Category: Cognative Errors

How to Leave Work at Work

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How easily do you leave your work at work?

For many people, their job is an important part of their lives. In fact, they love it so much they donate a lot of unpaid hours to their employer every year. (For the record, that’s not a charitable approach I would ever suggest doing willingly.)

However, for employees who want to enjoy their downtime, but have trouble separating their work and personal lives, are their ways to disengage in the evenings and weekends?

Going through my files today I came across an article from 2019 that addresses this topic. Titled, 15 Tips for Leaving Work at Work, writer Marina Khidekel shared ideas from a slew of experts on how to successfully leave the office and enjoy life outside of it. One example is a classic approach to conclude a workday – tidy up!

“Something I began doing, almost unknowingly during my years as a teacher was straightening up my desk each day just before I left work for the day. Fifteen years later, now as a counselor I do the same thing. When my last client leaves, I come back into my office and straighten up my desk. It takes me no more than one minute and brings about closure to my day. When I return the next morning, I walk into an organized work space and that helps me think clearly and begin the new day. The habit is set and hardwired and I don’t take work home with me.”  

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Another idea is to set boundaries outside of the office. While this can be a challenge with our digital connectivity, it is possible to be clear with others about when you are checking email.

“I never check my work emails or phone over the weekend — my out of office response is turned on until 9 a.m. Monday morning. That way people know not to expect a response from me, and I don’t feel guilty about not getting back to them.”

Another option to create separation is to craft a ritual to empower the switch from work to home.

“To help transition my mindset from work-mode to relax-mode, I have a few rituals that allow me to leave work at work. For example, on my walk home, I will listen to a podcast about my interests outside of work like fitness, health, and well-being. With these rituals, I get to celebrate my hard work of the day and immerse myself in the other activities I enjoy to reground.”

To learn the other twelve suggestions to keep work at work, please read the rest of the article.

Can’t Focus – Try This!

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Let’s be honest, some days I find it hard to focus. In fact, I was almost too distracted to write these words!

However, in order to get things done we need to focus on the task at hand. Yet that ability can seem fleeting. What can be done to regain focus when it is lost?

Darius Foroux has struggled with a lack of focus and learned some lessons on how to restore it. He shares them in a post on his website called, “What I Do When I Can’t Focus.” He starts by identifying a prime impediment to focus, the dreaded distraction.

Focusing on a single thing is one of the hardest things at work.

There’s always something that interrupts you, right? …

Sure, you can blame those things — but that’s weak. You and I both know that those things can’t interrupt you without your permission.

That means every time you’re not focused; you’re giving someone or something permission to enter your mind.

Foroux goes on to provide his first strategy for getting focused. It involves elimination.

What did I do when I lacked focus? I asked myself this question:

“What thing(s) should I eliminate to make my life so simple that it’s easy to focus?”

In this case, I stopped focusing on YouTube. Elimination is a key strategy that I use for many aspects of my life.

We accumulate so much unnecessary baggage throughout the years that we consistently need to eliminate ideas, projects, work, objects, and so forth.

Read more about this strategy and Foroux’s second strategy on his website. Then it try it yourself and see if focus returns.

Ways to Overcome Summer Stagnation

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Are you suffering from summer stagnation?

For many of us, summer is seen as a time for leisure. Our colleagues are off on family vacations or extended weekends hitting the beach, travelling to other countries, or finding a cottage in the woods. This can lead to a slowdown at work as key individuals are out of the office and offline. Projects pause and many of the usual meetings are cancelled.

Under these conditions, workers may feel less engaged and unmotivated as they wait for the office to return to normal. A recent article on Korn Ferry.com points out that 46% of office workers believe the quality of their work slumps in the summer. This can have many effects.

Indeed, being unmotivated during the summer can affect your ability to meet goals later in the year, says Mark Royal, a senior client partner for Korn Ferry Advisory. “It can negatively impact your image and personal brand within the organization,” he says.

Don’t let summer stagnation overcome you.
Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels.com

However, this time need not be wasted. Employees can take advantage of the summertime shift at work to explore news ways of doing and thinking. To counter stagnation, the article explores five ways to stay energized at work during the summer. One of the suggestions in the Korn Ferry article is to switch things up by busting out of the usual routine.

Simple changes—like working outdoors instead of indoors, or at a coffee shop instead of at home—support engagement and renew excitement, says Val Olson, a career and leadership coach at Korn Ferry Advance. “Slumps can happen due to a lack of variety. Variety is the spice of life,” she says.

If you can’t get out of the office, try rearranging the furniture or adding new decor to revive a tiresome space. Varying your surroundings can be energizing and aid focus.

Another way to take advantage of quieter summer workspaces is to reflect on what actually excites you about your work and career.

More people on vacation often means fewer meetings and emails. Experts say you can use this lull to reflect on, and pursue, the aspects of the job that most engage you. Being able to find meaning and value will help motivate you during any downtime, as well as when the workload heats back up.

