From Surviving to Thriving...at Home and at Work

I enjoy listening to podcasts as a break from sports talk radio.  One of my favorites is megachurch pastor Joel Osteen, whose podcasts are upbeat and fun.  One recent episode dealt with a topic that is close to my heart- overcoming an attitude of surviving and moving towards thriving.

When so many people are negative and depressed, it can be hard to stay positive.  Maybe the economy is bad.  Maybe your job is on the line but there is still hope- I suggest that we start with some of the smallest of things.

At Home

• Declutter: choose one space per day for a week to pair back and clean out.


• Simplify: identify one area of your home life which could be streamlined.


• Prevent: stop spam mail by arriving in your in-box and into your mail box.


• Take a sabbath: commit to a weekly break where you can pray, be with family and relax.


• Make it your own: add a decorating style or landscaping signature piece to really make home feel like your own.


• Plan for your next move: carry out a home improvement project which will ready your house for resale.

At Work

• Minimize your interruptions: find ways to let people know that you're working and need some space to focus on the task at hand.


• Control your meetings: keep them simple, focused and with an end in sight- it's the only way to keep sane in a knowledge-working world.


• Watch your calendar: look back, nail down and look forward to the week(s) ahead.


• Arrive early once a week: make it a point to be the first one at work at least once a week.


• Set up 6th gear: I'll talk about this later in the week but for now, 6th gear is that time of the day when you should be getting tired but somehow find a way to squeeze one final push of work before the day is out.

Photo by St0rmz

Reclaim Your Productivity Rituals

This week, I'm aiming to reclaim some key rituals that I've missed from
my schedule. The result has been a feeling of living "by the seat of my
pants" and I've been fatigued and frustrated.  Little things start to
fall through the cracks and details get missed.  This week, I'll focus
in particular on the bookends of my day- mornings and evenings.

Here are some helpful articles that may help you to reclaim pockets of productivity in a daily schedule:

8 Rituals to Crank Up Your Productivity

Workplace Rituals Enhance Productivity

The Power of Ritual: Conquer Procrastination, Time Wasters and Laziness

Create a Morning Writing Ritual

For Students: Follow a Sunday Ritual




Photo by h.koppdelaney

An Ounce of Prevention

We often think of prevention as solely related to health.  What if your productivity had regular doses of prevention? 

I'm thinking of simple things like:

• Scheduling family and friends' birthdays into Outlook or Google Calendar


• Charging your cell phone before its battery runs down


• Clearing off your desk before you leave for the day


• Responding to email before it gets lost in the shuffle of a bloated in-box


• Touching a piece of mail once rather than marching it around your office in search of a home


• Filing a little at a time

Imagine what things would be like if we practiced preventative productivity instead of reactive work...

*photo by slambo42

The Weight of (un)Productivity

Water cooler talk the other day.  My colleague is talking about the injury she withstood last year when she missed a few weeks of work due to a broken foot.  She then had a walking cast for a while, followed by physical therapy. 

One long road just to get back to work.

Oddly enough, she remarked that the biggest thing about being hurt was the weight of the cast on her foot. "It was only when it came off that I realized how heavy it had been."  It was only when she healed and got back to healthy that she got her groove back. 

What's preventing your groove from really shucking and jiving at work?  How about with your spouse and kids?  What's the "weight" on your productivity?

Most of us are plagued by any number of the following:

• An inability to look at the calendar to see what's coming up in the week ahead


• A lack of a weekly review


• A hesitation to think, "what's the next action?"


• Allowing terrible meetings to take over our schedule


• Disorganization on any number of fronts

If you can identify just one of the items mentioned above and go to work on it, you'll feel like my friend at work- lighter, leaner and better able to handle what life throws at you.

Software Review: RescueTime

I discovered RescueTime after watching the Robert Scoble interview with CEO Tony Wright.  It's promoted as a tool for tracking your work on the web.  The tagline is  "ridiculously easy time management and analytics" and well, it is certainly easy.  Whether or not it enhances my management of time is another matter.  Time will tell.

RescueTime promotes itself as a free (always good) online tool for tracking your own internet usage.  The steps are really quite basic- visit their site, download the app, let it track your online usage, receive a weekly report of your traffic.  Simple right?

My first report was really interesting.  Not because I was spending way too much time on Sports Illustrated (although I probably was) but that I spent more time tinkering than I thought I did in a week.  For those who Twitter or FriendFeed, RescueTime could be a Godsend.  For others who check and recheck their blog stats, I could also see the true purpose of the product: to renegotiate one's use of time.  Like a monthly credit card statement, RescueTime serves as a mirror of reality. 

I think back to that old saying, "you know your priorities by two things: your checkbook and your calendar".  As the internet becomes an extension of both of these, RescueTime just might be the old fashioned yet high-tech way of keeping priorities in check.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

New Definitions of Work-Life Balance?

Photo by Gilest

I love the concept of work-life balance.  Putting it into practice, now that's where things get difficult. 

Difficult, but not impossible.  Julie Mortgenstern, who writes alongside David Allen at Business Week offers this as fresh insight:

"Work-life balance is not about the amount of time you spend working vs.
not-working. It’s more about how you spend your time working and
relaxing, recognizing that what you do in one fuels your energy for the
other."

What she's really saying is what Pope Paul VI called for in the late 1960's.  He coined the phrase, "unity of life" and he meant to encourage folks to see their work and personal values as integrated one with the other. 

One of the tragedies of the entire Bill Clinton scandal was not so much what he did (although hardly commendable).  Rather, it was the paradigm that he promoted: private life and public life as separate entities.  I have heard many of my students over the years buy into this gospel- i.e. "what I do in my own time is my business and not yours!"  Both true and false.

So, what is work-life balance?  Simply put, work-life balance is the art of maintaining the integrity of both your labor and your love.  Someone once said that a job is what you're paid for and a vocation is what you're made for.  Now that's work-life balance.