life@work

Time Keeps on Slippin'

When everything appears to be spilling and leaking all over in my life, I notice how attracted I am to finding the perfect time management system.

Ideally I'll find one that also cleans my house.

Sue Shellenbarger wrote recently about her experiment with three different systems:

• Getting Things Done
• The Pomodoro Technique (requires buying a tomato shaped timer - fun!)
• FranklinCovey's Focus

There are pros and cons to each, and she has decided to use the elements from each that work for her.

I'm a huge fan of Leo Babauta's Zen To Done system as described in his E-Book. It's a simpler (and more Zen-like) approach to productivity than Getting Things Done, but with GTD influences.

For something a bit more radical, try changing your perception of time from a Newtonian approach (time is scarce) to an Einsteinian one (you are where time comes from).

Gay Hendricks outlines this concept and describes how adopting it can make you more productive in his new book, "The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level".

Another paradigm-shifting concept of your relationship with time is explained in Darlene Cohen's "The One Who Is Not Busy: Connecting with Work in a Deeply Satisfying Way". Mindfulness plays a huge starring role in this approach.

I'm still experimenting with ways of relating to and managing my time that work best for me. 

I'm thinking about getting that tomato timer, in the meantime.

And I'm still waiting for my house to get clean.

I'd love to hear: What time management system works best for you? How long did it take for using it to become a habit?

photo by Robbert van der Steeg

Working Less Actually Works

Hurrah! In my desperate online search for anything that could be construed as positive news related to employment issues, I found Sue Shellenbarger's article, "If You Need to Work Better, Maybe Try Working Less".

For the last year we've been hearing only about how people are either working all of the time, or not working at all. 

Now a four-year Harvard Business Review study that will be published in October reveals what many of us already know - taking breaks yields numerous on-the-job benefits.

Working all of the time has become a habit that is unsustainable for most people over a 40-year working career. Sure you can do it for a while, but over your entire career? I don't think so.

If you never learn how to take a Saturday off or leave before 9:00 pm, and if you never allow your staff to learn that they can live without you for a couple of days, you train yourself and everyone around you to expect nothing short of your constant attention and focus on your job. After a while, your performance, enthusiasm, relationships, and health will all suffer for it.

In her article, Shellenbarger shares how it's been for her to not do any work one weekend day each week. Although she says it was stressful at first, "my little test was forcing me to improve the way I work".

If you are working all of the time, what are your reasons? Is it an expectation woven into the culture of your workplace? Are you doing the jobs of three people? Is it something you believe a "star performer" does? Do you have nothing else going on in your life? 

Could you do well at your job without working all of the time?

For everyone out there who works constantly, what small space can you create for something different in your life?

photo by extranoise

Variety vs. Security - How Much of Each Do You Want in Your Career?

5 years is the maximum amount of time I want to spend doing the same thing at the same place.

This insight comes to me as I look back on my life, and it’s an idea that, looking ahead, gives me a feeling of curiosity and relief.

Outside of my career life I am remarkably consistent and enjoy sameness. I’ve been living in the same city for 20 years, have been with the same man for 21 years, have had some of the same friends for over 25 years, and of course there’s no changing being a mother to the same two people, something that's been true for 11 and 8 years.

I generally order one of two ice cream flavors, always get my favorite dish when I go to my favorite restaurant, and could visit Cannon Beach, Oregon every year from here on out.

But ever since the 6^th grade, I have changed what I do or where I do it at least every five years. Well, almost. I've been a life and career coach for the past six years. Gulp.

Many people are like me and want to move on to something different fairly frequently. Others want to stick with the same thing or the same place their entire career. Still others end up sticking with the same thing but aren’t quite sure why they did or how they could have chosen differently.

When it comes to career happiness, the elements of variety and security are essential to understand. When you know your demands and tolerance for these two elements you can better design a satisfying career plan.

For instance, my five year rule is the formula that blends my desire for both variety and security. I don’t want to job hop, but I don’t want to feel stale and bored.

Your formula for happiness might mean staying with the same company for 20 years but changing jobs within it every four or so. Your desire for security (financial, job, emotional – there are so many different kinds) might be much stronger than your need for variety. Or you may find ways to create variety in small ways that don’t threaten your requirement to stay in the same position for many years.