Read the full article to learn three more ways to turn summer stagnation into engaging and worthwhile experiences.

The Death of Goals

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Have you recently created a set of clear, written goals?

Most career advice emphasizes the idea of writing down measurable goals that one then pursues with laser focus. This is said to be the key to success in work and life. However, is this advice sound?

In a post on his website, Tiago Forte pondered the idea that we have reached the Death of Goals. He starts by lamenting the continued assumption that SMART goals are the be all and end all of achievement.

Every time I bring up “SMART goals,” I can see the light go out in my students’ eyes. An unmistakable feeling of dread and aversion fills the room, and the decline in energy and enthusiasm is palpable. They know they should set goals that way, but they don’t want to.

The SMART framework was developed 44 years ago by a director of corporate planning at an electric and natural gas utility – not exactly a paragon of modern business in the information age.

I knew traditional goals were an outdated relic of a bygone era, but I hadn’t figured out what to replace them with. After all, they seem like such a load-bearing pillar of modern society: you set an objective, you make a plan, and then you follow the steps to get there. 

To Tiago, a possible solution lies in the book, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, by Kenneth O. O. Stanley and Joel Lehman. For the authors, goals are fine when the project is about incremental improvement or completing rote tasks. However, the value of goals collapses when the scope of possibilities grows larger.

The problem arises when we try to scale up this modest strategy to greater achievements – those that involve true ambition, novel invention, innovative breakthroughs, or pushing the frontier.

These are the kinds of pursuits in which goals lose their power, and can actually become counterproductive and lead you in the opposite direction of progress.

To understand why, it’s helpful to think of achievement not as creating something completely new from scratch, but as searching a space of possibilities.

Tiago believes that goals work best when the environment is well defined. The problem comes when we encounter undefined and unknown conditions. As technology and society advances in unexpected directions, a reliance on goals can be a dead end.

For the most interesting, exciting, impactful achievements, goals are a false compass, distracting you from the highest potential directions. They induce a narrow tunnel vision, eliminating the serendipitous discovery, unorthodox creativity, and breakthrough innovation that are most valuable.

In other words, the best path through the vast hall of possibilities is not a straight one; it’s a twisty turny wild ride of daring leaps and hairpin pivots that would seem positively crazy to any outside observer.

The article ends with Tiago’s six steps to think outside of goals. These steps allow people to appreciate the value of interesting problems and expand their realm of thinking to a broader range of possibilities for success.

Read the full article to learn more about the limitation of goals and a possible alternative for progress.

So, what is your non-goal?

Do Less

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When was the last time you did less?

Most of us live very full lives. Between work, exercise, housekeeping, and other commitments it seems like being on the go is the natural state of affairs. However, is it healthy to remain constantly picking up new projects, agreeing to new responsibilities and rushing to the next meeting?

In a Time magazine article from last year titled Do Less. It’s Good for You, journalist Jamie Ducharme explores how doing fewer things may bring greater health and life enjoyment. To do so, we must first rethink what it means to do less. Ducharme points to a set of studies that show how hard it is for most people to relax.

Researchers including Michelle Newman, a professor of psychology at the Pennsylvania State University, have also studied the concepts of “relaxation anxiety” and “relaxation sensitivity,” which relate to the discomfort, boredom, or unease some people feel when they slow down. For some, “There’s this view that, ‘I should always be busy doing something,’” Newman says. “Often people feel like it’s not okay to just be reading a good book or watching a good program on TV.”

She then points out how relaxation through doing less is vital to staying healthy.

The truth is, rest and relaxation are vital to well-being. Chronic stress negatively affects nearly every aspect of mental and physical health, even contributing to higher risks for chronic disease and premature death. Meanwhile, rest may boost your health, quality of life, and longevity. Getting better at resting and relaxing, then, isn’t frivolous; it could actually be lifesaving.

The challenge of doing less involves setting boundaries between work and home, relaxing the body, and starting small with changes. To learn more about how to reprogram yourself from a state of constant doing to a lifestyle that values relaxation, please read the rest of the article.

The Secret to Success – Take Time Off

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When was the last time you took a vacation from work? I mean a true vacation where you unplugged completely from the office, not even peeking at your email once.

There is a mindset that we need to keep working to succeed. Breaks and vacations are seen as distractions from accomplishing goals. However, is this true or simply a recipe for burnout?

In an article on his website, Darius Foroux suggests that taking time off is actually vital to completing your goals. In fact, time off not only is good for your physical and mental well-being, but it also a way to increase creativity and focus. To start, he chastises the idea that taking time off is for wimps.

People who never take time off to do nothing are short-term focused. “I want to reach my goals! NOW!”

But as always, short-term thinking harms your long-term development and growth. What happens when you power through work and burn yourself out? In most instances, your results suffer, and you become less productive.

In some cases, you even become depressed — which will set you back even longer. 

