Category Archives: work

Doing Good

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Tim Stahmer’s post about Apple choosing to do good over making profits reminded me of my recent reading of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink. I loved the book for lots of reasons and have been stumbling over real world connections right and left since I finished it. Tim’s post makes one of those connections.

Pink discusses the seemingly anti-capitalistic idea that businesses can make money AND do good at the same time. He highlights Tom’s Shoes whose business model includes donating a pair of shoes for every pair they sell.

Another connection related to Pink’s description of the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow was one of my favorite reads in graduate school. Turns out it is one of Pink’s favorite books about work:

Flow is the mental state when the challenge before us is so exquisitely matched to our abilities that we lose our sense of time and forget ourselves in a function. Csikszentmihalyi’s contemporary classic reveals that we’re more likely to find flow at work than in leisure.

As part of his work, Csikszenmihalyi (Chicksa-ma-hi).researched happiness using a somewhat unique method that took advantage of the technology at the time. According to Pink:

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did more than discover the concept of “flow.” He also introduced an ingenious new technique to measure it. Csikszentmihalyi and his University of Chicago team equipped participants in their research studies with electronic pagers. Then they paged people at random intervals (approximately eight times a day) for a week, asking them to describe their mental state at that moment. Compared with previous methods, these real-time reports proved far more honest and revealing.

I think Flow is a relatively well-known concept so I was a little surprised when a recent report on National Public Radio described “new” ways to research happiness using an app that pings you several times a day and asks you to complete a survey failed to mention the connection with this earlier work. The researcher’s findings are similar to Csikszentmihalyi’s:

KILLINGSWORTH: So when I look across all the different activities that people engage in, they are universally happier when they’re fully engaged in that activity and not mind wandering, no matter what they’re doing.

The last, and perhaps most interesting, connection I made with Pink related to a comment he makes about contemporary businesses. They are, according to Pink, living in the past, and not even the recent past:

Big Idea: Management is an outdated technology. Hamel likens management to the internal combustion engine—a technology that has largely stopped evolving. Put a 1960s-era CEO in a time machine and transport him to 2010, Hamel says, and that CEO “would find a great many of today’s management rituals little changed from those that governed corporate life a generation or two ago.” Small wonder, Hamel explains. “Most of the essential tools and techniques of modern management were invented by individuals born in the 19th century, not long after the end of the American Civil War.” The solution? A radical overhaul of this aging technology.

This accusation is usually flung at schools: they would be familiar to people from earlier generations. And, ironically, that accusation often comes from businesses who are, according to Pink, themselves outdated and who are not always successful at adopting new technologies. Pink describes the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) adopted by companies including Best Buy. The focus is on the work rather than the seat time (hmm….again sounds familiar). But, as Best Buy began to struggle, the new CEO disbanded the practice, returning to a more standard top down management, 40 hour work week model. This, along with Yahoo’s decision to end telecommuting, is seen as a step back for flexible work arrangements despite evidence that it can boost worker satisfaction and productivity.

 

Consumed (weekly): ROWE Resources

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I’ve been reading Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink. I’ll post more about the book but here are a few links about the Results Only Work Environment that Pink discusses as the future of work. Not everyone loves it…

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Changing the Way I Work

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Thanks to Curt Rees for pointing me to this article by Matt Boyd about avoiding burnout. The 11 suggestions range from working weird hours to changing scenery to writing it out and I found that there are a couple I’ve started implementing in this new year.

In particular, I’ve been focusing on doing micro-work (without knowing that’s what it was called) at weird hours. Maybe not as weird as the writer seems to suggest but weird as in late Friday night before heading to bed or early Sunday morning while I’m watching the news shows.

Boyd defines micro-work as follows:

Micro-work is the idea of an always on mindset where you do bits and pieces of work throughout your natural 16 hour awake cycle. This way, you can mix in a healthy dose of daily activities while still accomplishing a whole lot.

I have daily morning routines that include checking email and touching base with my online students. I’m also a fan of Brian Tracy’s “live frog” theory of getting things done so I usually have at least one or two items on the to do list that need to be done before the lunchtime dog walk. (In looking up the reference I discovered there is now a live frog app.)

Once I get past those routines and frogs, the day opens to possibilities beyond work. But then, about 9 PM, I find myself back in my chair, laptop in hand, considering the to do list. That’s when I like to at least get started on the next morning’s live frog. It’s taken me a long time to realize that working independently from home means that I don’t have to follow the classic work schedule. Just because other people are battling the morning commute so they can be behind their desks by 8 AM doesn’t mean I have to. After all, my commute, including the stop at the coffee shop, is about two minutes. 

Rees pointed to the “strategic procrastination” tip: I don’t really think about my work flow as procrastination but simply knowing when I need to start working on a long term project. For instance, I’m doing a workshop for school administrators in early March. I’ve already created the folder and copied potential resources into it but I’m just not ready to start the final presentation. It will take about two days of work and I have plenty of time. For now, I’m letting it percolate: do I want to play a game? use a special group project? organize the day around a theme? These are questions I can be contemplating even when I’m not working specifically on the project. So, it may look like I’m procrastinating but it is very much strategic.

I tweeted the article with the question about how this could apply in what Boyd calls the “classic 9 to 5 grind.” And I continue to wonder how we prepare our students to live in a non-classic environment?

 

 

Using Evernote for Everything

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I’ve been using Evernote more and more these days to organize the various projects I’m working on. The summer travel season is upon me, and I’ll be away more than I’m home for the next month carrying different devices on each trip. I’m scrambling to make sure I can get access to information no matter what digital device is sitting on my lap.