Different careers offer different opportunities to blend security with variety. A freelance management consultant is going to experience more variety and less security than a tenured university professor, for example.

Take a look at your situation and how it fits with your needs for variety and security. If it falls short, are there small tweaks you can make to strengthen your position?

If you think about this every once in a while, instead of only when you become desperately unhappy in your job, you can head off a whole lot of angst at the pass.

I'd love to know - are you satisfied with the mix of variety and security you experience in your career right now?

Is Your Head Spinning From All the Career Advice You've Been Reading?

I read a lot of career advice, and I dispense my fair share of it, too. In the past couple of months I have done both of these activities with above average vigor, and I must admit, tension.

Until I read Eve Tahmincioglu's post yesterday on CareerDiva, I was only vaguely aware of a restless and unsettled feeling I was having reading and writing career advice. Was it the proliferation of gloomy economic forecasts? The effect of hearing too many personal stories of loss and discouragement? Was I just needing a vacation?

Although I wouldn't turn down a trip to Hawaii right now, Eve's post articulated exactly what has been bugging me - the over-reliance people are placing on following advice at the expense of creating their own game plan.

No wonder people's heads are spinning, including mine.

Career advice is general, Eve's post reminded me. It's targeted to corporate employees in cities. It's often geared towards the younger generation.

Your situation may not approximate in any way the typical situations career advice addresses, and this is probably pretty frustrating.

There are fabulous, knowledgeable people giving out incredibly useful career advice for free, on blogs such as Career Hub and others. I'm grateful we can get key information when we want it on all kinds of career strategies.

Tempting though it can be, when we make too many of our plans based solely on the advice and opinions of outside experts, we get stuck.

First of all, the experts often disagree with one another. We've got to keep our own critical thinking skills sharp so we can take in what's useful and weed out what isn't resonating. Otherwise we don't know what to do with the contradictions we're hearing.

Secondly, no one knows your priorities, needs, wants, or opportunities better than you. They may not be easily apparent to you right now, or they may be disguising themselves, but you are still the expert on you.

When you make a career decision based on what a magazine article advises, for example, how good a fit is that likely to be? What if you don't have the education, skills or local job opportunities that would make it a good option for you?

So my advice, which I encourage you to ignore, is to limit the career advice you are taking in. Let the advice have a supporting role, and allow your own wisdom to be the star. If your head is spinning from all the career advice you've been reading, stand still for a few moments and regain your balance.

Drop the Mainstream and Follow the Unstream

Today I'm inspired by this post from The Illuminated Mind by Jonathan Nasman, about how following the mainstream is a dream killer.

To know what your dreams are you need to know how to listen to your own heart and mind. Jonathan offers the intriguing idea that following the "unstream" instead of paying attention to the mainstream, connects you to who you are and what you want.

When you key into the mainstream, you're following a template for your life that has already been designed by others (society, culture, your family). Embracing the unstream is about following yourself.

Even though these are very tumultuous economic times, there's still room to nurture and achieve your dreams. You may want to adjust them and expand the time frame on some of them, but you can still move forward with them, even in the tough times.

This is because over half of what you need to move forward with your dreams is a particular mindset, and you don't have to spend any money to get this.

You don't even need all the circumstances of your life to be aligned in some magical order to cultivate this mindset. This is handy, because perfect alignment comes along only every once in a while and lasts about two minutes.

The mindset that allows us to achieve our dreams is optimistic. It's open to risk, to experimentation, to setbacks, to failure. It's expansive and creative. It's fueled by a powerful belief in our dreams and a deep knowledge of why the dreams are important to us.

Following the mainstream is about doing "what works", and is not the mindset of dream achievement. Note Jonathan's examples:

"I’ve wasted a lot of time in my life doing what works. I can’t count how many times I’ve used this excuse to stall pursuing my dreams.

• I went to college because that’s just “what works.”
• I go to a job and sit in a cubicle for 8 hours a day because “it works.”
• I don’t work on the weekends because I feel I need to reward myself for a week’s worth of drudgery. I have to say… “it just works.”
• I do the expected things. I try to make art because I’m supposed to be creative. I read because I’m supposed to learn. I dress a certain way because I’m supposed to be cool."