His solution is to embrace time off from work. Whether it is deliberate breaks during the day or taking an unplugged vacation, time off has many benefits. One of the primary reasons breaks are important is that they give us time to think and process.

All ideas require processing. Are the ideas any good? Do I really want to do those things?

Again, that’s a thinking process. When you go from idea to execution, without processing, you often waste your time in hindsight.

Of course, you can never entirely prevent that. But by taking the time to process your ideas, you can prevent your future self a lot of pain, worry, and even money.

Read the full article on Foroux’s website to learn more benefits of taking time off.

The Path to Happiness

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Given the choice, most people would prefer to be happy. Yet, happiness remains frightfully elusive. Why is that?

It may have to do with where we place our attention. Quite often our happiness is a result of what we are choosing to do, and who we are with, in the moment. With that theory in mind, is it possible to mindfully improve our happiness?

According to Scott Young, the answer is yes. In an article on his website, Young proposes that the path to greater happiness is focusing on the things we love as opposed to the things we merely like. Early in the piece he lays out his logic.

Each of us has things we love. These things are both deeply enjoyable, and they fit ourselves into the vision of who we would like to be. When we’re doing them, we feel both fun and joy in the moment, but also feel content with the person we’re aiming to be.

We also have things we just like. These things may offer some momentary pings of joy, but the activity itself doesn’t really make us feel better about ourselves or deeply fulfilled. It’s just something to pass the time.

A route to greater happiness, in both the day-to-day enjoyment and long-term fulfillment with who you are and where you are in life is simple: do more of the things you love, and cut back on the things you merely like.

Young believes that by being methodical about identifying the things we love to do and the places and people we love to be with, our happiness will improve by focusing our time on them. To learn more about his theory and follow his step-by-step guide to make it happen, please read the rest of the article.

Do You Measure Your Wealth in Money or Time?

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When people consider the idea of success, often they equate dollar signs as the measure. The belief is that having more money in the bank account equals greater satisfaction. However, one can have an abundance of dollars, but it is worthless when there is no time to enjoy it. Therefore, is it more accurate to say that a person should be measured by how much time freedom they have?

In a recent article on Lifehacker, writer Jeff Somers explores how control over one’s time rather than monetary wealth may be the best sign of success. He writes:

Time affluence—the feeling that you have enough time to accomplish everything you want to get done—is a crucial aspect of our happiness and sense of personal satisfaction. Time poverty is the opposite—that stressful feeling you get when there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. Between commuting to and from our jobs, the time spent working, then the chores at home, many of us barely have time to eat some dinner and maybe stream a show before collapsing into bed—and starting the process over again the next day.

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Later in the article he offers some time hacks that can free up valuable space in the day. The first method he discusses is organizing and prioritizing.

Since your time is limited, stop treating it like an amorphous, infinite resource you always have more of. Make lists of things you need or want to do and prioritize them. Then use time blocking to break each of those priorities into a fixed amount of time needed to accomplish them or at least move them toward completion. This avoids letting tasks pile up, which increases stress and that sense of not being in control of your time, and provides a visual guide to how your day will play out. And having clear times for specific activities to end will increase your efficiency.

Learn his other techniques for building up time affluence by reading the rest of the article.

Opening Up Your Personal Constraints

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Oftentimes personal development seems like a nebulous task. Since a lot of it takes place in our heads and hearts, it would seem that attempts at self-improvement are hard to quantify. However, could there be a way to use physical world productivity systems to produce inner growth?

On his YouTube channel, Tiago Forte recently explored using the Theory of Constraints to improve personal productivity and development. For those not familiar with the theory, it was developed decades ago to better understand how large-scale systems, especially factories, could function more effectively. A key focus of the process is identifying the bottleneck. The website Lean Production defines it this way:

The core concept of the Theory of Constraints is that every process has a single constraint and that total process throughput can only be improved when the constraint is improved. A very important corollary to this is that spending time optimizing non-constraints will not provide significant benefits; only improvements to the constraint will further the goal (achieving more profit).

Thus, TOC seeks to provide precise and sustained focus on improving the current constraint until it no longer limits throughput, at which point the focus moves to the next constraint. The underlying power of TOC flows from its ability to generate a tremendously strong focus towards a single goal (profit) and to removing the principal impediment (the constraint) to achieving more of that goal. In fact, Goldratt considers focus to be the essence of TOC.

Tiago believes that this theory can be applied to personal growth. In the video, he gives an example of how he uses it to improve his deep-thinking time for writing his next book. Since there is no physical bottleneck, what he explores is how his personal energy is the obstacle to his process. He then identifies ways to overcome it, such as blocking out time in the morning, exercising, eating healthy, and minimizing distractions. All these actions are ways to expand his capacity to think deeper.

The video is only five minutes long and easy to understand. I invite you to watch it and learn how the Theory of Constraints could improve your life.