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Colleagues,
This is the final article in our series on healthily leading from home. You can also watch the video for each day's content at my YouTube channel here. Today we will talk about three work practices that can help renew you:
Creating 1-2 priority goals focuses your work. These are separate from your to-do list but take priority over it. I like to identify the 1-2 things that I really need to do to call the day a win. Focusing on priorities helps you:
Engaging in uninterrupted focus work goes hand-in-hand with setting priority goals. Here are the benefits:
Developing other people’s skills is a renewal activity because:
Also note that developing others has long term benefits. It increases overall organizational capacity, decreases problems, increases retention and job satisfaction, and, if focused specifically on leadership capacity, increases your ability to be strategic as other leaders can focus more on urgent tasks. Remember there are three overarching themes for the week:
This series focused on helping you develop healthy habits as you work at leading from home. Just as you face challenges with isolation, so do I. The most challenging aspect of my current focus is not receiving feedback. Please, if you have adopted any of the practices in this series, take a moment to let me know by clicking on the blue email button. What practice did you adopt? Do good and be well, Frederick
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Colleagues,
This is the fourth article in our series on healthily leading from home. You can find the previous articles below. You can also subscribe and have them delivered to your inbox daily: https://mailchi.mp/c15c68e6df32/specialedition. Ding! Brrrp. Whistle, ring. Pop-up, peek-out, flash, banner! Communications clutter may be one of the most insidious and damaging aspects of work, both in the professional and home environments. Uncluttered communications look like this:
If you routinely practice these habits, great! If you don’t, keep reading. Remember there are three overarching themes for the week:
Communications clutter undermines every one of those themes! If you agree that the three themes are important, then why would you maintain poor communications hygiene? There are three possible explanations:
Let’s look at each of these. Haven’t thought about it. Now you have! Don’t know how to declutter.
Note: I’m laughing hilariously as I write this as the lawn person has come and is mowing right beneath my window! Add that to the list of intruding distractions! Being unavailable is an unavoidable luxury. That is certainly possible, but perhaps you have created a false story around the importance of being available 90-100% of the time. Remember that one of our key themes is to be intentional, so please reflect on the following. Maybe the real problem lies within us, and the narrative we have constructed around our own leadership. Let’s briefly unpack a couple of the stories we may have constructed for ourselves. Under each story, I’ll offer some alternative thoughts and perspectives. You don’t need to agree with me, just reflect so that you can do so intentionally. Narratives:
I’m really interested to know how people respond to this theme. If you had a strong response (positive or negative) please comment below. Do good and be well, Frederick Colleagues,
This is the third article in our series on healthily leading from home. You can find the previous articles at my blog. Today we will look at some healthy practices to enact while leading from home:
All three of these practices help you to become both a better leader and a healthier one. Accepting limitations means accepting that we can’t do everything. There are too many tasks, needs, and people that need attention. This is at once terrifying, because it implies failure, and liberating as it gives us permission to choose. Understanding that everything won’t get done means that you choose what gets done today and what doesn’t. Accepting limitations also makes it easier to shut down at the end of the day. Acceptance makes it easier to focus on priority tasks, to let go of our aspirations to be perfect, and encourages us to delegate. In the video, I’ll discuss five ways to deal with things that aren’t your priority items. Being fully present is the single most powerful thing you can do to both improve your leadership and enhance your state of mind. Being fully present means that you are physically, mentally, and emotionally present to the person or task in front of you. Steps to being fully present:
Being fully present helps you:
Strengthening connections is imperative in a time of physical separation and isolation. Try these:
Best practices:
Do good and be well, Frederick
Note: Estimated read time for this article is 6-8 minutes
Colleagues, I want to give a shout out to Dr. Jacque Jacobs. In addition to being a long-time friend and mentor, she has been helping me refine and edit the content in this series. Thank you, Jacque! Yesterday we talked about routines. If you missed that you can read it on my blog here and watch the video here. Today, we will focus on spaces. Your routines create behavioral structures, and your spaces create physical structures for healthily leading from home. Remember that we have three overarching themes:
In general, your “home office” will fall into one of three categories:
Your home office should do several things for you:
Let’s look at each of these more closely. Signaling Having a dedicated space (individual or shared) creates a physical signal that you are “at work.” Sitting down (or stepping up to your standing desk!) cues your mind to engage in your work. It serves as a notice to others that you are working, and that they need to observe any interruption protocols you have established (more on that in the video). How-to:
