Drawing Digital Boundaries in an Always-On World

If you’re like most people, you’ve responded to work email while on the grocery check-out line, on vacation, and in bed. Increasingly we are always at work unless we make a conscious decision not to be. As a workflow coach to busy professionals, I get to see both the benefits and challenges of our ever-shrinking, instantly-syncing and always-buzzing technology.  The plus is that we can work from anywhere, anytime; the drawback comes when we are working everywhere, all the time.

The truth is that your inbox will still be accepting emails when you die. Will you choose to live in your inbox 24/7, or will you step away from time to time and be present in the messy, physical, relational world?

We have to get really good at choosing when we’re working and when we’re not. The radical act of unplugging – of intentionally turning off our devices for a few hours, days or even weeks – can have profound effects:

• Coworkers will see that you place boundaries on your time and adjust accordingly.  By not responding to work emails after a certain time of night, on the weekends, or on vacation, you signal that you respect your own time and that of your colleagues.

• Loved ones will appreciate your undivided attention. A dinner without text messaging and a day outside without email will not go unnoticed.

• You will grow to enjoy the alertness, calm, and productivity that comes from focusing on the present moment without attending to a blinking device.

If turning off your devices for even an hour seems like an impossible feat, here are some questions to get you thinking:

• What parts of your life could you experience more fully if you were to unplug?  What are the consequences if you don’t unplug?

• What one technology habit, if you changed it, would make the biggest positive impact on your life?

• Where in your day, week, or year, is it most important to you to you carve out time to disconnect from technology?

No one else will draw these boundaries for you.  The only person who can stop you from answering email 24/7 is you.  So, where will you draw the line?

From the Vault: Pondering Purpose in the (Jewish) New Year

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For those who celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, now is a time of reflection, of returning to that which we value most, and of reconciling our best intentions with our actions. 

In the spirit of the holiday, I offer this post from the vault: Pondering Purpose in the New Year.  Whether or not you are celebrating the birth of a new year this week, I invite you to take a moment to step back and reflect with this exercise.  

How can you call upon your purpose to do your best work in the year to come?

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Today I've been revisiting some of my favorite perspectives on the concept of purpose.  I am particularly moved by these words by choreographer Martha Graham:

[quote] There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action.  And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.  If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.  The world will not have it.  It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how it compares to other expressions.  It is simply your business to keep the channel open.[/quote]

Reflecting upon these words, what resonates?

• What is the unique energy or action you will contribute to the world?
• How can you more fully express it in the year to come?
• How have you blocked its expression in the past?
• How will you remove these blocks this year?
• What's the possibility you create when you "keep the channel open"?

Happy New Year.

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Photo credit: loop_oh on Flickr.

3 Super Online Tools for Writing and Reflection

One of my personal goals for this fall is to take more time for regular writing and reflection.  To get back in the groove, I've turned to some of my favorite free online writing tools.  Each of them make getting the words out fun, simple, and relatively painless. Write long:  750 words.com On the face of it, this site is simple: log in daily, start writing, and don't stop until the auto word-counter tells you you've hit 750 words (approximately 3 pages longhand).  Once you've accumulate several days worth of input, the site's algorithms kick in and you can take advantage some very cool bells and whistles.  Based on your writing, the site offers you data on everything from your typing speed to your mood and mindset; you can even earn badges for consecutive days of writing.

Write quick: ohlife.com Ohlife is founded on the simple premise that keeping a journal doesn't have to be a time-consuming endeavor.  Once you sign up on the site, you will receive an email each day that asks you simply, "How'd your day go?"  Reply to that email with whatever you want to write about your day, and the site will archive your responses (which you can access on the site at any time).  Collectively, your answers to this one question constitute a record of your days.

Write deep: doyou10q.com 10Q is an annual online reflection event that takes place during the 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur -- but you don't have to be Jewish to participate or to benefit.  Sign up and starting on September 28th, you will be sent one question a day to answer about your life, looking back and looking ahead.  (Sample question: "Think about a major milestone that happened with your family this past year. How has this affected you?") Your answers are "sealed in the vault" at the end of the 10 days and - here's where it really gets cool - only become available to you one year later (time capsule-style).  I'm going into my 3rd year of doing 10Q and can't wait to look back on my answers from 2010 and 2009.

BONUS - Write old school: (Non-virtual) Journal Online tools are great, but sometimes I just want to put pen to paper.  My go-to sources for journals are Moleskine (when I'm feeling spendy) and Muji (where my favorite journal costs $1.50).  Nothing beats a good old-fashioned blank page.

What are your favorite tools or prompts for writing and reflection?

The One Planning (and Focusing and Decision-Making) Tool I Couldn't Live Without

  Three years ago at the Selah Leadership Program, I was introduced to a planning tool that I've used every single day since.  This magic tool?  POP.

The POP Model was developed by organizational consultants Leslie Sholl Jaffe and Randall J. Alford.  POP stands for Purpose, Outcomes, and Process, and it's a simple and effective tool for keeping yourself and others focused aligned in almost any context.

