4 Ideas For Reflecting On Your Work
thoughts to ponder on your work and career
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4 Ideas For Reflecting On Your Work
I got some good feedback on the approach in my last week’s newsletter so we’ll try it again. Below are four ideas I’m thinking about to help you reframe how you think about work and life. Also, if you missed my most recent writeup on professional development trends, give it a read
#1)Finding 20% of things we love in our job (and outside of it)
The author and researcher Marcus Buckingham recently came out with a new book this week titled Love and Work: How to Find What You Love, Love What You Do, and Do It for the Rest of Your Life. The main message here, is that if you figure out what you love doing and do more of it, you can increase your resilience, engagement and lower the potential of burnout. This, on the surface, makes a ton of sense. The nuance and wrinkle is that based on their research, the amount of things you should do that you love is about 20% of activities per day. Not the “do a job you love and never work a day in your life,” but a more reasonable/practical number.
The rub I would add, is that in addition to finding that 20% at work, if you actually know what you enjoy doing, and the skills you are using or the tasks you are doing that give you that energy you can also look to incorporate those elements outside the primary job you do each day.This is also why I like April Rinne’s concept of the Portfolio Career, because if you are someone who has other aspects of your life that you spend time on outside of your work, you can find more ways to do those things in other aspects of your life.
I am biased about this, because this is how, and why I decided to build MBASchooled while I was working full-time. It’s how I started getting involved in corporate training, (volunteered to lead internal trainings as a side project) keynote speaking (asked to present at customer events) - all of these were activities that I ended up loving, and that I was able to find both in my day job, but also in other aspects of my life.
So if you’re wondering how to make work a little better, start by finding what Marcus calls the “red threads” about what you love doing, and then, figure out how to get about 20% of them, and I would add, from your job, but also, from other aspects of your life.
Podcast: Find Joy In Any Job: Why am I Unhappy at Work? (HBR)
#2)Will We Ever Be More Productive?
Even before COVID-19 and a global pandemic forced the majority of knowledge workers to work from home, the United States work culture has always been fascinated with productivity. We also have been fascinated with meetings. Some of this is because the nature of knowledge work requires collaboration and connectivity between people and teams, and a meeting is visible signal that suggests “the work is getting done.”
Unfortunately, meetings can often be overwhelming, and even come at the expense of actually getting the work done, and even more so in a remote and distributed environment.
Derek Thompson tackled this in his recent article. He cites new research from Microsoft, which studied the impact of communication and collaboration during the global pandemic.
While some of the methodology to come to these conclusions makes me a little weary (they tracked typing of keyboards..) if we all did our own sanity check I think the conclusions make sense. Here is what Derek Thompson had to say:
Microsoft has also found that the pandemic has simply led to more overall work. According to company research, the average workday has expanded by 13 percent—about an hour—since March 2020, and average after-hours work has increased by twice as much.
He also went on to add:
Something else is pushing work into our evenings: White-collar work has become a bonanza of meetings. In the first months of the pandemic, Microsoft saw online meetings soar as offices shut down. By the end of 2020, the number of meetings had doubled. In 2021, it just kept growing. This year it’s hit an all-time high.
If you want to be more productive, you have two options. One, is to rearrange how you are using the time you have in better ways, and to do what my friend Khe Hy calls, 10K work. The other option is to extend the time you have to get things done, which is what we are clearly doing.
Meetings have an importance in our workplace today, but perhaps there is a better way than what we have right now. I offered up some thoughts on what I thought better ways of working are and at the core of it is recognizing that the outputs we choose to optimize for and the time horizon’s we anchor to drive the mechanisms (ex: productivity hacks) to achieve these goals.
While there might be a new system or framework for productivity, those are incremental gains at best. Its why I believe to a certain extent, after you’ve cleared a threshold for improving your productivity and efficiency, it’s really just a game of productivity dysmorphia
#3)Maybe We Don’t Know How Others Are Thinking and Feeling
I’m still reading Atlas of The Heart, Brene Brown’s new book (it’s a long book) but it’s a good read so far. But I saw Brene was recently on one of my go-to podcasts so I wanted to give it a listen. If you haven’t read the book, it’s a good overview of what to expect, but one insight that jumped out at me is around using emotions to connect with other people.
During the interview, Brene talks about how for a long time, she used to believe that people should understand their emotions in part so they could better understand other people’s emotions. Intuitively, I think this makes sense.