Limiting Physical signaling through being in an “office” space is a first step to limiting distractions and interruptions, especially those in your household environment. Complete a household check by eliminating noise and information distractions from sources outside of your space. Inform others that you are “going to work.” Complete a space check by eliminating sources of distraction within your dedicated space. There are two primary sources of distraction in your home office environment, personal clutter and communications. Personal clutter may include actual objects (e.g., a stack of household bills, basket of laundry or pile of dirty dishes) or digital ones such as your news and social media feeds, personal browser pages (Amazon, airfare, more news, facebook, etc…). Try the following:
I was originally going to examine communications in detail right here but have decided to do a communications deep-dive on Friday instead. Until then, here are some communications things to think about:
Enhancing The physical layout of your space can make work easier or more difficult. Try and arrange furniture appropriately. be reflective about inefficiencies or challenges and consider changes to your equipment. For example, six months ago I bought an adjustable desktop so I could alternate between sitting and standing while at my computer. It was awesome and improved my health and my productivity. Last week I replaced that desktop with an adjustable table. Wow! I have so much more space! The result is that I can stay in my office when I need to write stuff out on paper or take notes. I can keep more material within easy arm’s reach. This saves me from having to move away from my work which aids flow and productivity. Professionalizing Imagine sitting on your couch in your PJs amidst a pile of laundry, paint swatches for your living room, and equipment for your favorite hobby. Now imagine sitting in an office chair at your computer in your business attire amidst your professional books, diploma(s) and teacher/leader memorabilia. The second scenario is a lot easier if you have a dedicated individual space, but have you moved some of the important trappings of your leadership into your home office? Even in a dedicated shared space, you can “stage” the space like a movie set. Hang your diploma(s) on the wall above your computer. Stack your three favorite leadership books on side of your desk. Choose one meaningful piece of “favorite teacher” memorabilia and set it on your desktop or even mount it on the edge of the monitor. The point is that you want to provide subtle emotional cues that reinforce your professionalism and will aid in your focus. Best practices:
Logistics:
Do good and be well, Frederick Colleagues,
Today we begin our 4-part series on caring for yourself. Assumptions: You are (a) working from home, (b) you don’t usually work from home, and (c) that you are putting the needs of others in front of your own needs. Over the next four days we’ll look at establishing healthy routines, creating healthy spaces, engaging in renewal, and increasing healthy leadership practices. On Thursday afternoon we’ll conclude with a 2:00 virtual meeting. We will also examine three overarching themes:
We have had to react to a new way of leading and working, but now it is time to be intentional. Intentional choices will result in better leadership. Every break in concentration requires refocusing. This is as true for scanning an email notification or news headline as it is for taking a phone call or interacting with someone in your environment. Each time you refocus you lose time and your ability to concentrate is degraded. A series of breaks creates a cascading effect that undermines your ability to engage thoughtfully and intentionally. After you finish with this article you can jump here to read a research summary about the cost of disruptions. Closely related to distraction is the concept of being fully present for each task and each interaction. Being fully present offers performance and mental health benefits but is challenging in the digital age and might be even more so when leading from home. Routines are the practices we engage in on a daily basis. Think about routines as being a set of dominoes. If you start your first routine correctly, the rest of them should follow as long as you’ve set them up well. When you execute your first routine, it becomes easier to do the second, and then the third, and so on. Why are we starting with routines?
Like a sailboat with no rudder, we go wherever the wind takes us without solid routines. In short, it is very difficult to act strategically without having routines. There are four critical parts of the day for routines:
This sequence assumes a standard day focused on being most productive in the morning. Rearrange elements to suit your schedule and times of peak performance. If you are still functioning in crisis mode, these practices are still relevant but will be harder to execute. Transition to Work This is the single most important set of routines due to the domino effect. If you stumble on the first step, it can make the rest of the day rocky. Here are some suggestions for routines to include in your transition from waking to working:
Morning Productivity Have a set order for getting started. Some of the steps you may take:
Afternoon Productivity One of the inescapable facts of leading from home is that there are more distractions. Being militant about sealing off blocks of work time is critical. If you need to do non-work things during the day, try and do them in a set block. Importantly, build a trigger at the end of the block that pushes you into your afternoon work. Accept that the afternoon block may be “squishier”, but you can anticipate certain types of work.
Transition from Work This is critical for your mental health. Your work may require you to do things in the evening, and if that is the case, build in an evening work block with its own routines. It is imperative to create clean breaks between professional and private time and to adhere to them to the greatest degree possible.
Best practices for routines:
Logistics:
Do good and be well, Frederick |
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