You get the picture. "What works" is what we do because we feel we're supposed to do it. We stay inside the box, and we base our choices on what we believe the mainstream template dictates. Period.

Here is Jonathan's take on how to follow the unstream:

• "Take risks and possibly make a fool out of ourself once or twice (or 200 times).
• Make things up as we go along and generally have no idea what how we’ll get to where we want to go. We just know that we can’t settle for anything else.
• Listen to our hearts. See with our hearts. Feel with our minds."

When we embrace the unstream, we dare to believe in the wisdom of our own hearts and minds, even if we've got a "crazy" dream and a lot of unanswered questions about how we're going to get there.

Following the unstream still allows us to make choices that seem pretty mainstream. We can create our own path to an 8-to-5 job, a marriage, a mortgage, or a Golden retriever.

The key is that we tuned in to ourselves as we made those choices. We know why we made the choices, and it wasn't just because it's "what worked". 

It strikes me that all this is about recognizing the passions and drive that are within us and allowing those feelings more power over our actions.

What do you think? When has creating your own path and taking more risks than the mainstream would recommend worked out for you?

How Advanced Degrees Affect Women's Lives

Photo by sndrspk

I am one of the few women in my now 10-year-old mom/baby group with "just" a B.A. degree.

Several have at least a Master's degree, and there are a couple of PhD's. Many of my friend's spouses or partners have advanced degrees, too.

I read this article from CareerJournal.com with interest, about a large new study conducted by a law professor at Washington & Lee that's coming out next week on women and advanced degrees.

Among the findings is the fact that women with M.B.A.'s are more likely to divorce than men. (Apparently the men to whom they are married don't also have an M.B.A., otherwise their divorce rate would be just as high, right?)

In fact, women with law and medical degrees are more likely to divorce than their male counterparts as well.

Forget divorce, the study also states that women with advanced degrees are abstaining from marriage in the first place at a much higher rate than are men.

And here is where the rubber meets the road - the more women earn, the more likely they are to be single without children.

This rings true looking at my own world of contacts.

The good news is that my highly educated friends are all still married. Yet, for the most part, they have decided to be at home full-time with their families. In these cases there is a high-earning spouse, with a demanding career that takes up a whole bunch of time.

One of my friends told me once that she thought a family in the U.S. could support only one "high powered" career. Personally, I agree.

We all have our ideas of what a family needs in terms of time devoted to family life and attending to children, and two people working 80 hours a week is really pushing it. (I'm not a fan of any one person spending 80 hours a week at work as a matter of fact!)

So what to make of all this? It's more evidence that career planning and navigation is tricky work when you've got a partner and kids. That old slogan about "having it all" - well, it's time to decide what you really, really want, because you may not be getting it all, not all at one time anyway.

I'm all about optimism and "making it work", a la Tim Gunn. I've got a can-do attitude and lot of creativity. Yet navigating career and family life often involves compromises and feelings of ambivalence. It's important for me to acknowledge that in my own life, and it's important to many of my clients to do that themselves as well.

If this were a blog about social and political activism, I'd have a call for action right about now. But instead I'll have a call for reflection.

• Do you fit the statistics of this new study?
• How has an advanced degree (or lack thereof) affected your happiness in relationships or your decision to become or not become a parent?
• And does your advanced degree translate into high compensation? (For many folks, it does not, sometimes to their surprise.)
  
• What compromises have you made or do you make regarding career and family?
• Are these compromises OK with you?

Heather Mundell
Dream Big Coaching Services
www.dreambigcoaching.com
heather@dreambigcoaching.com

The Good Enough Career

Sometimes I'm tired of striving for perfect - how about you?

It's a real gift to recognize when what you have is good enough. It will do. It's just perfectly OK and alright as is.

When was the last time you thought that about your career? Or about anything in your life?

What kind of career happiness would be possible for you if you felt grateful for all the good things about your good enough career?

When we are always striving for something better in our careers, we lose track of the present. We focus on what we don't have (more money, a promotion, a better office, a more interesting project, a more compelling organizational mission, a better boss). We worry a lot, sometimes to the point of being unable to appreciate what we do have. This isn't fun.

I've worked with plenty of people who hired me to help them change careers, jobs or companies - only to decide a bit later that they really had it pretty good where they were and would simply stay put, with a slightly adjusted attitude.

