The power of saying No

Ah No! That little word we learn around when we are 2 years old and are told by our parents that we are just a terrible 2.

Yet it’s such a powerful word despite having negative connotations and one we need to re-learn how to use all over again. Go in front of the mirror and practice with me: No. Not a but, not a maybe, just a No.

But why is it so hard to say no?

Let’s face it, we are people pleasers. We evolved by being next to others, having each others backs against predators or other enemies. Belonging to a community was part of our survival, it’s wired in our brains. So it’s not easy. Worst of them all is to say no when everyone around you says yes.

Say you get a request on a friday night to work over the weekend, if the first person of the team says yes, that’s it, the rest of you will feel cornered into pulling one for the team. You don’t want to be the one saying no, unless it’s something really major like a family funeral or your kids birthday. All of you will be upset about it, because who loves being called last minute to work when you were planning to rest? Even if you had no plans at all, well there’s one you didn’t had: work!

We avoid hard conversations – and that includes saying no – because we don’t like conflict. It’s not comfortable and we want to belong. Many of us all assume – with some evidence – that if you say no you are limiting yourself in your career growth. What if it’s not quite like that? What if you might end up being respected for it?

Establishing boundaries

The first step is to recognize what your boundaries are. What are your non compromisable slots / actions? Is it that you want to take the kids to school or want to start your day with some exercise? Or rather that after 17h30 you really need to spend time with your family, cook dinner and eventually unwind yourself? Just identify what those are and a) add them in your calendar and b) communicate to those that could impact them what they are.

The more specific you are the better, e.g. every weekday I want to run from 07h to 08h and that includes any prep time before / after running. Or maybe it’s not every day and just tuesdays and thursdays.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

Trust me, you cannot rely on common sense for people to know what your boundaries are. I guess whereas everyone can accept that being called at 03a.m, 07a.m might be ok for some but not for others. So the key here is to communicate. Be as clear and assertive as you can regarding your boundaries. This is valid with your family, friends and at work too.

Work wise, this would be a really good topic for your 1 on 1 with your line manager. If you don’t have them, then start to schedule them. If you receive requests which you don’t like, the fault is not only on the requestor but also on you for not making it clear what’s acceptable and what’s not. Most companies will have a code of conduct, and in some countries even specific laws (like in France, where it’s against the law to call employees after hours (here) – we seriously have a lot to learn from them). But as we are all unique, so our boundaries. So if you want to avoid disappointment and high levels of stress I would make them all clear.

I would go as far as also share them with your colleagues, in the coffee break you can say how taking your kids to school really makes you happy and it’s a non compromisable slot for you, or playing football with your friends thursday night. If you are willing to share them, you will find others will too, in turn making it easier for you guys to protect each other. Ah I won’t book that call with Steve as it’s thursday and he’s going to football, lets do friday morning instead.

Don’t be afraid to say No

For every yes you say, it’s a sequence of No’s you are saying. If you stay late in the office you will miss dinner with your family and your rest. Is it something you are willing to “sacrifice”? Yes it’s nice to say yes to people, it feels good as just discussed but how bad does it feel when you compromise your boundaries and over time, might end up with burnout due to saying yeses to everyone but to yourself?

So don’t be afraid to say no.

Say No is one of the best tools for self-care. Is it against one of your boundaries? Then say No. If you’ve invested the time in communicating what is not compromisable, then saying no should be a lot easier. Yes there might be the odd exception when you might end up saying yes, but it can’t be the rule.

Someone who has the courage to say no will be respected, because we ALL struggle with it after all. Your line manager has the same problem too, believe me. We all do. So if you say no and it’s clear you are doing so to protect your boundaries, you will be respected. If they still argue that you have to do x, y and z and don’t respect you, then it’s really time for you to find some other place. Most people though, would understand and be able to find a compromise somewhere.

I have to admit I’m really with Gen Z on this one. We just keep on saying yes again and again, and in turn we are boiling like our friend the frog in the pan. It’s hard, it’s itchy but if you don’t protect yourself no one will. There will always more work, more to do’s that demand your time and attention. How much are you willing to sacrifice from your mental health just so you don’t have to say no?

I do believe in the power of every single no. It will protect you and others will be encourage to do the same. Maybe it will shift organizations to understand that we are not robots and if they expect excellence and delivery they have to respect the employees too. If you are exhausted and in burnout you cannot give your best self nor resolve problems. You might break to the point of no return and might not even get a thank you back. So yes give your best, feel proud of your achievements every day but don’t forget to take care of yourself, even if that means using a good old fashioned: NO.

