Reading List: Winter Break Edition

I've got a month off from assigned reading!   These are the books I'm digging into over my break. Your Brain At Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long By David Rock

I saw David Rock give a talk last month on the neuroscience of mindfulness and was eager to learn more.  David's newest book delves into what is going on in our brains as we go through our days at work - checking email, attending meetings, trying to adjust to new roles and responsibilities.

As a non-science person, I was worried this book would be over my head or a  drag to read, but it is very fast-paced and accessible.  The book uses two fictional characters and  very clear metaphors (i.e. the prefrontal cortex as a stage) to illustrate how understanding our brains can help us "work smarter."   Here is David's schpiel on the book, in a talk he recently gave at Google.

Unclutter Your Life in One Week By Erin Doland

Do I need this book?  Probably not.  I am not a particularly cluttered person.  (Not now at least; my mother would tell you that my childhood bedroom was a whole different story!)   However I love Erin's blog Unclutterer and David Allen (Mr. GTD) wrote the foreward to this book, so I had to check it out.

Take the title (which has the unfortunate ring of a crash diet) with a grain of salt: there are enough uncluttering projects in this book to last the average reader for months.  I am planning on implementing just one of these projects -- using Erin's criteria for wardrobe decluttering -- over winter break.

I have already internalized Erin's brilliant toss-it-or-keep-it question:  "Is this helping me lead a remarkable life?"  If not... it's clutter.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon By Stephanie Meyer

I'm on break -- I need some teenage vampires and werewolves.  And plus, I've got to read the book before I see the movie!

I'm still interested in finding a good "brain for dummies" type book that will ease me into the field of neuroscience.   Particularly with a connection to leadership or organizational life.  Any recommendations?

What Matters Now

Seth Godin asked 70 "big thinkers" from business, social innovation, and technology to answer the question, "What Matters Now?"  Their answers - one page essays on topics like fear, generosity, gumption, sleep, and willpower - are available in a free e-book. You can get the free e-book here.

Using the Warmer/Colder Test to Stay Aligned With Your Purpose

Remember that childhood game, warmer/colder?  You'd search for a hidden object while your friend who'd hidden the object told you if you were getting "warmer" or "colder" with each step.  "Warmer" meant you were getting closer, and "colder" meant you were edging farther away.  To succeed at the game, you had to follow the "warmer" prompts until you were right where you were supposed to be. My friend and I were discussing a career decision I had to make, and he asked me if either choice felt "warmer" or "colder" in relation to where I ultimately wanted to be.  When I thought about it, one option clearly felt "warmer" -- that was where I needed to focus my attention.  The other felt "colder" --  not the direction I wanted to be headed.  That's when it clicked for me: warmer/colder is a great everyday gut-check for alignment with purpose.

I began to test out the warmer/colder question in little and big ways.  Staying up late reading blogs? Colder, zapping my energy to focus on things that are really important to me.  Reading a book on brain science?  Warmer, exploring a new area of interest.  Taking a consulting gig to do work unrelated to my studies?  Colder, dragging me back into a way of working that doesn't work for me.  Seeking out connections with new people and organizations?  Warmer, though it feels risky and unknown.

This can be especially helpful in times of career transition and personal growth.  You may feel like you have no clue of where you are going, but doing a warmer/colder check can provide you with some quick gut-level data as you move forward.

My GTD Year in Review

This time last December, I was working in an office crammed with stuff.  Conference programs, old speeches, copies of travel receipts, notebooks brimming with ideas from half a decade ago, and drafts of reports long-ago published were filed and piled around me.  I wasn’t a hoarder – I just considered stacking things to be a valid organizing system. Since I was generally able to find what I needed when I needed it, I didn't consider myself disorganized.  Psychologically, my stacks served as a symbol of the important work that I was doing – work so important that it kept piling up and didn’t wait for me to get around to filing it.

At the same time, I knew my stacks weren’t really doing me any favors.  They took up valuable real estate on my desk, limiting my ability to spread out when I needed to do “big thinking” on projects. Occasionally I would fail to do something or be somewhere because the information I needed was buried and forgotten in a stack. I would sort through my stacks, filing and shredding from time to time, but the stacks never went away.  They were weighing me down.

Enter David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system, recommended to me by a number of trusted colleagues.  GTD is a system for collecting, processing, organizing, reviewing, and doing all of the “stuff” that comes into our lives.  Though there are many different products & commentaries on GTD, the place to start is David Allen’s book, which is a cheap and quick read.

I embarked on the first stage of GTD during the week between Christmas and New Year’s.  For five days, I went through every piece of paper, every receipt and takeout menu. Armed with a label-maker, a stack of fresh file folders, and an inbox, I followed David Allen’s instructions and began to bring order to my office.  By the first week of 2009, I was back to work with an organized workspace and a new system in place.

My desk and my mind clear of clutter, I was able to clarify my priorities and take care of first things first.  Trusting that every email, meeting request, or task I agreed to do would be captured and processed in my system, I was able to shed the nagging feeling that something was falling through the cracks.   My follow-through on the commitments I made radically improved, and I developed peace of mind that I was doing what I should be doing at any given moment.

This summer, as I prepared to shift from full-time office worker to full-time student and part-time consultant, I brought GTD more fully into my home.  I set up a home office and have maintained a zero-tolerance policy on stacks of papers.  The only place that papers are allowed to pile up is in my inbox (which gets regularly emptied), meaning that on more days than not, my desk actually looks like the picture above.

I now allow myself the time to do the regular maintenance that I need to keep my work, and my life, moving in the direction I want to be going.  When I wasn’t giving regular attention to all of the things that needed attending to, stuff quite literally stacked up. I used to feel that I couldn’t afford to spend time “organizing” – work and life moved too fast.  Now I realize that I can’t afford not to.

This is not to say that life feels totally under control and my time spent is always aligned with my priorities – far from it. But GTD has helped me develop a “new normal” for myself.  And this calm, organized normal feels a lot better than the overwhelming stacks of unaddressed stuff I was living with before.

To Manage Workload, Right-Size Your Goals

A great takeaway from the Selah/Rockwood refresher training I attended yesterday: Workload = Goals / (Timeframe x Resources x Efficiency)

If your workload is unmanageable, the best way to tinker with this equation is to right-size your goals.

Why?

• The timeframe available for our work is often externally mandated.  We have to get the report done by the date of the board meeting, or the RFP is due on a certain date.
• Resources are something we also often have limited control over.  We only have $100,0oo in our budget, one part-time staffer to help with the event, etc.
• Efficiency is a place where many of us love to tinker but actual gains are modest.  Our ability to be more productive or efficient certainly helps move work along (and can greatly improve one's mental state), but doesn't really reduce workload if we have taken on too many commitments.

Our goals are where the biggest shifts are possible. How much are we committing ourselves to do?  Do we have three strategic goals for the year or seventeen? If our goals are unrealistically ambitious from the get, it is unlikely we will be able to make sufficient alterations to our timeframe, resources, or efficiency to regulate our workload.

Right-sizing goals can be hard -- especially for us social change folks, who have such big and long-term goals.  But we all know the alternative: burnout, disillusionment, and reduced effectiveness.  To be able to sustain ourselves as change agents over time, we need to make sure we are regulating our workload, and that means being more realistic about the goals we set for ourselves and our organizations.