It’s February; we’re running out of steam on those New Year resolutions. What happened to all that willpower and motivation? Where did the light-footed exuberance and optimism of a new start, turn into a trudge through a muddy, ploughed field, with no end in sight?

It happens at work as well. All through the year. The team starts a new project full of optimism, energy. Planning is done by groupthink with a “How could anything go wrong?” mindset. Six months down the line people are looking for a scapegoat, and the exit, before they get engulfed in the crapstorm of blame and recrimination.

Where did it all go wrong?

“What do you do when the plan starts to fall apart, when willpower has gone and working long hours just doesn’t work?”

I’ve written before about the pre-mortem. It’s a thought experiment. You fast forward to the future, a future where your resolution/project failed disastrously, and list the reasons why it did. It forces you to remove the rose-coloured spectacles and face a different reality. One where willpower, guts, blood, sweat and tears are all exhausted. All those plentiful resources that you start with are depleted. Time has run out.

At the planning stage it doesn’t feel like this could ever happen. The glass is completely full, never mind half full. And it feels like it will never be empty. There’s even a superstitious feeling that imagining it being empty will help bring it about failure. We mustn’t allow negative thoughts to drag us down. Think positively.

Any plan must be capable of failing. So planning for failure must also make sense. What are you going to do when the plan starts to fall apart, when willpower has gone and working long hours just doesn’t work?

First, name some of the possible triggers. What will I do about my diet when I have to go to three business dinners in one week?s When I’m stressed out by my boss, and I’m reaching for a cigarette, how will I respond?  What will I do when I just want to pack in the new routine, because it’s too hard and I’ve run out of willpower?

Then come up with a plan for when you meet these inevitable obstacles.

But it’s more than having a theoretical plan. Rehearse the whole scene, including visuals and dialogue. You need to be ready with an automatic response that doesn’t need any willpower to put into action. “If this happens, I know that I need to do this”. “When we’re faced with situation X, we’ll recognise the trigger and  do behaviour Z”.

By the time your faced with the nightmare scenario, it’s OK. You’ve already been there in your head. You know what to do, because you planned for this, and you’ll be happy you did.

It’s a New Year. Time for a change. A new job. How can you use psychology to give yourself an edge?

“The VIA survey will give you brilliant material for an interview. You’ll have a scientifically validated list of the qualities that make you unique.”

A really good place to start is the VIA survey of character strengths – It’s free, you just have to register to use it. I like it because it makes you think about who you are, not what you do. You’ll get a list of your signature strengths, like Love of Learning; Fairness, Equity and Justice; or Judgement, Critical Thinking and Open-Mindedness. You can read more about it in the Martin Seligman book “Authentic Happiness”. Seligman was the founding light of Positive Psychology, which shifted the focus from a “What’s Broken?” model to “What’s Great” frame. That’s an excellent jumping off point when looking for a new job, you can play to your strengths. Otherwise it’s easy to waste a lot of time rectifying or concealing your “weaknesses”. The VIA survey will give you brilliant material for an interview. You’ll have a scientifically validated list of the qualities that make you unique.

It’s also good to find out what your motivations are for leaving your current job (assuming you have one). I love Daniel Pink’s book ” Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” . I love it because research shows that what we think motivates us (money, shiny things, big houses) isn’t what motivates us. What we really seek is Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Very different to the carrots and sticks usually on offer in the workplace. You might want to buy your old boss a copy as well. Did you know that having a bad boss is the most common reason for wanting to get a new job?

I’d also modestly suggest getting a Time Intelligence Report for yourself. It will tell you how you score on Motivation, Planning, Execution and Reflection, as well as the all important Time Perspective. Why do you need to know these things? Well, if you’re looking for a new job, you need to change from your current negative state of disillusionment with the past (old job) to a more optimistic, future-orientated state of optimism. The Time Intelligence Report will get you there, with a personal diagnosis and list of positive actions to take.

The Time Intelligence Report is only £1 until the end of January.

You can get it here

At the end of December, you can’t open a newspaper or magazine without seeing a review of the past year. What happened, who died, who won, who lost? You might be tempted yourself to have a bit of a self-audit of the year just gone, and maybe use it to cook up some New Year’s resolutions of your own.

