life@work

Why You Don't Want to Be Indispensable

A dear friend of mine took her newborn baby home from the hospital a few days ago. Most of us parents get seven or eight months to plan and prepare for a new arrival, but my friend had three days.

She and her husband had just agreed to adopt this baby, due May 5, and then received the call Friday: "She's here!"

There was not a single diaper, onesie or bottle in the house. No car seat, Baby Bjorn or bouncy seat, either.

The talk with their four year-old son went something like this:

"What do you think of having a baby sister? Like on Monday?"

The healthy baby was born four weeks early, operating on her own timetable, as babies are wont to do.

My friend has a very responsible job. She is a real muckety-muck whose Plan for April did not involve starting family leave a month ahead of schedule with no time to prepare. She had critical projects to complete, loose ends to tie up, reviews to write.

Cue the work-life balance theme music.

When she started talking to me Sunday night about how she might work one day a week from home during her family leave, I could see where she was coming from. It's hard to remember just how time consuming taking care of a newborn is, even when you've done it before, and it's hard to imagine completely stepping away from a major responsibility, even temporarily.

But it's called family leave for a reason, and I said as gently as possible, "You aren't indispensable, you know." I was hoping she'd cut herself a break and allow herself to focus fully on getting to know the baby, helping big brother adjust, and enjoying this unique time as much as she could.

The saving grace for my friend is her outstanding team. She knows she's hired a great group of people whose competence and helpfulness she can rely on when she's gone.

I was so relieved to hear this. Because being the only person who can do "X" or the only person who knows about "Y" is not only exhausting but reflects poor planning.

It may be tempting to think that your ticket to job security is being the one whom the company can't do without, but in fact the opposite is true. When you hire superstars and mentor them so well they could take over the world tomorrow, everyone looks good.

Babies arrive early, parents get sick, and stuff happens. Any one of us might need to take a month or longer off work with no notice.

When your team can step up to the plate and hold things together well, your previous efforts are better protected and your return to work goes much more smoothly.

Note: This post first appeared on this blog in December, 2006. I'm pleased to report that my friend did take time off to be with her baby, who is now an adorable, spunky four-and-a-half-year-old.

I'd love to hear: How are you avoiding being indispensable at work?

Share in the comments below or on the Dream Big Coaching Facebook Page!

Flickr photo by kudaker

Consciously Choose Better Work-Life Balance

What kind of balance do you want to strike between your professional and your personal life?

Harvard business blogger Ron Ashkenas wrote an article in December in the Harvard Business Review that a key to minimizing regret regarding your work-life balance (or lack thereof) is to consciously choose the tradeoffs you're willing to make to achieve personal and professional success.

Absent that, we're likely over the years to make hundreds of small and subtle decisions about when to stay late, when to make it home for a family dinner, when to work through a weekend and whether to take vacations that create an overall pattern we could be profoundly unhappy with.

This is a conclusion Ashkenas came to after studying a group of academic physicians. Even though none of the physicians had consciously chosen to sacrifice their families to advance their careers, some of them ended up doing just that.

It was an accumulation of small choices that gradually created a new reality of work-life balance, a reality that made them wonder, "How did I end up like this?"

Now It's Your Turn

Think back a few years and try to remember what your life was like.

• Were you working more hours than you are now? Were you closer to your friends or significant other? Did you see your kids more often? Were you sleeping better? Were you in worse health?

Now think about the kinds of choices you've made over the last few years that led to the changes you've experienced.

• What did you tend to choose and why? What patterns can you see? Do you want to continue these patterns of decision making? If not, what could you choose differently?

Ashkenas suggests several good questions we should be asking ourselves continually, so that we create a relationship between our personal and professional life that we're satisfied with on the whole:

1. What's the balance you want to strike between personal and professional success?
2. If you had to honestly choose, is one more important than the other?
3. What are your goals in each of these spheres, and what can you do to optimize both?

These are not questions you can answer easily. But I believe exploring these can affect whether your marriage, health, and career succeed or fail.

No one sets out to stall in their career or become estranged from their kids. By being introspective and making conscious decisions about your work and personal life, you're much more likely to avoid either extreme.

I'd love to hear: What are you choosing that is resulting in a good work-life balance for you? And if you're not in a good place with this, what could you be choosing differently?