Great Expectations

How great expectations are leading to great disappointment and it’s all our fault.

Disclaimer: This has nothing to do with the book from Charles Dickens (or maybe it does).

Let’s face it, we live in a world with unprecedently great expectations. Everyone expects something out of you, you expect a great deal of those around you and on yourself as well. With all the technology around us, we just expect more more and more.

You are expected to be a great parent, the best employee your company can have, the best partner at home and be extremely fit – both physically and mentally. Although we always had expectations – it’s part of being human after all – the imbalance started to come when suddendly work expectations just kept on growing as if not even the sky is a limit.

In a post-covid world, companies got hooked to the long hours we were doing when working from home while at the same time they started to demand all employees to be back at the office, some the full 5 days others some kind of hybrid in between.

The concept is a lot older really, but did indeed accelerate with technology and the rise of the smart phones. You can have emails and internal messaging 24/7 so you are expected to pick up on those email and messages all the time. Bit by bit we started to do so. We wake up in the morning and check emails and work messages (not just instangrams and tik-toks). In the evening, while you are doing dinner, you end up checking emails too and after dinner might even be back to your desk – now that we all know we can work from home – and continue just to catch up on a few things.

Then weekend comes and because the week was so crazy we end up doing some work over the week too. What was meant to be just a quick scroll through the emails and to dos, easily becomes a few hours which are not eating from your personal and rest time. Little by little we do more and more.

This keeps getting encouraged when celebrating success at your organisation. How many individual or team awards will contain something in the lines of: “This team or individual worked weekends and really long hours to get this work done! Amazing, well done!”. I can’t but roll my eyes at this as I know it keeps on fueling the expectation that we need to carry on to do more.

If you see your whole team logging late and sending emails over the weekend you will end up – unconsciously – feeling guilty and also wanting to be there for the team. But the more everyone does, the more management expects you to do.

The reward for good work is always more work.

Now breaking news, it’s all our fault as well.

Gen Z has a point here (Good summary from Deloitte on Gen Z here). All other generations believe they are lazy, spoiled and don’t want to commit to anything. But what if they have a point? They want to do meaningful work and want to feel connected and don’t seem to be willing to accept workism. I say they do have a point and we should try to see the world from their point of view.

If we all continue to fueling the constant rising expectations how can we expect they will become realistic? It’s everyone’s role to bring them down to earth.

Protect your boundaries

We all have the same 24h, but if you want to avoid burnout or end up consumed by work (workism) then you have to protect your boundaries. Yes there will be cases where indeed you have to do more work. There are major milestones and it’s really critical you are there. But then you need to be able to step down when it’s no longer critical.

A lot of the work that comes late – including requests to work late evenings and weekends – comes down to bad planning. If we don’t challenge those asks, the people responsible for articulate the plans will never step back and revisit what they are doing, they will just continue to use your personal time (and all your team’s time) as contigency to get work done.

Always start by asking: is this really critical? Is someone dying? Will the organization go down or could this result in a major reputational risk? Or does it come down to someone doing bad planning and now you don’t want to say no to the leadership team? If it’s the latter, I’m afraid to say it, but step up to your mistakes. A lot comes due to missing communications between those responsible for planning and the team actually doing the work.

I would never expect someone to be able to plan everything in isolation, you need the experts to tell you how long it takes. With experience, the ones responsible for planning can judge if the estimates are being conservative or not, but that dialogue needs to exist. Just don’t come and ask for your team to work every weekend (or quite a big number of them).

Don’t be afraid to challenge the asks by having a constructive dialogue with your line manager, you might find both learn quite a lot along the way.

As for the organisation’s point of view – as I’ve written quite often – a well rested brain is more efficient at resolving difficult situations and bringing up creative to either resolve big problems or keep on adding more value to clients and stakeholders alike.

The frog and the pan

If you’ve read my original posts on this space you know I have a good friend, the frog. So this is the story about the frog in the pan and how it has followed me all my working life.

Like the frog, if we are thrown into a pan of boiling water we would jump straight out. We know it’s too much, we know it will kill us immediately.

But, if every day we warm up the pan a little bit, almost unnoticeable, then the frog starts to cook slowly but doesn’t realise as he adapts to the new temperature. The frog will end up cooked but won’t even realise it was time to jump a while back.