It’s a worthy endeavour,but  I’m always reminded of a quote I first heard from Tony Robbins – [Tweet “You can’t use your rear view mirror as a navigation aid”]. In other words, you shouldn’t be using your past experiences to determine your future goals. I’m pretty sure this works for companies as well as people. A lot of what passes for corporate strategy is either re-jigging something that worked in the past or fixing a sticking-plaster over something that didn’t work, and dressing it up as innovation. No one sits down with a blank sheet of paper and just riffs on the future to create a new world of possibilities. Unless you have a coach.

A good coach will invite you to just go wild and dream, without looking over your shoulder at the Shoulda, Woulda, Couldas. The future doesn’t have to be the same as today, with the volume, contrast and brightness turned up a bit. It could be an extraordinary place. Learn from your past mistakes, by all means, but don’t rely on them to illuminate the way forward, get yourself a coach if you want to escape from the confines of your own thinking.

What are you forecasting for yourself next year? Get in touch with me if you need some help getting past your limiting beliefs and shaping a future that you want to thrive in.

Me? I’m finally going to learn the harmonica, after thirty-five years of not getting around to it.

Have a great Christmas

Paying attention

Paying Attention. Focus. Being Present. Mindfulness. Whatever you call it, people think we have lost the ability.  They say we’re more easily distracted, because there are so many more distractions than there used to be. I’m slightly sceptical of these statements about the hectic pace of modern life. Mostly because people have been making them for 2000 years. Here’s a quote from Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor who ruled from 160 to 180 AD, I guess in response new papyrus technology, or recent increased chariot performance.

“Confine yourself to the present”

So how do you actually do that? What’s the instruction manual for being present? There’s been an upsurge in courses and writings on Mindfulness, because of the perceived benefits in treating depression`and anxiety, and reducing stress. It’s a bit of a mash-up of different Buddhist teachings, with a 21st century spin, and it seems to work. But for me, being able to pay attention to your own thoughts, and not judge them, isn’t being in the present. If your mind wanders off, wondering “What’s for Dinner?” , and you consciously attend to it, that’s being in a present that feels a bit irrelevant. I’m probably missing something, because it’s becoming big business –  Google are running courses in it for their employees. Note to Google’s HR department, being present is different to presenteeism…… but they probably already knew that.

Here are some really easy tips for not only being present, but showing other people you are as well. I know they work, because my clients tell me they do:

1. If you find your mind wandering while someone else is talking to you, you can keep yourself on track by silently repeating their words to yourself.
2. Any form of exercise gets you back in touch with Now. Including sex.
3. Become a good listener. Stop yourself from formulating snappy responses in your head, while someone else is talking. Just attend to what they’re saying, tune out those voices in your head.
4. Do one thing at a time. However great you think you are at multi-tasking, you’re actually crap. You can’t check  email and pay attention to your kid’s football match at the same time. You’re actually micro-switching from one task to another, and doing neither very well.
5. Be spontaneous. Get comfortable with unpredictability. Learn improv,  tell jokes. Take up a sport where you have an opponent, or a whole team of them.
6. Stop making numbered, ordered lists.

Good Luck and let us know how you get on by leaving a comment.

I’m one of the pioneer service providers for Google Helpouts, giving 30 minute coaching sessions to walk up clients.

Google Helpouts

This is the logo for Google’s new video-based service. He’s waving, not drowning.

Being a Helpouts dude has  been a combination of great satisfaction and niggling frustration.

 “I make sure they come away with at least one practical step they can take to solve their issue”

On the plus side,  it’s been brilliant with the guys that made the time to navigate the new service. Establishing rapport over a video link isn’t too difficult, even though the clients are from all over the world. I’ve learnt to be even crisper than I normally am, and I make sure people come away with at least one step they can take towards solving their time management problem. I like the discipline of the half hour slot, it really concentrates the mind. The trickiest part is figuring out if the customer wants to just hangout (it’s all based on Google Hangouts technology) and get a bit of free advice, or if it’s a really pressing problem that they need fixing NOW. If it’s one of those, I can’t over-complicate things. Diagnosis and cure have to be pretty rapid, especially if they don’t intend having a second session. We normally think of coaching as a process. Not as long as therapy, but usually more than one half hour slot.

