life@work

It's Time for Energy and Enthusiasm!

Bad news is everywhere - do you really want to read more of it on this blog?

So I'm turning my focus to subjects and people that inspire and expand, and away from news about the job search. There are many other great blogs where you can read about job search how-to's and all the data you could ever want about who is laying off and who is hiring.

Today's bit of energy and enthusiasm I have to share with you comes from twentysomething, Cody McKibben, of Thrilling Heroics.

Cody writes compellingly about his unorthodox career and encourages other to "Optimize your life, rock your career, and make the world your playground!"

Here's what I thought after reading his post today:

• Love his energy! What a breath of fresh air.
• Great idea to turn his blog into a community!
• Ouch! I'm afraid he's right about the K-12 experience being pretty inadequate. And I'm sending a kid to middle school this fall.
• I hope my kids figure out how to be excited about their careers, 11 and 14 years from now when they're out of college. If I can play a part in inspiring them to do so, I'll be extremely grateful.

What do you think? How are you rocking your career?

What Drives Me Crazy About Time

Photo by laffy4k

There are 24 hours in a day, and I can drive myself crazy deciding what to do with that.

Ah, time. I struggle daily with how to manage it, budget it, watch it pass, schedule it, forget about it, savor it, and squeeze every last drop of productivity out of it.

I have a fear of wasting it, except for those times when I commit to doing so with glee.

I have a nagging desire to have more of it, yet no clear idea of what I'd do with it. Most likely I'd struggle more with managing it, budgeting it, watching it pass, etc.

Or perhaps I would take a nap.

Stephen Covey's classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People offers quite a useful Time Management Matrix. Barry Zweibel at GottaGettaBlog! recently posted a thorough review of it I recommend you check out.

Here's the very short and sweet overview.

You can describe everything you do in one of four ways:

1. Important and Urgent
2. Important and Not Urgent
3. Not Important and Urgent
4. Not Important and Not Urgent

Naturally, spending as much time as possible on the important things is what most of us aspire to.

But this is tricky, because it's hard to:

• Recognize what is important and what isn't (many times it all seems important.)
• Recognize what is urgent and what isn't (many times it all seems urgent.)
• Reserve time and take the initiative to attend to things that are important, even if they aren't urgent.
• Resist the impulse to spend a lot of time on activities that are neither important nor urgent because we're so burned out reacting to all the things that seem urgent and important.

The tricky parts summarize how I can drive myself crazy about time.

What makes the tricky parts tricky:

• We allow other people's ideas of urgency and importance to trump our own.

We feel pressure (either real or self-imposed) to say yes to all requests without negotiation, respond to all emails within an hour (or some similarly impossible standard), and so on. Or, depressingly, despite our best attempts to negotiate, we remain saddled with a workload greater than one human could possibly do.

• We become addicted to "fire fighting" at our jobs, and the accompanying adrenaline rush that comes with dealing with crises.

If this is true, sooner or later we depend on external urgency to motivate us to do anything. Our lives become about reacting to urgent situations rather than building on important opportunities.

• We underestimate how long things will take us to do.

We classic overachievers have a list of 45 things to do each day and little sense of how long these things physically take to accomplish. Also we assume it takes about ten minutes to get to each appointment, no matter where it is. So we're usually behind and rushed. Some of us are always late.

• We subject ourselves to information overload.

Too much news, too much TV, too many hours surfing, too many Facebook updates, too many tweets. We surprise ourselves by how many hours we fritter away, and often end these information intake sessions feeling scattered and unfocused.

I'm working on recognizing what's important yet not urgent, and making time for these things as much as possible. For my personal life this includes exercise, creative endeavors such as playing the piano, keeping up with friends, and keeping my dog well exercised and happy.

At work the important yet not urgent tasks involve long term planning, creating new products, reaching out to new people, and writing.

Life is richer and our relationship with time is friendlier when we make time for what's important. It's an ongoing process that isn't always easy, but it's worth the effort.

What drives you crazy about time? What are you doing to make peace with it?