Leave a comment here or head over to the Dream Big Coaching Facebook page Wall!

Flickr photo by scribbletaylor

Better life@work Tip: Be a Good Delegator

Today I begin a series of "Better life@work" tips, inspired by real clients of mine and their challenges to create a better life at work for themselves.

While I've changed names and identifying information, the issues and solutions remain the same. I'm selecting themes that many people face at work in hopes you can get a fresh idea or two to try out at your own workplace.

Delegation is an art that requires practice and commitment, and therefore time. Many of us feel that we don't even have a spare minute to pet the dog, so delegating remains a pipe dream.

Don't confuse delegating with dumping. Dumping work involves taking your most tedious or least appealing projects and handing them over to someone with little thought or explanation. Dumping work gives you the illusion of efficiency, until you're called in to fix the messes that follow.

Steve, a marketing director at a growing West Coast firm, was a client of mine who desperately wanted to learn how to delegate better. He knew he should have been spending much more time at strategic meetings and gaining more of a bird's eye view of his group, but he was still mired in deliverables and having trouble deciding what to delegate, how to do it, and to whom.

The biggest challenge was his perceived lack of time. In back-to-back meetings much of the workday, he left evenings and early mornings free to "catch up" on email and his own work. If he didn't do this he'd become the bottleneck for essential projects. When would he have time to delegate?

Steve needed to be thinking smaller. He assumed that relief would only come if he figured out how to re-work several large projects. Instead we found one area that offered a pretty straightforward delegating opportunity, where the stakes were fairly low if there were total failure.

Total time to decide on, prepare and delegate in this instance: 1 hour.

Relief felt: immense.

Over time, Steve became a good delegator. Here are his top six tips for success:

1. Know your staff's competencies. Trust them.
2. Look for small tasks and projects to delegate at first.
3. Clearly communicate directions, resources at their disposal, your expectations and a deadline.
4. See delegating as the key to others' development. Support others' development. If you're the only one with knowledge, the team loses and you burn out.
5. Be available for questions.
6. Immediately address any problems or shortcomings.

However, there are certain situations where delegating is not your key to a better life at work:

• Your entire team is completely swamped. (Your priority is managing, redistributing and negotiating workloads).
• Unresolved personnel issues make delegating doomed to fail. (Time to address underperformers and deadwood rather than keep putting up with them).
• There isn't anyone to delegate to because you have no reports. (Outline a plan of what could be delayed, done differently, or done by another team and discuss it with your manager.)

Up until we worked together, Steve believed that it was too risky to trust his team with responsibilities he'd had for years, that delegating took too much time to bother with, and that letting go would mean letting go of a sense of "indispensability".

But when he decided to experiment with delegating he found that it allowed him the freedom to serve the organization at a more strategic level. He began to enjoy his ability to develop and grow his team. He got more weekends and evenings back to spend with his family. In short, his life at work got better.

What about you? What can you delegate? What's holding you back from doing so?

photo credit: lumaxart

Can't Stop Working? Try These Tips

What's the difference between hard work and workaholism?

People who work hard, because they want to or because they have to, aren't necessarily workaholics. Hard workers are dedicated to doing good work, yet can enjoy their time off.

If you're a workaholic however, you'll be able to recognize yourself in many of these statements:

• You require control and overreact when you don't have it.
• You have problems with your family because of your job.
• You spend many extra hours at work and/or take work home frequently.
• When you're at home, you spend most of your time thinking about work.
• You don't take your paid vacation days.
• You're only happy if you're working on a work project.
• You don't delegate well.
• You believe you need to work as hard as you do.
• You don't eat well, get enough rest, or get enough exercise.

If you're just not sure whether you're a workaholic, take this short quiz and see how you score.

Workaholism is a very effective way to stay busy and avoid intimacy. And like any behavior that ends in "aholism", workaholism isn't a healthy lifestyle.

If you're a workaholic who wants to stop working compulsively, you might benefit from the resources at Workaholics Anonymous or by working with a counselor.