The feedback has been embarrassingly (for a Brit) excellent, and I’m hoping to get repeat business as a result, which is the whole point of me doing this.

On the sucky side……

“My head space becomes like a hotel room. I have to remake it so the next guest believes they’re the first occupant.”

We have just finished the first week, and the sessions have all been free, just so we can all try it out and see how it works. But there have been about 50% no shows. I guess this is because there’s no cost for non-appearance, just my time. I’m now charging a nominal fee, and I hope that will make people show up. The worst part for me, though, is getting ready for the next client. I’m half expecting them not to turn up, but being in a state of readiness if they do. My head space becomes like a hotel room. I have to remake it (in 60 seconds) so the next guest believes they’re the first occupant.

Speed coaching – for people who don’t have time. It could catch on.

Why not try it out? You need a computer, a video camera, some free software and 30 minutes

Time for a Team Meeting

Time management for teams is vital. Colleagues demand your time. Meetings are a major time-suck. Being time poor is a tragedy of the commons.

Why’s it vital? You and your colleagues hold the key to you all being more productive. If you can just work uninterrupted for 40 minutes at one stretch, you’ll be 66% more productive.

There are two kinds of interruption that disrupt your workflow and kill your productivity:

Interruptions Controlled By You:

• checking email every time you get a notification (yep, you control this – it’s your choice)
• checking Facebook
• getting up for a break
• interrupting someone else
• answering the phone (see email)
• multi-tasking

Interruptions Not Controlled By You:

• meetings
• a colleague interrupts you
• last-minute requests for urgent information
• needing more information before you can progress
• an emergency

Step one is to eliminate the ones that you control, by turning off alerts and just focusing on one thing for 40 minutes.

Step two is to make the interruptions that you don’t control more controllable. That means negotiating  with your colleagues, your boss, her boss. You all need to agree that, when your special sign is up, you can’t be interrupted – unless there’s an emergency. You all need to agree that meetings have a declared purpose, that everyone turns up and leaves on time, and that everyone is present during that time – so not covertly checking email or doing something else that wastes your collective time.

So that’s the short-term taken care of. You can then look at longer term distractions. Here I’m thinking of those “initiatives” and “special projects” that management cook up. You have to get them done as well, but how do they align with the company’s strategic objectives, and your own? It’s important to know this, because if you understand the reasons, you can then increase your own sense of control. They belong to you, and you can prioritise yourself. You don’t have to go running back to the boss every time you have a conflict in your schedule.

Because when you do that, you get recommended to go on a Time Management course, and no one wants that, do they?

“At the Harvard Business School, the philosophy has long been to eschew formal training in time management, instead overloading students purposely to force them to learn for themselves how to prioritize and become better time managers.”

Source: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7146.html

Time’s in your head

My earliest memory is when I was about four years old. As I remember it, there was a snowy winter that seemed to go on for ages. The snow was deep and didn’t melt for weeks – a rare thing in England. I remember making snowmen, and throwing snowballs at/ with my brother and cousin.

I don’t really know whether the snow lasted for weeks – it certainly seemed like it, but I hadn’t started at school, so time wasn’t yet divided into weekends and weekdays. It was a continuous, unstructured Present. And my memory of it now is a distorted, reconstructed version of what actually happened, fifty years ago. All of this is taking place in my head, it’s the only place I can locate my Past.

But time is obviously a thing, you say. We have clocks. We divide those years into months, weeks, days, femtoseconds. It must be a thing if we can manipulate it and measure it like that. I can see the distinction between yesterday, which has already happened, and tomorrow, which hasn’t yet.

Here’s what Einstein said:

“….the distinction between the past, the present and the future is only a stubbornly  persistent illusion”

Have a think about your last holiday. What kind of time did you have? Compare the quality of that time with queueing at the post office. I’m willing to bet that they feel different, even though they both had a duration that could be measured.

When you procrastinate, you’re doing some mental gymnastics to keep you from completing a task. It’s not that you don’t physically have enough time. You put off doing something important to you by choosing to do something less important. Maybe you don’t know why, but it’s definitely a mental operation.

But so what? What if time is an illusion. How does that change things back in the real world?

