Archives for December 2009

I think this answer is relatively on target, from the book :Managing Time: Expert Solutions to Everyday Challenges (Pocket Mentor):

You cannot successfully manage your time if you don’t know how you should be spending it. The biggest problem new managers face is understanding their goals and priorities. They are not really sure what they should be doing.

Because of this uncertainty, new managers often spend time working on the wrong things or let others pull them into activities that aren’t directly tied to their priorities and goals. To better understand how you should be spending your time, work with your supervisor to clarify expectations and responsibilities.

At the same time, start to get a handle on how long your new responsibilities take so you can better estimate and plan your time as you grow in your new role.

In one sentence:

“When your brain is always engaged, your best and brightest solutions are not likely to emerge.”

And this only gets at the productivity benefits of unplugging — let alone the intrinsic value of a change of pace and time for reflection.

We talk a lot about distractions, but it is helpful to realize that overall productivity is actually up from what it was 30 years ago. This is from the book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Things Done:

Without offering an involved and wearisome discussion about rising productivity levels, let me simply say that today’s career professional, frittering and all, could beat the pants off of yesteryear’s career professional in terms of getting things done.

Today, workers in all types of organizations, including government, non-profit sector groups, health care, and education as well as private industry, devote a slightly higher percentage of their time to the tasks and responsibilities for which they actually were hired, and they have advanced tools that aid them in ways that the workforce ancestry could hardly imagine.

Although I wasn’t around thirty years ago (at least in the workforce), it seems to me that in spite of all the complications and information overload of the modern work environment, people do indeed get a lot done.

There’s still a lot of improvement that we can make, and our execution could become a lot smoother and more fulfilling, but the current work environment has a lot of good news. It’s worth keeping in focus that we don’t have before us simply (or even mainly) challenges to overcome (although there are a lot of those), but rather opportunities to capitalize on.

The Now Habit does a good job of articulating the two methods of motivation we often use (on ourselves and others) when it comes to challenging tasks.

Push Method
The first is the “push method.” This method is “designed to stimulate action through fear of punishment.” It is not as though this method is always inappropriate; but in general “the ‘push method’ of management assumes that humans are basically lazy and that scaring the heck out of them will create motivation.”

Pull Method
The second is the “pull method.” This method, on the other hand, “assumes that we are naturally inquisitive, and if we are properly rewarded for our efforts we can persevere with even the most difficult of tasks.” (I would clarify that by “reward” here we should include both intrinsic and extrinsic dimensions.)

Examples
Here’s an example of the push method. This example is why I’m writing this post — I find it pretty funny:

“This freshman class had better learn now that you’re in for a lot of hard work. By the end of the semester you’ll have read this entire shelf of books; and by the time you graduate, this entire wall of books.”

Scary, but not very motivating — and I like to read! Here’s an example of the pull method:

“Imagine that, as you read one chapter of your textbook, you place it on this empty shelf. Chapter by chapter and book by book, you’ll be filling this entire shelf by the end of your first semester. By the time you graduate you’ll have read enough books to fill the shelves on this entire wall.”