Evernote is rapidly becoming the answer. I’ve used it for my own writing and to do listing but in the past month, I’ve been doing more clipping, note taking at meetings, transferring hand written notes, etc. etc. And today I learned why it’s such a great tool for me…because, according to the CEO of Evernote, Phil Libin, I have a poor work-life balance.

At any given moment of the day, I may have tabs open related to “work” (articles or blog posts about education, technology and learning) or “life” (articles or blog posts about beekeeping, reading, farming, music and folk art). And increasingly I’m using Evernote to save or organize that information. I’ve gotten serious about creating folders and useful tags. I’m using the image feature to take pictures of slides during presentations. I’ve connected Evernote to my calendar so appointments and reminders get saved there. One stop for my life in all its aspects.

Musing on Work, Life and Productivity

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148/365 for 2010 The Definition of GreenAs someone who works in a very non-traditional environment, I am interested in conversations about what I call the work life flow. Mitch Joel calls it the work life blend. I like the concept of the blend: you work when work needs to be done, but you don’t work all the time because there are other things to do that are important as well. But whether you call it a flow or a blend, it’s easier to achieve if you don’t have to be in an office for a set number of hours. Once you put me at a desk from 8 to 5, you separate work from life.

I’m also really interested in how other people work: what kinds of routines have they established them help them manage the flow or blend or whatever you want to call it besides balance? I had a vague idea that there were “productivity methods” out there but I am not very good at following methods. Heck, I still do paper and pencil to do lists*. Most people end up doing some kind of hybrid method and I like the Pomodoro method of working with focus and then taking breaks. It’s actually kind of how I work anyway.

I tend to be a little cynical about methods…you spend more time organizing than doing. I do practice the live frog method although I have not read the book, only seen it on airport bookshelves. And, I’m thinking about writing the “graduate student” approach to productivity that I practiced: the fact is that everything on the list has to be done by a certain deadline at the end of the semester, but there wasn’t any rule that they couldn’t be turned in early. So, when there’s work to do, I generally work on it at least a little bit every day. When I see a chunk of time, I do a chunk of work. The goal is to complete the work rather than meet the deadline. It may be that it fits with the nature of the work I do, taking on projects with finite beginnings and endings rather than a more open ended king of employment.

Right now, my big productivity challenge is to figure out a routine that includes more “quadrant two” time (OK, I’m a Covey fan) when I can read and share.

And it occurred to me that this lifehacker.com article about productivity apps has the same lesson that educators are learning; it’s not about the technology. You can buy a million productivity apps but at some point, you have to just do the work not simply plan to do it.

*I have tried hard to transfer to a digital to do list. But I like being able to “curl up” with my to do list and I have an affinity for Moleskin. It’s part of my method.

When Work and Life Mix

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Something about this blog entry from the Harvard Review really bothered me. It’s this paragraph that really seemed over the edge and made me wonder if this was irony:

Technology has not ruined your work-life balance, it has simply exposed how boring your work and your life used to be. Did you ever try to figure out why it is so hard to stop checking your smartphone, even when you are having dinner with a friend you haven’t seen in ages, celebrating your anniversary, watching a movie, or out on a first date? It’s really quite simple: None of those things are as interesting as the constant hum of your e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter account. Reality is over-rated, especially compared to cyberspace. Technology has not only eliminated the boundaries between work and life, but also improved both areas.

I worry that the “constant hum” of the Internet does interfere with our personal lives, and I try to take at least one “sabbath” day when I disconnect from media in general. A day that goes unreported on Facebook or Flickr, a day when I connect with reality, no matter how over-rated it might be. I bake and sew and read an analog book off the shelf.

I do that because I do worry about the work/life balance. I need to take a break from my work because I have other passions and communities that require attention. And taking a break is sometimes the best way to a great, new idea, or the solution to a nagging problem. But, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic goes on to describe an idea that I’ve been considering lately. He calls it the difference between a job and a career, I called it the difference between a job and work:

People who have jobs, rather than careers, worry about work-life balance because they are unable to have fun at work. If you are lucky enough to have a career — as opposed to a job — then you should embrace the work-life imbalance. A career provides a higher sense of purpose; a job provides an income. A job pays for what you do; a career pays for what you love. If you are always counting the number of hours you work (e.g., in a day, week, or month) you probably have a job rather than a career. Conversely, the more elusive the boundaries between your work and life, the more successful you probably are in both. A true career isn’t a 9-5 endeavor. If you are having fun working, you will almost certainly keep working. Your career success depends on eliminating the division between work and play. Who cares about work-life balance when you can have work-lifefusion?

I was attracted to the idea of work-life fusion. But as long as having a career means also having a job, this fusion will be difficult to achieve. You have to be somewhere for 40 hours and then put in another 40 hours in your “free time.” If you are active for about 15 hours a day, that leaves you 25 hours per week or 3.5 hours a day. And what do you do? Spend it commuting.

I think a work-life fusion can only happen truly successfully when your work and your life take place in the same location where you control both when and how you work.

I agree with the writer that work and career isn’t about the number of hours you work or are supposed to work, but it’s about being able to distribute those hours in ways that make sense for you. Develop the “fluid” approach described by Melanie Pinola, feature in Lifehacker’s How We Work series. Somehow it doesn’t seem like you’re working 80 hours when you can divide them up between family or other passions. And many people will save 2 hours each day just getting to work.