Or try some of these tips, suggested by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits:

• Stop working after a certain time each night
• Schedule other things into your life (exercise, time with your son, etc.) so you can't work all the time
• Practice relaxing ten minutes at a time (read the paper, have a cup of coffee as you look out the window, whatever you can manage)
• Practice staying present as you practice relaxing
• Exercise every day, even for just ten minutes
• Schedule solitude ten minutes per day to start

I'd love to hear: Did you used to be a workaholic? What did you do to stop working compulsively?

photo by geopollock

Mom's life@work Post #5: How Work Is Like Blackberry Bushes

This post is fifth in my "mom's life@work" series, which is bridging the work I do here with what I'm up to at Mom In The Balance. Other posts include Help for the Working Mom, Blend or Separate?, How to Reduce Your Stress During the Second Shift, and  Why My Kids Should Tune Me Out.

How do you want work to fit into the rest of your life?

Let's face it - work has a way of taking over our lives if we let it. In that way it's kind of like blackberry bushes. Here in Seattle, blackberry bushes will grow over your car seemingly overnight.

One of my friends let the blackberries and ivy and whatnot grow for years in her backyard. She never stepped foot out there. Then after she couldn't stand it anymore she rented a couple of goats and had them clear the place.

Do you wish you could get a couple of goats to take away your job, or are you hoping for a less drastic solution?

Here's where a vision may help you out. A vision is a clear sense of what you want for your future. It anchors your decision making around where and how you work.

Instead of a vision, most of us have something more like a vague hope (e.g., "Please let the stress ease up soon") or a pipe dream ("Someday I'll sell some paintings") that we believe is never going to come true.

In her book, Work + Life: Finding the Fit That's Right for You, author Cali Williams Yost does a fantastic job of describing how you can create a vision of how you want work to fit into your life and make the kinds of decisions that support that vision.

Will you get what you want just by thinking about it and writing it down? Of course not, but you'll have a direction that you're aiming for and a strategy. You'll figure out whether you want to change how you work, when or where you work, and how to factor in realities such as company policies, your personal finances, what your partner's expectations are, and more.

If you're frustrated by how work is fitting into (or taking over) your life, start addressing it today. Explore what you want as far as relationships, leisure, community and other life stuff goes. Be open to change and think outside of your usual boxes to get closer and closer to your vision.

Attend to those blackberry bushes every day and let the goats go to your neighbor's house!

I'd love to know: What's your vision for how work fits into the rest of your life?

photo by Jami Dwyer

Mom's life@work Post #4: Why My Kids Should Tune Me Out

This post is the fourth in the "mom's life@work" series, which is bridging my work here with what I'm doing at Mom In The Balance. Other posts in the series include Help for the Working Mom, Blend or Separate? and How to Reduce Your Stress During the Second Shift.

I talk to my kids every day about what they should be doing - with their time, their attitudes, their toys, you name it - and frequently conveniently forget that how I live my own life is my most powerful tool of influence.

I can talk all I want to my middle schooler about being easy on herself when she makes a mistake, how it's important for her to take a break when she starts to feel overwhelmed, how gossip is vicious and should be avoided, and all of the other theories I have about growing up to be a successful, independent, compassionate soul.

But really it doesn't mean a thing if I'm hard on myself and talking trash about the neighbors. That's what she pays attention to - what's right in front of her face. There's a good reason kids tune out lectures from their parents - they often have nothing to do with reality.

As a mom of girls I'm especially aware of my Same-Sex Role Model status. What my daughters take in about how I live my life influences their view of their own potential as girls and young women. Of course their dad also is a huge influence, as he models who a man is and how a man treats himself, his partner and his children. Together we are a model of marriage for our kids.

As I encourage my daughters to pursue their interests and their dreams and remember my own mom always encouraging mine (she still does to this day!), I wonder what I'm modeling to them right now about being a working mom.

Here are some comments from my kids about me:

• You sure work a lot.
• Mom, you're always stressed.
• Could you just relax? (from the middle schooler)
• Mom's always busy.
• Mom, you need to chillax (yes, from the middle schooler again)
• I know what you're going to say, Mom.
• Who cares if the babysitter sees the dog fur on the floor?
• Mom, you never sit down.
• Do we have time for something fun today?

Ouch! Don't I sound like fun?

Being harried and humorless is not what I want for my life, yet so often I find myself going there. So many other moms I know seem to be there with me as well.