We are intelligent people, we think, there’s no way I would allow myself to “cook” (aka burn out). Let me bring you some stats: 79% of the UK workers will end up facing burn out (article here) especially if we consider the environment for more than 2 years. Personal life and office life become blurred and like the frog in the pan we are starting to boil without noticing. Though I do believe we actually notice but we end up without knowing what to do. It’s not so simple to jump out (even though we are in the midst of the great resignation).

Don’t be fooled, change in itself also adds to stress. Will you like your new job? Will you be able to adapt quickly? Will you like your new colleagues? Is it the company for you? What about your boss? Of course all of that would be thought through before you actually say yes but there’s nothing like being there to truly find out what it means for you. Many of us end up preferring to stay “with the evil you know” than jump into the unknown. So you stay.

You try to think about ways you can make the solution better, but before you realise your normal routines kick in and you’re not really changing until you really boil. 

Also there is something else that plays quite a big factor here. In some cases yes you are in the wrong company and your values don’t align with the company, your team could be the worst out there or your boss could be an ass. In those cases, by all means, face the jump and get out.

But… hands up if you believe the enemy is actually yourself. You can keep on changing companies but a few months on and you realise you are exactly following the same patterns of your old company. We are our worst enemy. Having the right boss – and I prefer to say line manager – will keep you grounded and challenge you to think about your ways of working so you can indeed make changes that help you long term. But mostly it’s actually self-inflicted.

• We like to be busy – or put another way – no one likes to say I have a lot of free time. It feels you are doing something wrong, that you are not making enough, that mind you, that you’re not cool because everyone else around you is super busy. It’s addictive. Yes, yes it is.
• Ego – I wrote a few times already but ego plays a big unconscious role. You compare yourself, you want to come out on top even if that means working until you boil.
• We don’t have enough examples when we start that show us there is another way. That if you work just smarter and focus on your priorities – without jeopardising your health and your valued relationships that you can still be successful. That feels unachievable, so you follow all the examples you see. 

The scary part is, all of what’s driving you to boil – or most of it – is unconscious. It’s routine, it’s in your working DNA.

It will require a lot of strength to break the cycle and implement incremental changes that will lower the temperature of your pan.

Before I dive into what can be done. I will quote something my husband keeps on repeating to me as a mantra:

“My boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, this is why I poop on company time.”

Maybe it’s a bit extreme, but there’s something to think about for sure.

At the end of the day, work is just work. It’s in your hands to make it more enjoyable and bearable. 

So what can you do?

• Learn to say no. Not just to others, but to yourself too. Every yes you say, it’s a lot of no’s you are also saying. If I accept this, it means I can’t have dinner with my family. It means I won’t have time to exercise. You get the picture. Saying no is hard. It is (unless your kids are asking you for the 1000th snack in the last 5 minutes). It requires practice. You can start with small steps. Say no to peers who ask your help and when you believe that will jeopardise your goals for the day. Then start by accessing your “yeses” and thinking about what you will lose in that time slot. Can you really fit it in your day? 
• Start your day by writing down your priorities. That’s to write, your top 3 things you really need to achieve that day which can be both work or personal. You need to have something measurable at the end of the day.
• Protect your calendar – I wrote at length here (show your calendar who’s the boss) but now you know what are your priorities you need to find slots for them. Ideally they would be done in the morning when your brain is fueled by coffee (unless you’re a tea drinker). Are there meetings in the middle that would get in the way of having a good 2h slot of uninterrupted work? Can you move them or even better do you really really need to go? Cancel them. Have a go, cancel them. See if anyone dies.
• At the end of the day assess what you’ve accomplished. I find myself always doing a stretch of work at the end of the day because I feel I achieved nothing during the day (just meetings). It’s a trap I keep on falling into. Probably if I had the time to retrospect about my day I would find I had already achieved more than I can think of by the end of the day. Really take a few minutes to think of what you’ve achieved and what you can do next day to achieve your top priorities. What failed? What was in the way? Did you need more uninterrupted time to get them done? With this in mind prepare your next day. 
• Think about your boundaries. What can you compromise and what can you not? As an example, except if I have to go to the office – I need to either drop my daughter at school or pick her up. It’s really important for her that I’m present and it’s important for me too. I get to chit chat with the other parents and establish relationships which help her as well make friends. I need to show my face. So if any meetings fall on those slots I say no to them. No matter who the requester is, senior or not. Same is valid with the bedtime routine. The answer is no. I’m not willing to compromise that. Maybe for you it’s a slot for daily exercise. Whatever it is and it can be multiple things. Think about them as they will act as your compass as to when you are taking too much.
• Once in a while (monthly, quarterly, even daily) assess how it’s going. How do you feel? How many days of utter stress and feeling out of control did you have? What are the things you can do to help you out? Do you need a day off away from work and family to think about what you can do to feel more grounded and healthier? Then take it! It might feel like 1 day’s loss and you’ll be even more behind where you wanted to be, but you’ll gain so much more. Maybe you’ve reverted back to saying too many “yeses”. Maybe you are not delegating enough. 
• Setting time aside for the things you really enjoy. We all have hobbies and things we really enjoy doing. Whatever those are, save time to do them. Ideally you would have time for them even during the week too. Even if it’s 15m, it can be totally refreshing for your mind. Sometimes I get 15m aside to read during my quick lunch break and those 15m give me a lot of energy to face the rest of the afternoon, not to mention they lift my mood (I obviously don’t read the news).
• Work out what works for you. There’s no one rule that fits all. You need to find what are the things you can do to help you live a more balanced life. Can well be asking for help – either for home commitments or work. We are not machines and it’s ok to slow down. If you are not boiling down you will be more productive at work and home. One single fresh idea is worth many tired ones. Try one of your ideas and see how it works. If it doesn’t work, go back to the drawing board and think of what could work. Finding what doesn’t work in itself is quite powerful too.

