The Journey to Productivity Starts with 10,000 Steps

How many steps do you take a day?  Inspired by a recommendation by Dr. Oz, I bought a $23 pedometer and have started tracking my steps.  Dr. Oz recommends taking 10,000 steps a day as a good aim for a healthy, active lifestyle. Yesterday I just hit 10,000 by doing a day's worth of errands, laundry, and housecleaning.  I know not every day is so active for me -- many much less so.  My goal is to hit 10,000 steps a day, 4 days a week for the next month.

Tracking my steps is a fitness project and a mindfulness project, but it is also is a productivity project.

On days I work from home, I am much more productive if I start my morning with even a short walk outside the house.  Getting out of the house and taking a walk first-thing wakes me up and focuses my mind.  Mid-day, walking can take me from a dull, foggy work slump to a sharp and alert state of mind in five minutes.    It can also give my mood a significant boost.

Have you noticed that you are more productive when you shift your physical state?

Mindfulness on Vacation

I am on my first vacation out of the country in a number of years, and am remembering how international travel forces me into a more mindful state. With so much new information to process -- from the sound of the language to the songs of the birds in the trees to the texture of sugar cane between my teeth -- my propensity to notice what I am experiencing in real time is exponentially heightened.  This is the phenomenon that at its most overwhelming can become culture shock; but in small, manageable doses, it provides for a cascade of pleasantly challenging experiences.

Vacations alter our daily routines just enough that even the things we experience at home can take on new meaning.  Trying to photograph the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean the other night, I couldn't believe how quickly the sun was disappearing below the horizon. I barely caught it before it disappeared altogether.  I found myself thinking, does the sun always set this quickly?  Does it move this quickly across the sky all day, even in New York City?  How could I never have noticed this before?

That the sun sets rapidly is hardly a revolutionary discovery. It's a  useful reminder though that there is rich, meaningful information surrounding us every day -- information that  whether by necessity, obliviousness or choice, we have trained ourselves to ignore.

We can't tap into all of this information all the time, or we would find ourselves in a immobilizing state of sensory overload.  Still, it is important to create opportunities for our minds to have to process new information, or to be able to process old information in new ways.

It's 2010. Do You Know How Many Emails Are In Your Inbox?

The new year presents an opportunity to revolutionize your relationship with email.  Many of us allow email to pile up and overwhelm us in a way that we would never permit to happen with physical clutter.

The good news is it's not that hard to develop healthier email habits.  Here are some ways to start: Start treating your email inbox like an inbox -- not a filing cabinet, calendar or reminder system. Would you keep 10,000 messages on your voicemail if you could?  Or allow five years worth of information to pile up in your physical inbox?  It's probably not the greatest idea to use your email inbox in this manner either.

The key to an inbox -- any inbox --  is that things come in, and are regularly processed out.  About a year ago, I went from 36,000 emails in my work inbox to ZERO.  Productivity guy Merlin Mann has written and spoken about how to do this -- his system is called -- wait for it -- Inbox Zero.

Unsubscribe from junk mail clutter. As a Gmail user, I find that I get very little spam.  Most of the "junk mail" I get is from lists I actually signed up for but no longer care about, or from one-time purchases that enrolled me in a lifetime of sale alerts.

Treat this stuff like what it is -- clutter -- and purge it.  Rather than ignoring or deleting each message as it comes in, open it, scroll down to the teensy-tiny print at the bottom of the message and hit "unsubscribe." And, when you make online purchases, think twice about opting-in to sale notices and updates.

Use your own email habits to lead by example. Hate getting work emails at 11:30 PM on a Sunday night?  Stop sending them yourself.  Your colleagues build their expectations about your availability based on how available you make yourself.  Most things can wait until morning.  Others will catch on.

Be intentional about checking your email. If you are being interrupted by the "ding" of incoming email every five minutes, you are allowing yourself to be interrupted about a 100 times during your work day.  Try turning off your automatic email notification for a couple of hours, for a day, or for good.

Check your email when you actually have the time and head-space to process what you'll find in your inbox, and when it won't serve as a distraction from the work you are doing.

What are your best strategies for keeping email under control?

Training Your Brain to Stop Putting Off That Vacation

The New York Times ran an interesting piece yesterday about pleasure procrastination: our tendency to put off things we actually want to do. Researchers have found that there are a couple of reasons we don't redeem gift cards or use our frequent flier miles. First, we mistakenly believe that we are too busy to engage in pleasurable activities now and that we will have more time to do so in the future.  Second, we don't want to settle for a good experience now when we imagine that we can create a perfect experience in the future. The problem comes when we habitually deny ourselves fun in the present moment because we are holding out for tomorrow. At best, we wind up with a drawer full of unused gift cards and Banana Republic winds up a little richer.  At worst, we wind up with a severely out-of-balance life, unable to allow ourselves (and probably those who are unfortunate enough to work for us) the "luxury" of a long vacation, a long weekend, or a long lunch.