It's positively uninspiring, and yet inspiring my kids is something I very much want to do.

There's a lot I can do to rise up out of the busyness and savor and enjoy life more. There's also a lot I can do to focus on what's really important (connecting with the people in my life) and let go of the things that simply aren't nearly as important (getting everywhere on time).

I can talk all I want about what life can and should be, and my kids are right to tune me out.

But when my kids see me enjoying life, then they can see that future for themselves, too.

I'd love to hear: What are you modeling for your kids right now?

photo by heather mundell of her kids tuning her out

Mom's life@work Post #3: How to Reduce Your Stress During the Second Shift

This post is third in the "mom's life@work" series, which is bridging my work here with what I'm doing at Mom In The Balance. The first post was Help for the Working Mom, and the second was Blend or Separate?

  Last night at home from approximately 6:10 to 6:11 this is what happened:

• I was preparing chicken for dinner
• My younger daughter called out to me to log her on to the computer
• While I was out of the kitchen, Nico the Crazy Cat jumped onto the counter and started licking the butter
• I came back into the kitchen and yelled at the cat
• The cat jumped off the counter
• Caleb the Barking Corgi started chasing Nico
• My older daughter yelled from upstairs, "Mom! I need your help right now!" "What is it?" I called back.
• She yelled something unintelligible
• "Come downstairs and tell me! We're not a yelling family!"
• The phone rang
• The garlic burned
• I really started to hate chicken

Even though I enjoy my work, I'm still tired at the end of the day, and often crave peace and quiet, a nice glass of wine, and at least a three-minute, interruption-free chat with my husband.

With two school-aged girls and a couple of energetic pets, usually just at the time I'm ready to unwind and relax, I start the notorious "second shift", where I work as planner/chauffeur/chef/nurse/housekeeper/drill sergeant, aka mom.

Sometimes I can roll pretty gracefully with the chaos and the busyness and the unending list of things to do. At times I even enjoy it and feel grateful for the full life I lead and the wonderful people I live it with.

But that second shift of work that we moms (and many dads) face after we get home from work or emerge from the home office usually feels pretty stressful.

Here's what makes that time feel stressful instead of energizing or engaging:

• We're tired. We don't get enough sleep, and we've had a full day before the second shift begins.
• We don't delegate.
• We don't let go of low priority tasks.
• We don't even know how to identify a task as low priority.
• We say yes to taking on more when we're already overfull. 
• We'd really rather be doing something else that isn't so repetitive and boring.
• Children are often at their most tired, cranky and unreasonable at this time.
• We feel guilty. About preparing a dinner that isn't perfectly healthful, about leaving others to take care of our kids, about having to leave the meeting early, about you name it.

There's a lot we can do to reduce our stress during the second shift. Below are some ideas. I am not an expert at executing all of the following, but when I focus on one or two of them on any given evening, I'm usually a much happier person:

Ask someone else to do or help with a task.

This could mean your partner, your kids, or someone you pay. Be willing to let go of absolute control over the outcome in favor of allowing someone else to help and relieve you of the responsibility.

Come up with your top priorities for an evening, and just focus on those.

Your top priorities might be a mixture of tasks you want done and experiences. For example, you might intend not to yell this evening, to ask your partner to help your son with his math homework, to make an easy dinner that takes less than 20 minutes, and to watch the season premiere of Lost that you missed last night.

Returning the phone call, getting the kitchen really clean, and the other dozen things that are on your list then take a backseat, to be completed or not, but not stressed over.

Commit to saying no unless you truly have plenty of time and energy for it.

Chaperone the field trip? Bring the snacks? Join the committee? Attend the meeting? Sign up for the class? Speak at the such-and-such group? Host your daughter's sleepover party? It's all no unless you have plenty of time and energy.

The requests will never stop coming, and you can't possibly say yes to them all without losing your mind. So pick and choose the commitments that are really important to you and gracefully decline the rest.

Re-frame the tedium

Repetitive tasks can feel oppressively dull or meditative and soothing. It's your choice. It's all about how you are talking to yourself when you're in the process of getting it done. When you can take a little pleasure in making something tasty, listening to your favorite tunes as you load the dishwasher, or appreciating that you have a home and a family as you help them transition from the workday to bedtime, you can feel a lot less bored.