Show your calendar who’s the boss

Please raise your hand if you find that you’re having too many meetings? All hands raised? Yap, in fact I have both of my hands up. It’s just feels like meetingeddon.

You start your day with a few meetings to wake up, you go for lunch and there you go, more meetings!

I was once reading a book and stumbled upont the quote below. I shared it with the team and we ended up printing it up and posting it in our wall:

First of all, why are meetings bad?

In my view, meetings are neither good nor bad but they are avoidable. Yes, that’s right. A meeting should be just a quick catch up to formalize a common agreement. To make meetings efficient it means that all the relevant parties need to make their homework, prepare, have the right discussions and then just present them at the relevant meeting and close the topic.

If you have too many meetings how will you get the chance to get the work done? By half listening to one of the meetings so you can reply to emails or get any work done while in a meeting – a lot easier now given we’re all working from home. But we all know multitasking is a lie, so why are you in that meeting anyway? One (or a few meetings) can be efficient and sometimes are totally necessary, however the problem is when meetings get in the way of getting meaningful work done. How can you be productive if you use your most productive slots to do meetings rather than work?

This is one of the reasons why I would wake up at 05h20 to be at work at 07. Not because I’ve read it somewhere that all successful people wake up really early but because I hated rush hour and even worst, hated to arrive in the office and go straight to meetings. If for any reason that would happen I felt like punching people and only a bit of coffee would hold me back from doing so.

And don’t get me started in those meetings where someone would arrive to the room having printed a pack for each participant, twenty first century hello? I have no doubt in my mind that this meeting overflow is one of the key culprits for people feeling so low and tired these days. After we all had to work from home, most of us just endeding up commuting time to plug in even more meetings in our calendars.

So what can you do? Before I dive into my own ideas, I have to admit that theory is amazing, problem is always putting them in practice. However, having shared these with some people at work and receiving some positive feedback that they were helpful decided to write them here too.

How do you show to your calendar who’s the boss?

I’m a firm believer in organization. Clutter and mess just give me anxiety, likewise a mad calendar will do too. The tips below work for both office life as well as any personal to do’s.

1 – Time Blocking

This is the most important tip of them all. It’s all about rulling your calendar before your calendar rules you. How do you do this?

First block in your personal breaks – we all need them, be it lunch, a 30m job outside, breakfast, a bath, a slot to help the kids do homework, whatever you need. Then block in the slots to do critical work – e.g. to achieve your number one priority of the day which should fit in on when you feel most productive. Ideally this would be a slot of 2h where you should remain undisturbed. At tne end of the day you should reserve a slot to recap on your achievements of the day and plan the day ahead of you. If you need to review a document next day, find a slot in your calendar and block it. All other available slots then can be used for the different meetings you need to organize yourself or attend.