They came to this conclusion after thinking and talking about what was working well in their careers, not just the disappointments. Many times the pros were more compelling than the cons.

I'm all for proactive career development and planning ahead. But there's something to be said for enjoying your good enough career and setting the striving aside for a while.

Heather Mundell
Dream Big Coaching Services
www.dreambigcoaching.com
heather@dreambigcoaching.com

 

How Boomers Can Plan Working Until They're 97

Can you tell a member of Generation X wrote the title of this post?

Yes, it's my duty to occasionally poke fun at the huge and ambitious generation that has always cast a shadow on the misunderstood, whiny and poorly defined generation of which I am a member.

Some Boomers want to work until they drop. Why not? They've spent their whole lives working like fiends and are going to live a long time.

CareerJournal.com's article summarizing Tamara Erickson's upcoming book "Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation" offers some really useful ways for Boomers (and I would argue, even little ol' Generation X someday) to plan their retirement years.

Like any good career planning practice, the process Erickson describes hinges on looking inwardly first, then reviewing external opportunities and assessing their fit.

In a nutshell you look at both how you want to work and why you want to work, which makes complete sense, yet isn't something that everyone thinks to do.

Heather Mundell
Dream Big Coaching Services
www.dreambigcoaching.com
heather@dreambigcoaching.com

Happiness is Giving Your Full Attention - to Just About Anything

There's a book I turn to again and again that I feel I must say something about here. It's called The One Who is Not Busy: Connecting with Work in a Deeply Satisfying Way, by Darlene Cohen.

I'm convinced that finding happiness at work happens more reliably when we're paying attention to how we're thinking and what we're choosing to focus our attention on.

In other words, it's not just about finding that dream set of circumstances to plug yourself into - you have a lot of power and control on your own to make it great or suffer mightily.

Let's face it - a lot of us are stressed out. There's too much to do, the demands are overwhelming, and at the heart of much of our distress is our extreme level of busyness.

We can find some relief through taking breaks. But what Darlene Cohen's small, wise book discusses is a way to take the Zen approach to consciousness, known as simultaneous inclusion, and use it to create an entirely different relationship with busyness and our work.

I don't want to lecture about Zen concepts and summarize koans here, though. Suffice to say, if you're curious about how you can learn to focus your full attention on what you are doing, whether it is presenting a new ad campaign to a client or washing dishes, and consequently experience a feeling of flow and increased well-being, read the book!

I will give you a sneak peek at the two key skills the book offers, and how I think acquiring them would help me.

Skill #1: The Ability to Narrow or Widen the Mind's Focus at Will

If I can get the hang of this, I can focus deeply on a task at hand as if it's the only thing in my world and then come "to the surface" whenever I want and place that task in relation to the general scheme of things.

I do the small steps well and with full focus without losing the big picture.

Skill #2: The Mental Flexibility to Shift the Mind's Focus at Will from One Thing to Another

If I figure this one out, I can move from narrow task to narrow task to narrow task quickly, letting one go completely before dipping into the other. I leave work at work. I don't get stuck in compulsive thinking or fretting.

When there's too much to do I simply do the work, mindfully absorbed in it.

It's understandable to cling to our busyness - it can make us feel alive and it protects us from emptiness - but if life feels particularly mechanical to you right now, try some of the practices in this book (many of them are meditative).

You may find that simply changing your focus changes your entire experience.

Heather Mundell
Dream Big Coaching Services
www.dreambigcoaching.com
heather@dreambigcoaching.com

 

Quick Tips on Work-Life Balance

Kent Blumberg wrote a great post on how to restore work/life balance.

It's great because he offers 12 diverse ideas you can digest in a few moments and solutions you can start working on right away. No procrastination required!

Take a look at his list and pick something you can do that would make a big impact. Even a very small change or adjustment can lead to big differences. Commit to starting it right away without a big fuss or analysis session.

Personally I'm taking on setting a few more rules for myself around my home office - when I'm starting and stopping work in any given day, when I'll check email, and when I'll leave it for the night.

What will you take on?

Heather Mundell
Dream Big Coaching Services
www.dreambigcoaching.com
heather@dreambigcoaching.com