One major caveat: If you are suffering in a terrible job or a terrible relationship, no amount of adjusting your attitude is going to significantly reduce your stress. You need the appropriate support and resources to change your situation.

Dump the guilt (or at least try a little bit)

All of the major decisions we make, such as choosing our partner, having children and accepting a particular job offer, come with trade-offs. Consequently we have a lot of mixed emotions and especially during stressful times can feel guilty for making the choice we did.

But in these kinds of cases, guilt is simply destructive. When you notice a thought coming on such as, "I feel guilty for taking this job and seeing my kids only two hours a day", see if you can remind yourself of why being in the job is good for you and/or your family. Gently shift your attention to the green grass over on this side of the fence.

Life during the second shift is often busy, crazy, and messy. I'm doing what I can do to see its bounty and lose the stressed-out thing.

So tonight I resolve to make the easiest dinner I can think of, appreciate my kids' good health and fascinating personalities, refuse to answer the phone, ignore the dog fur in all the corners, and one final, crucial thing:

Put a lid over the butter.

I'd love to hear: What do you do to make the second shift less stressful?

photo by Xti

Mom's life@work post #2: Blend or Separate?

This is the second post in the "Mom's life@work" series I'm writing on this blog. Read the first post, Help for the Working Mom, here.

Are you a blender or a separator?

I'm not talking kitchen appliances or bras here - I'm talking about how you navigate your work and home time, energy, and identities.

Blenders are most comfortable weaving family and work together. They like working from home if possible, and don't have set work hours. They can switch gears quickly between tending to their three year-old's meltdown to initiating that week's team conference call. They talk with their partner briefly at least a couple of times during the day. They're comfortable having one Twitter ID.

Separators want boundaries between work and home. They like to wear office attire to work and then change into casual clothes at home. They like to be fully present and engaged with work during work hours and fully present for their families and friends during non-work hours. They talk about work with colleagues and personal stuff with friends. They prefer to have separate Twitter IDs.

Most of us gravitate towards one style or the other. Either strategy works! However, it's helpful to know your preferred style so you can arrange your life as needed and avoid punishing yourself for not being the other style. 

We moms love to punish ourselves for not being _______ (fill almost anything in the blank) enough.  We can spend way too much time tripped up by vague and nagging guilt instead of just getting on with living our lives.

If you're a blender, you might want to:

• Discuss this with your family. Tell them that you move back and forth quickly between worlds so they can adjust their expectations.
• Talk with your family about your availability to them and how you'll signal to them when you need to be working.
• Plan adequate time cushions between appointments so that you don't have a client call in the hallway of your kid's elementary school.
• Set a time in the evening after which you won't check email, so you can get enough rest.

If you're a separator, you might want to:

• Discuss this with your family. Talk with them about what kind of availability you have to talk during the work day.
• Acknowledge that it's OK to make changes to your schedule for out-of-the-ordinary circumstances (for example, when there's a big deadline at work or when you have a sick child at home).
• Designate an area at home where you can work when needed.

If you know your preferences and are willing to be flexible, you can cut way down on the guilt.

Case in point: I'm an enthusiastic separator. I have three Twitter IDs (which I am re-thinking, by the way!) My friends and family hardly ever hear me talk about work. My clients and readers don't hear much about my vacations or movies I've seen. My Facebook account is for personal friends only.

I recently moved from a home office to an office space in my neighborhood, which feels fantastic. I don't work on the weekends. I seldom see friends during work hours.

It's lovely when this all works out.

But I can get rigid and feel really stressed when I'm too attached to this preference for separating, because, as we working moms know, the best laid plans usually have to be revised. A few times. And orthodontists don't work on Sundays. And I've got two kids who have crooked teeth. And so on.

So every once in a while I check email at 11 pm or send a client something on a Sunday or see my friend who's home with infant triplets (!) on a Thursday for lunch and manage not to have a stress attack because I'm blending more than separating. And this is real progress.

You don't have to do work and family any one way. Just do it your way, and talk with your family about how it can work for everyone, at least most of the time. 

I'd love to hear: How does it work for you to blend or separate?

photo by tilted horizon photography <by kyle>

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