For the different blocks I really like to use colour coding because it does help it become more visual. Here’s the colours I use:

• Green – My personal breaks (breakfast, take my daughter to school, lunch, a quick walk outside)
• Purple – This would be anything where it’s either a doctors appointment or any commitments related to my daughter
• Orange – Working slots (including prep for next day)
• Yellow – Important meetings
• Blue – All other meetings
• Edit: I know use different colours per project so it’s easier to spot how much time I have allocated to each of them

Choose your own colours and have fun with it! I Also apply the same rules on my own personal calendar, where I have reminders for key birthdays and key things I need to prepare for next day. I also do a meal planning to remove that stress from my week. As I’m writing I just finished my meal planning and online weekly shopping where I buy what I need for the meals I have added into the menu for the week ahead.

Finally don’t forget to leave some contingency for the unexpected because that’s life. It quite well be an emergency deliverable or one of the kids falling sick and you have to pick them from school. If you have tackled your critical work at the start of your day (assuming that’s when you feel more productive) you will feel a lot better than if you’ve left it for the end.

2 – Tips to reduce the number of meetings

Below sharing my own rules for trying to reduce the number of meetings that pop up in my calendar:

• Reject meetings without any agenda – Go and check what you have in your calendar. I’m pretty sure you are going to find meetings with a ton of people invite where any clue regarding on what the meeting is about is a vague subject. Reject, reject, reject! If the meeting doesn’t have a clear goal it’s likely to run with the wind and just waste your time and your team’s as well. No regrets, just reject it.
• Reject meetings where you don’t feel you don’t had value – I have to remind my own team of this one too because they tend to believe that the person inviting them had a reason for it. You want to know what? Many times they don’t! So just check the agenda and if you are unsure about why you have been invite and have a quick chat with the organizer. It’s quite likely that you will find that someone else from your team should join instead.
• Reject meetings which are not critical and would be in the way of achieving your (or your team’s) priorities for the day – Maybe the meeting has a valid agenda and a goal, maybe you can even add value to it, but it’s not the most critical topic right now and you need that slot to get critical work done. Reject it. Just have a quick chat with the organizer and challenge if the meeting can be moved to a later date or just suggest someone else to go in your place
• Think about what you can let burn right now – This is a lesson my boss told me and goes hand in hand with the previous one. Sometimes you need to let a little fire to start to avoid a big one to burn everything down. This will be the case where neither you nor anyone in your team can really make to a certain meeting but you know if you don’t attend it will be just a little controlled fire which you can deal with at a later stage.
• Reject meetings which conflict with personal slots – I have received in the past meeting requests from really senior people which would clash with my slot to take my daughter to school. Having judged that the meeting wasn’t critical I just politely declined them and proposed an alternative slot. So it’s up to you to determine what’s non negotiable and protect it with all your might because no one else will!

So the key here is don’t be afraid to challenge what you get in your calendar and not be afraid to say no. You might be surprised with what you will find.

3 – If you’re the one who needs to organize a lot of meetings

I totally fall in this category. And there’s nothing that frustrates me the most as having to organize meeting with 2 people that could well just chat together without your intervention. True story! So here’s some tips you can practice if you need to organize a meeting.

• First start by defining the meeting purpose: what is the outcome you want to achieve? Who do you need to achieve it? What’s the format that will most likely enable you and the attendees to achieve it? How long do you need to get there, 30m? 1h? As per rules above you need to ensure the meeting has a clear agenda and goal and if you can timebox it.
• Try to keep the attendees to the minimum – I would love to see how much money companies burn in meetings. Except townhalls which are meant to provide information to a complete department, I have seen meetings running for a couple of hours with more than 20 people on them and I always wondered what’s the cost for the organization. More than it should be spent I’m sure. So if you are organizing a meeting just think of the key people you really need to achieve your goal and try to stick with just those. The less people you are, the more likely is you’ll have a productive discussion.
• Think of the type of meeting you need – If you have a big topic maybe you would be better off with a quick 15m meeting to explain what needs to be achieved, communicate the goals to the wither audiance, let them do the investigation and the homework and agree the slot where you’ll review it together. You might need to break it into smaller working groups before the group can get together again. By all means avoid having more than 10 people for hours in a single meeting. A meeting should always be the last resort and should be able to achieve a specific goal.
• If the meeting is going of topic – No matter how well you organize this can well happen. If it does try to intervene as soon as you can and ackwoldge the point needs to be discussed further and park it in the backlog (this should be included in the summary of the meeting) and ensure you go back to the next agenda item.
• Do you need to organize it? – Maybe I should have started with this one, but do you really need to organize the meeting yourself and run it? Ask someone else in your team (who knows about the topic) to go and arrange it directly with the people that need to be involved and ensure there is a clear agenda and a documented outcome of the meeting. See, you saved yourself 1 or 2 extra meetings in your calendar.
• Close the meeting with the summary of what was discussed, key actions, owners and timelines and agree when the group needs to meet together again (if required).
• Document the outcomes of the meeting – No joke, but in the past we had to repeat meetings at a later stage because people will easily forget what had been already agreed in a previous meeting. So it always felt like those tv series where more than half is about the previous episode “in the previous episode”. So go ahead and document it. I’m not talking about those lengthy Minutes of the meeting documents but something with the key bullet points with either actions, owner, due dates and key decisions. If you can, while people are talking just draft those on your computer during the meeting itself so you only need a few minutes to send it back to the attendees after the meeting.

