesn’t have a Pavlovian response to a Blackberry’s red blinking light. Based on his own experience, he suggested that successful decisions come when we create space for deep contemplation and reflection – when we create the time that allows us to we walk around and look at our problems with the curiosity and reflection of a poet who studies a rock, or a beach, or the morning sky.
A lovely idea that is easy to dismiss, to be sure – and many in the audience had just that reaction. One person went so far as to give an impassioned argument in favor of the efficiency of multi-tasking (while conceding that he agrees with Clifford Nass’ research showing that multi-tasking doesn’t work).
Why are we all so defensive? Perhaps because we kid ourselves into think that we’re almost getting done 100% of what we need to get done. We’re super-busy, but, we tell ourselves, we’re probably completing 90% of what we absolutely must get done, and the other 10% probably isn’t all that important anyway, right? And if we’re getting 90% done, then cutting out half of our meetings or not responding to half our emails sounds impossible. It feels like a move from 90% to 60%. Imagine the impact!
But I wonder if the 90% is an illusion. What if I’m doing 15% of what I could do, or even 5%? What if I’m nowhere near doing everything I could do that would be productive, because “everything” has gotten so big that I’m never anywhere but the tip of the iceberg.
If I’m only doing 5% of what I “could” do, then a radical shift becomes easier. By acknowledging that I’m the one deciding how I spend the time, and by recognizing that my criteria might be really good or really bad, I just might create the space for that radical reorientation.
Am I ready to make a big change? Not yet. But I do think that doing away with the notion that I’m doing “almost everything” will allow more space for doing what I really need to do.
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Work like a freelancer
Twice in the last 24 hours I’ve come across two glimpses into the life of the freelancer / writer that struck a chord. Chris Guillebeau, who is the author of an inspiring and useful manifesto called 279 Days to Overnight Success also sends out a weekly newsletter called “The Art of Nonconformity [AONC].” From his last newsletter, about the life of a freelancer:
It’s always fun to go on vacation as a self-employed person because a) you still have to work, and b) no one thinks you do any work to begin with. So then when you go on vacation they say, oh, must be nice that you don’t have a job and can do that. Meanwhile on vacation I work six hours a day instead of ten.
And then I came across this passage in Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life”:
Every morning, no matter how late he had been up, my father rose at 5:30, went to his study, wrote for a couple of hours, made us all breakfast, read the paper with my mother, and then went back to work for the rest of the morning. Many years passed before I realized that he did this by choice, for a living, and that he was not unemployed or mentally ill. I wanted him to have a regular job where he put on a necktie and went off somewhere with the other fathers and sat in a little office and smoked. But the idea of spending entire days doing someone else’s work did not suit my father’s soul. I think it would have killed him. He did end up dying rather early, in his mid-fifties, but at least he had lived on his own terms.
And my reflection is this: life, especially professional life, is becoming much more like freelancing. The most important decisions we make every day – even if we have “regular jobs” – are how to spend our time, defining what success looks like for ourselves and for our customers, and figuring out who our customers are and how best to serve them. This is where we all have the most leverage, and it’s a shift that’s happened in this last decade as markets have fragmented, costs of production have plummeted, and networks have become ubiquitous. And it means that we all are, to a greater or lesser extent, a lot more like freelancers than ever before – and if we’re not acting and thinking like freelancers we’re missing an opportunity.
It’s easy to romanticize the life of a writer or a freelancer – in reality, as Chris reminds us, it’s hard and uncertain because you have to have the discipline to decide how to spend your time and to create the structure you need to produce your work (your art).
But what’s deceptive about “regular jobs” is that it’s incredibly easy to fool yourself into thinking that these aren’t your choices to make – because you have a full inbox and lots of meetings to go to and a boss telling you what you have to get done and when.
The moment you start looking at the 24 hours in your day and how you’re going to spend them, the moment you open the door to the possibility that you could wake up at 5:30am to do what you do best – whether blogging or writing or learning a new craft (or programming language or computer software or foreign language), or just going above and beyond for the job that you already do and love – is the moment you open the door to real possibility.
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Epiphany
Nothing magical happens when my Inbox is empty.
There’s no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.
Which means I can decide whether or not to care about this.
And so can you.
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Judging
You can decide that this is work and that is play.
That every time you do a little extra, someone else is getting the best of you.
That you’re making tradeoffs each and every step of the way.
Just remember that it’s you who’s doing the judging. Which means that some day (maybe today) you can choose to decide that you’re judging right – and do something about it – or decide that it’s time to start telling yourself a different story.
Don’t be afraid to thrive.
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