My wish for you is that you are able to do at least one of these things today. Do good and be well, Frederick
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Colleagues,
Five strategies for differentiating your communications. All strategies won’t work for all people, but if you can use one of these than your leadership will be incrementally better (A-B).
Please understand that I am not saying that you should never be on your phone or engaging with email. I am suggesting that there are strategic times during most days in which you should not be subject to interruptions. Do good and be well, Frederick Colleagues,
I’ve been talking a lot about turning off notifications, but of course it is not that simple. Almost every daily reader is in a position where people rely on them and need to be able to get ahold of them. That’s just the way it is. However, if we leave it at that, then we effectively create a situation where all communications are equal. Every call, text, tweet, news alert, and new cat video gets an equal amount of our immediate attention. That makes no sense. Try this:
Think about what it might be like to differentiate your communications. By that I mean create conditions where all alerts are not created equal. Do good and be well, Frederick Colleagues,
Confession time. When I am really stressed or down, I eat fruit loops. With all the colors and sugars, there is probably nothing worse I could binge on. The good thing is that I can’t eat them if they aren’t in the house and they are rarely in the house. I am the only one who will buy them so the only way they wind up in a bowl on my table is if I make multiple bad choices. In the store, I only have one decision to make at a single point in time – do I buy the cereal today? If I don’t buy it, I have no other decisions to make until the next time I am in the store. If I do buy the fruit loops, I introduce a large number of choices into my life, all around trying to avoid eating something that is bad for me. Communications are the same way. If you allow them to come into your awareness, you will have to constantly decide when to engage with them. Turning off your notifications is like leaving the cereal on the shelf at the store. Do good and be well, Frederick Colleagues,
I checked my email and had something I needed to respond to. As I thought about my reply, I noticed there was an email in my junk folder. 99% of the email that winds up in my junk folder is junk, so I was pretty sure that it was nothing important. Guess what? I checked it “to make sure” that it wasn’t anything important. It wasn’t. Dissecting what happened:
It wasn’t a huge deal, except that this kind of thing happens over and over throughout the day. All of these little deviations and interruptions add up and undermine our ability to focus on what is important. Try this: monitor every little thing you do today. Identify all of the little things you do that aren’t important and that break your flow. Do good and be well, Frederick |
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