If it’s an illusion, we’re not all seeing the same thing. That means we’re not all having the same experience at the same time. It’s different for all of us. And that’s important at work, at home, with colleagues, friends, kids, lovers, neighbours – whoever. In the present,  we’re not having a digitally perfect “experience” being played to us, and when we remember the past, we’re not replaying the same DVD. It gets filtered, distorted and remade at all stages, like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.

And then we have to take into account how different cultures view time.

It’s no wonder that guy in sales never gets his monthly report in on time. If your boss is always late for a meeting, is it poor-timekeeping or disrespect? When you’re told that the meeting next Friday (8th Nov) has been moved back to Tuesday, what date is it now on? Feel free to use a calendar to work it out.

Answers on a postcard, or better still, leave a comment.

 

Time Anxiety

 

The Big Business Man smiled. “Time,” he said, “is what keeps everything from happening at once.”

…….And space is supposed to stop it from all happening to me.

It usually happens on a Friday, a few hours before a looming deadline, the day before a holiday. The printer stops. The computer goes into update mode, or crashes altogether. People you need to talk to vanish off the face of the earth, just to spite you. All you want to do is get out of there, close the door and run away, very fast, and very far. But you can’t, because you’ve remembered that you’re a grown up, with responsibilities and people who are depending on you. And shouting at your laptop isn’t a good look.

So what can you do when time anxiety grips you? It’s about managing your state, as well as your time.

Step 1. Stop.

Stop and breathe. You’re going to need oxygen, but not for running away. You’ll need it to think straight and clearly and come up with a plan. But for the moment, just stop and recover. Stand up. Feel the weight on your feet. Relax and drop your shoulders. Move your centre of gravity down to your navel and breathe slowly, from your belly. Be present. You might need to repeat this from time to time,as we go through the next steps,  if you feel that your centre of gravity has shifted upside your head.

Step 2. Gather Resources.

Gather resources, starting with yourself. Go back to the past. Think back. This is probably not the first time you’ve needed to deal with a deluge of demands, 90% of them unreasonable, unfair and poorly timed. How did you overcome? What are your strengths, that you know you can rely on in a crisis? Name them and gather them in a circle in front of you. Bring to mind a few more of those sticky situations and the resources you used. Put them in the circle in front of you. Then step into the circle and take them on board, one by one. Use a key word as an anchor to bring this state to mind when you need it in future.

Step 3. Plan

Using what you now know from Steps 1 and 2, look around you. Who else could help you, if you asked them?  Ignore the voices in your head telling you it will take too much time to involve other people. Pretend you have loads of time, just for now. Even if you just bounce your ideas off someone else, you won’t be on your own.

Now put together a visual plan to get you where you need to be, broken down into timed chunks. If you have an hour, split it into 10 minute chunks. If you have longer, split it into 30 minute segments. Be clear, and write down how you’re going to use each timed segment, including a small amount of time to review each chunk. This will keep you in control.

Step 4. Do.

When you’re pressed for time, the easy thing to do is to start here, in the belief that you don’t have any time to plan. But steps 1 to 3 should only take you ten minutes in total. Your return on this investment is regaining your sense of control and agency. Your anxiety level has dropped.You’re back in the driving seat. Things aren’t just happening to you.

Step 5. Review

When it’s all over, take stock and get a wider perspective. If you could get a re-do, how would you change things? Start from further back than when the shit appeared to hit the fan. You’ll probably find that things were set up to go wrong at a much earlier stage.The warning signs often get ignored. You should review dispassionately. This isn’t beat yourself up time, it’s a genuine discovery process, so you’re being curious, not the Witchfinder-General.

In summary, you combat time anxiety by getting back in control. Of yourself, mostly.

Many people will tell you that Time Management is really about Self Management, because you can’t manage time. They’re right, if repetitive. But it’s not about a Spartan regime of discipline and self-denial. I prefer to call it Self Mastery.

If you liked this article, you might like this one: “Time Poor. You’re Probably Making Things Worse”.

And you might want to subscribe to our email list, so you won’t miss out in future. There are links over on the right hand side.