Meeting etiquete

• All calendars provide you the option to accept / reject your meeting, so use it! It’s extremely rude to receive a calendar invite and not accept or reject. If you can’t make it just reject it, or if you want to attend it and the slot doesn’t work just propose an alternative slot. Not replying to an invite it’s an equivalent of not saying thank you when someone offers you something. So stop being rude!
• If you are the meeting organizer please check the invitees calendars. A lot of people even fail to acklowledge other people work in a completely different timezone or use a slot that is already taken simply because they didn’t bother to check. If you have a lot of attendees it will be hard to find a slot that fits all, so think about who are the key people that need to be there and work around them. You can always talk to them to see what they could move instead.
• Arrive on time – I’m obsessed with arriving on time for anything in life (this is a lesson I’ve got from my own dad. In my own culture people feel proud of arriving late because everyone else does!). I hate waiting therefore I don’t like to make people wait for me either. Sometimes I end up late from a previous meeting, so a courtesy I will send a note to the people in my next meeting saying I’m running out late and I expect to join in 5 to 15m (whatever the delay is). If I am the organizer this will allow the rest of the attendees of getting a refreshment as opposed to continuing to wait for you.
• Mute your microphone if you’re not talking – This feels like meeting 101, but seriously a lot of people in this day and age still don’t know how to mute themselves when they are not talking so you end up with echo or a ton of background noise that just disturbs everyone else in the meeting. A computer headset is uber cheap these days, so get one that works and practice a few times and avoid all the meeting cliches.

Priorizite

Finally just prioritize everything. Many times you don’t need a lengthy meeting, all you need is a daily priority meeting (e.g. scrum) with your team (this works for project as well as Business As Usual). There are really cool tools out there these days which allow you to make it interactive and fun.

Sample tools you can use (depending what’s available in your company)

• Mural – This is my favourite because it’s a post it based approach and the whole team can participate and provide updates at the same time in the meeting (or even after). You can make your own templates (I’m a huge fan)
• Standuply
• Planview – I have seen a demo on this one and was really impressed. Really intuative to use and again really visual
• Jell
• Sli.Do – This is really good if you have a few objective questions you would like to get answered (e.g. vote on specific ideas) or get a sense of how the team is feeling. This is a really interactive tool. Also really good at allowing people to post their own questions anonymously, so if you want people to propose their ideas on what they want to see improved or what is worrying them this is great for that.
• Scrumgenius

Pretty much all the tools above are Agile related, however I do believe agile concepts and tools can be applied everywhere these days. I am a huge advocate to a daily 15m meeting within the teams to ensure everyone is aligned on the priorities, goals and challenges the team is facing then off they are to do undisturbed work.

Would love to know your own ideas on how to reduce the meetings or how you can manage them more efficiently.

Stop multi-tasking… just give it a go

Ah, it seems quite a contra-sense that in this technology and always evolving world the studies are saying actually we should not multi task. I can’t imagine my work-life without it:

* Reply to e-mails while in meetings

* Eat and attend calls

You name it!

But then we miss what is important. Noticed that gorgeous sunrise in the airport? No? Too busy reading the newspaper, having breakfast and thinking about I don’t know what? But if we stop back even for a second, then we can actually enjoy the beauty of the moment.

Even those moments of pure focus can bring some benefits, the obvious one is that you’ll feel lighter and potentially happier. If you take a step at a time you’ll maybe have a sense of “mission accomplished” at the end of the day.