I would argue that in order to stop pushing pleasure off into the future, we need to practice being present. Just as practicing scales is the foundation of mastering the piano, regular mindfulness meditation is practice for being present in daily life.

Mindfulness meditation is as simple as sitting for 5 minutes and focusing on your own breathing. Each time your mind drifts toward "what's for dinner tonight?" or "did I pay that bill?" gently bring your attention back to your breath. That's it. This is the "practice" in meditation: returning your attention to the present moment again, and again, and again.

Neuroscience confirms what meditators have long experienced: the more you practice meditation, the more easily you will be able to shift your awareness from the stories in your head to the present moment before you.  David Rock explains how mindfulness meditation retrains the circuitry networks in our brains so that we can be less caught up in narrative and more attune to the present moment.  He writes that over time,

You perceive more information about events occurring around you, as well as more accurate information about these events. Noticing more real-time information makes you more flexible in how you respond to the world. You also become less imprisoned by the past, your habits, expectations or assumptions, and more able to respond to events as they unfold.

That story that you've been telling yourself about the much-delayed vacation you'll take once everything is perfectly under control at work?  Much less convincing, when you are attuned to the reality of your present experience.

Does the concept of pleasure procrastination resonate with you?  What do you do to curb it?

Are Organizations Just Apartments Crammed With Junk?

Watching a show about apartments crammed with junk has made me think about the challenges of sustaining organizational change. The show is "Hoarders" on A&E, a reality series that documents people whose compulsive acquisition of stuff has made their houses uninhabitable and their lives chaotic. One recent episode featured Dale, a man at risk of losing his apartment if he doesn't clear out the clutter and bring his living space up to code.  Dale, an avid dumpster diver and collector of art objects, has so packed his apartment with his finds that he has created a fire hazard -- and yet, he can't stop himself from acquiring more stuff.

The climax of the episode comes during a confrontation between the two professionals enlisted to help Dale: Christina the professional organizer and Dr. Moore the clinical psychologist.  Christina is pushing Dale to make decisions about getting rid of his stuff, and to accept responsibility for the way he has neglected the items he says he cares about so deeply.  Dr. Moore is growing increasingly concerned about Dale's mental state and his willingness to continue with the change process as Christina pushes and pushes.

Dr. Moore confronts Christina and basically says, "Your job is to clean out people's apartments, and my job is support people as they change."  Dr. Moore argues emphatically for "balance" between the two goals if Dale is to see any success at all.

The episode ends as Dale enters his newly clean and uncluttered apartment, ecstatic with the possibility of a new life.  We are also left with Dr. Moore's warning that if Dale doesn't get long-term counseling, the clutter will soon return.   It's a scary thought, knowing where Dale has been.

This made me wonder, as leaders initiating organizational change, how much are we just trying to clean out apartments and how much are we supporting organizations to achieve sustainable change?

Theorist Edgar Schein identifies three components of organizational culture: artifacts (the things we see), espoused values (the things we say we believe) and tacit assumptions (the often unexamined beliefs we take for granted).

Like Dale, many of our organizations are existing in spaces crammed with broken "stuff" we feel very attached to:  our lopsided org chart, our outdated diversity policy, or our serpentine process for ordering supplies.  These are the artifacts of our cluttered organizational lives.  Relatively speaking, it is not that hard for a focused leader or change consultant to sweep these away.

After the organization is swept clean, it is also relatively easy to take up a new mantra associated with the changes -- at least for a little while.  As we saw Dale exuberantly embracing his newly clean apartment, many organizations will at first luxuriate in the feeling of spaciousness that follows a change process.  Like Dale, organizations will espouse -- often quite publicly -- the values associated with their new way of being.

Much harder to change are the tacit assumptions that facilitated our need for change in the first place. This is Dr. Moore's plea to Christina: "Don't be so committed to emptying the apartment that you forget the person who created this mess in the first place."  This is where change leaders must ask the tough questions to uncover what the people in an organization really believe.  That is the place from which sustainable organizational change can occur.

The truth is, most organizational change efforts -- and I would guess most de-hoarding interventions -- ultimately fail.  Volumes of organizational literature have been written on why this is so.  The story of Dale presents a powerful metaphor for what we are up against when we seek to change organizations, and why simply cleaning house is not enough.