But through doing the research for Atlas of the Heart, Brene actually has changed her tune on this thought. Because there are so many emotions and figuring out how to name them is so important (and so elusive) it actually is damaging (even with good intentions) to try to intuit someone else’s emotions and assign a name to them when they themselves haven’t figured it out. Instead, it’s more about acknowledging and sitting with them, and supporting them on their journey to name them.
Over the next few months, I am delivering a handful of trainings and workshops around building relationships and connecting with others, so I’ll be thinking about this especially within the context of when working on a team with diverse people, how far should we go in terms of trying to understand and intuit out how others are feeling and thinking?
I still think it’s important to pay attention to these things, but like many other things in life, I think sometimes we give ourselves too much credit for what we are able to know, and perhaps a more open and supportive mind (while still being curious) about how others are thinking or feeling is a better response.
Podcast:Brené Brown Says You're Doing Feelings Wrong
#4) Margin Unlocks Opportunity, But Workplaces Aren’t Designed For It
One of the reasons why I chose to make the leap to becoming an entrepreneur and becoming my own boss was to design the workplace and work life that I felt would allow me to live the life I wanted to live while allowing me to do my best work. While I enjoyed and did well in the corporate workplace, as time went on I began to see how my own desires and styles of working were challenged with traditional corporate culture. I had two options, one was to try to work within it, and the other was to create my own, and I opted for the latter. I still work hard, I still have challenges and I still have things that I don’t like to do, but I have more agency and control over the priorities, outcomes, and time horizon that I am optimizing for, which makes a huge difference.
Innate in this, is creating space for what I call “margin.” Margin to me, is the acknowledgment that not everything we do can be quantified to a tee, and that in order for us to achieve non-linear outcomes we need to account for the space and time for great ideas to marinate. Margin for me also exists because I acknowledge my humanity, and I can’t function in my life being on my A+ game all of the time.
Humans need rest, full stop. Because I’m a big believer that work is part of my life, I also know that things in life will ultimately impact my work. As such, I create margin because I acknowledge I need that time for whatever comes my way. This is what allows me to have the space to reflect, think deeply, write newsletters and generate ideas. While I don’t always know what will come, I can tell you that the energy I feel from having this is correlated with my ‘productivity.”
But margin is also important because sometimes shit in life just comes up, and you just need the space to deal with it. Unfortunately culture and workplaces in the United States have no margin. This is why we have back to back meetings, and end up like data points in the Microsoft study about why people are working late at nights and on weekends. This idea of margin, comes from Ann Helen Peterson, in her essay How Our System Revenges Rest
Here is what Ann Helen Writes:
I am asking for us to think about the ways in which we’ve arranged life in a way that is intolerant, even actively hostile, to taking leave of everyday responsibilities — for whatever reason, for however long. I’m talking about vacation and rest, but I’m also talking about leave for sickness and disability and caregiving. There is just so little give in the system.
Our days have accumulated tasks and responsibilities that behave like invasive plants: if you neglect their maintenance, even for a day, they threaten to pull the entire enterprise asunder. The less societal privilege you have, the more true this feels. People with good credit, power and seniority within their organizations, and an emergency fund can afford to (momentarily) fall behind. Their apologies for a delayed email, a late bill, a late kid will be accepted. For everyone else, drop one ball and risk catastrophe: lost hours, lost jobs, lost credit, lost cars, lost homes.
This was a humbling paragraph to read, especially knowing the privilege and resources that i have (and if you read the rest of the article, Ann Helen also feels the same) While Ann Helen, myself and maybe you reading this have some level of resources to deal with these kinds of interruptions, there are many in the workforce that don’t.
So goes on to add:
Did you resist a sick day even when you felt like weathered shit after the Covid vaccine? Are your finances balanced so precariously that a day off feels like an invitation for disaster? What if we didn’t just normalize taking time, but created structures that made the taking of that time less catastrophic?
I am not sure what the answer is to this. I don’t think its solely entrepreneurship (there are many entrepreneurs who feel the weight of this) but I do know that we need a better way. This is also what motivates me to find better ways to work, so we can create better workplaces where people can be creative, don’t feel the weight of productivity, and have margin to not only accept and lean into their humanity, but unleash it.
Would love to hear your thoughts on these, or what else is on your mind about the workplace.
Have a great week!
Al