Try that, I dare you! Yap, just try it out for once do a task list of all you want to do in the day, and tackle it one by one. Then feel free to share any conclusions 🙂

A nice article on the topic

Work smarter… not harder

Ah this is a clear message for myself. Many times we just feel that all we have to do is work harder: “I’ll work harder and I’ll make it next time”. Someone actually told me: you don’t need to work harder, you just need to work smarter! And I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Just sharing a nice article I’ve just found on the topic:

Sharpen the Saw means preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have–you. It means having a balanced program for self-renewal in the four areas of your life: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual.

Then tackle all your issues one by one. How do you eat an elephant?

It’s up to you to establish your limits. If you are overloaded (or feeling like a burned frog) you won’t be any productive. So breathe, and then list out all the things you have on your plate and think what can be delegated or what can be delayed.

After all, we’re our greatest asset, you can find work but not another you 🙂

Do you recognize when it’s enough? 10 reasons to stop working so hard

I just saw this article and I had to share it. First of all because it fits into what I do. I do tend to  overwork and I do not say NO enough times, and many other times I don’t recognize when to stop and just carrying on doing a bit more (like that old story of the frog in the pan)

1. Quantity kills quality. You want to be excellent at what you do. But the more tasks you take on, the smaller your chance of doing an excellent job at any of them. Cutting as many items off your task list as you can ups the odds that you’ll do a killer job on the things that matter most.

2. Sleep matters. “The way to a more productive, more inspired, more joyful life is getting enough sleep,” Arianna Huffington said in a 2011 TED talk. She would know. She fainted from exhaustion and broke her cheekbone and is now something of a sleep evangelist. “I was recently having dinner with a guy who bragged that he’d gotten only four hours’ sleep the night before,” she continued. She considered retorting: “If you had gotten five, this dinner would have been a lot more interesting.”

3. You suck when it counts. I can tell you from experience that going into a meeting tired and distracted means you will suck in that meeting. You’ll be bad at generating new ideas, finding creative solutions to problems, and worst of all you’ll suck at listening attentively to the people around you. That disrespects them and wastes their time as well as yours.

4. Your mood is a buzzkill. The kind of irritability and impatience that goes with being overworked and behind schedule will cast a black cloud over the people around you both at work and at home. If you’re an employee, it will damage your career. If you’re a small business owner, it will harm your business.

5. Your judgment is impaired. The research is conclusive: sleep deprivation impairs decision-making. As a leader, poor judgment is something you can’t afford. Crossing some tasks off your to-do list, handing them to someone else, or finishing some things late is well worth it if it means you bring your full concentration and intelligence to the tough decisions your job requires.

6. You’re setting a bad example. The work schedule and tone you set for yourself will likely be mirrored by the smartest and most ambitious of your employees. What kind of leaders and bosses do you want them to be? Do you want the benefit of their brightest ideas and best judgment? Then don’t create an environment where everyone vies to see how many hours they can work without falling over.

7. There will always be more work. If you run your own business, there’s always a new project to start, a new customer to pursue, or a new technology to try out. You’ll never be out of new work to do. And if you work for someone else, getting a lot done will lead to being given more tasks. That can be a good thing, but only if you have the time and energy to do them with excellence.

8. You’re hurting your relationships. Somewhere along the way my husband sat me down and insisted that I make some time to talk with him every day. I’m blessed not only with a strong marriage but an unusually outspoken spouse. There may be people in your life feeling as shut out as he was who haven’t come out and said so. Don’t wait until it’s too late.

9. You’re screwing up your health. Did Mita Diran know she was risking her life by working so hard? It seems clear from her tweets that she didn’t, and if she had, she’d have made a different choice. I’m sure you’re smart enough not to work 30 hours straight, but do you let your work schedule interfere with things like healthy eating and regular exercise, not to mention sleep? If so, then it’s possible you’re shortening your life by overwork. Is it worth it?

10. Most of the work is less important than you think. A few years ago, hospice worker Bronnie Ware famously published the top five regrets she heard from her dying patients. Those who’d had careers all regretted the number of hours they spent at work. But many of her patients also spoke of dreams they wished they’d fulfilled.

Do you know when it’s too much for you? Can you say no? If you won’t, I can tell you no one else will! As long as you keep on doing there’ll always be more to come. Room for thought 🙂