Purpose answers the question, why is this important?  

Outcomes answers the question, what do we most need to accomplish?

and Process answers the question, how will we accomplish the outcomes?

It is easy to see why these three little questions have so much resonance.

• Purpose fuzzy?  You are likely to find yourself spinning your wheels, lost and not sure how you got where you are.
• Outcomes unclear?  Team members may be working toward different goals, reducing the group's overall impact.
• Process ignored?  You'll find yourself in the middle of a dead-end meeting, wondering why there is so much talk and so little progress toward what you really need to be getting done.

POP In Action

To use the model, articulate the Purpose of what you are taking on, your desired Outcomes, and the Process for how you will get to the outcomes.  In some contexts it is beneficial to use POP on your own, and in others it can be a powerful tool for aligning a group.  POP can be the basis for a 5-minute back-of-the-envelope exercise, or an all-day, organization-wide planning endeavor.

Say you have an upcoming meeting with your staff to plan your big 2012 fundraising event.  Before the meeting, you might sit down and take 5-10 minutes to sketch out a POP for yourself:

• Purpose: The purpose of this meeting is to kick-off planning for the 2012 fundraising event.
• Outcomes: We need to leave this meeting with:
  • Clarity around who will spearhead each major piece of work.
  • A decision on if we will hire a marketing consultant or handle that in-house.
  • An understanding on the part of the Development team of the Board's expectations for how much $$$ this event will bring in.
• Process:  In order to get to these outcomes:
  • I need to think about who I believe should take on each major piece of work, before the meeting.
  • I should look at that research we did two years ago about marketing consultants so I can go into the day with a ballpark figure of how much it would cost to outsource.
  • I sh0uld also have a conversation with my Development Director to make sure he understands the Board's target for this event -- that way he can help me get his team on board during the meeting.
  • Finally, I need to design an agenda for this meeting that will produce the outcomes I want -- so that we don't get lost in the weeds.

POP is a powerful tool to use in meetings. The meeting facilitator can either lead the group in collaboratively defining the meeting's Purpose, Outcomes and Process in real-time, or can bring a pre-defined POP to a meeting and solicit group-buy in.  A meeting where the whole team knows the POP -- why we are there, what we are trying to get to, and how we will get there -- is a meeting worth everyone's time.

POP can be used at the beginning of projects -- Why are we taking on this project? What do we want to accomplish by doing it? How will we accomplish that?  And, it can be a test of alignment, mid-project, when things seem to be drifting off course -- Why were we doing this project again?  What were we trying to accomplish?  How can we get back on track?

For me, the power of POP is in slowing down and thinking about what I really want to get out of the effort I am putting into a meeting, a project, or a partnership.  In a group context, going through the POP process can reveal hidden assumptions, biases and leaps in logic that would otherwise derail the group down the line.

It is no exaggeration to say that I use POP every single day.  I may have even POP'ed a vacation once or twice!   Try it out, and let me know how you experience the simple power of POP.

Want to learn more about applying POP in your organization?  Learn more about working with me.

3 Steps to Focusing at Work When It Really Counts

Are you able to focus when it really counts? When deadlines are looming -- when funder reports are due (or maybe were due a week ago), when you need to submit that important journal article -- how do you carve the time out of your already busy week to produce great work?

It's not like you can make the everyday emails, meetings, and work tasks stop while you work on this one really important thing.   You have to fit it in somehow.  Here's how.

Step 1: Identify The Conditions You Need to Do Your Best Work When, and under what conditions, do you get your best work done?  If trying to squeeze in a big writing project at the end of a busy day clearly won't work for you, what would work?  Some things to consider:

• Time: Do you do your best work early in the morning, or  do you kick into high gear after everyone else has gone to sleep?
• Place:   Can you do focused work at your desk, or do you need a change of scenery?  Consider taking a chunk of time out of the office if your everyday setting is too distracting.
• Duration: At a certain point, you will face diminishing returns.  A 90 minute sprint of focused work (at your most productive time and place) may produce better results than a 4 hour marathon.

Step 2: Book It Once you know when and where you can get your best work done, schedule it.  Put it in your calendar in no ambiguous terms: "8 - 11 AM, report writing at public library."  This now represents a commitment to yourself.

Step 3: Do Everything You Can to Protect Your Focused Time This is the most important step -- because if you do the first two steps and then let the time disappear, you're back to square one.

• Protect the time from others: Don't schedule meetings or phone calls during the time you've set aside for this important work.  Let others know you will be unavailable, and that they shouldn't disturb you.  If you are staying in your office, you might want to put a "Do Not Disturb" sign outside your work space.
• Protect the time from yourself:  Before starting work, preemptively eliminate whatever distractions might pop up and pull you off course.  Turn off your phone and use web blocking software (I use this and this) to keep yourself from wasting time online. If you're working offsite, bring only the materials for this one project so that you won't be tempted to work on others.

Once you've taken the three steps above, you've created a solid container for doing your best work.  Now all that's left is to hunker down and be brilliant!

What have you learned about the conditions in which you do your best work?