Lean Startup – Innovation at work.
Photo Credit Flickr Betsy Weber

Lean Startup rocks. If you’re starting a new business you should read Eric Ries’s book. If you work for an established business, and want to innovate, you should read it. I’ve just been listening to a webcast with Eric Ries, Patrick Vlaskovits and Brant Cooper. They were talking about Lean Startup, and how to roll Lean Startup out into bigger organisations.

“The Future’s going to be the same as today. Right? “

Eric said something that struck me hard. That big companies (and the people who work in them) fundamentally believe –  “The Future is going to be the same as today, right?”.

As humans we need to have some dependability and predictability in our lives. That’s why people work in a big organisation isn’t it? They get security,  structure and stability in exchange for their labour. The trouble is, in the new normal, it’s not like that any more.

“Even when they saw it coming, they couldn’t do anything to stop their own extinction”

Just five years ago, Nokia and Blackberry (then called RIM) were the kings of the mobile phone industry. Today, they’re both in their death-throes. Apple launched its first iPhone in June 2007. By 2011 they were the largest mobile handset vendor in the world (by revenue) having shipped 100 million units. Nokia has recently been bought by Microsoft. Blackberry has canned 10,000 people in the last year. They’re both toast. Even when they saw it coming, they couldn’t do anything to stop their extinction.

Successful today no longer means successful tomorrow. Start ups are disrupting and fragmenting established industries by using new technology. The barriers to entry are very low. Dropbox gauged whether people were interested in its product just by getting people to sign up on a website. They knew they had a product people wanted without writing a line of code, and they had a queue of early adopters ready to buy when they launched.

“No one knows where the next upstart startup is going to come from”

So the security and stability of a big company, is illusory. They can’t count on the future being the same as today. That’s why today’s buzzword is innovation. No one knows where the next upstart startup is going to come from, but if you don’t innovate, they’ll eat your lunch and eventually they’ll eat you.

That’s pretty scary (unless you’re the one doing the eating). So it’s no wonder those firms want new ways of working that need more agility, the ability to turn on a sixpence and to change direction if it turns out that no one wants to buy their killer new product. In a big company that’s hard to do. I’m talking to you, Microsoft.

What’s this got to do with time management and teams ? Well we believe that time management is right thinking about the past, present and future. And these are three distinctive skills, that you can learn. Innovation is understanding that the future is going to be very different to the present, and it’s not one big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey wimey stuff.

Time Poor

According to a Harvard behavioural economist and a Princeton psychologist:

“If you have very little, you often behave in such a way so that you’ll have little in the future”

These guys have just published a book entitled “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much”. It doesn’t just cover being money poor, it looks at being time poor as well.

What they found is that money and time poor people have trouble escaping from the poverty trap because they have to single-mindedly focus so much on the problem, they lose perspective. They only look for immediate solutions that will fight the fire in front of them. They can’t see the longer term consequences of something that appears to fix the problem right here, right now.

Scarcity saps your mental energy so much that you can’t think straight. You have tunnel vision. That’s why people take out pay-day loans, and borrow short-term if they can’t afford to pay off other loans – it gets them over this hump.

How did this play out with the time poor? They carried out experiments on Harvard students, with video games. They had a fixed time to answer a question or complete a task. Some were allowed plenty of time. Others weren’t, but could to borrow time (time they would also need in the future). The borrowers got into a debt spiral, and they never won back enough time to pay the debt. These very smart people behaved incredibly irrationally under time pressure.

I was thinking about the irrational things I’ve done, and seen other people do, when I’ve been so squeezed for time that I can’t see my nose in front of my face. Here are just a few I’ll fess up to:

• Saying “I haven’t got time to show someone else how to do this” and doing it myself.
• Soldiering on through gritted teeth, as proof that I’m tough
• Working stupid hours covering three time zones, instead of dropping one
• Imagining that I was making myself indispensable by working long hours

Funny that they didn’t seem so stupid at the time, but looking at them now, they’re absurd.

Which gave me an idea for a competition.

We’ll give a £20 Amazon voucher to the best true life story about how you did something that only made things worse, when you were already time poor.

Please tell us your (true) story where it says “Please Leave a Comment” below. The more ridiculous, the better. We’ll pick a winner and announce it in two weeks’ time, on the 19th of October.