Archive for the ‘work environment’ Category

Stanford has a BeWell program here that tries to build healthy physical and emotional behaviors among staff. A huge focus for their efforts is around mindfulness to reduce stress and increase clarity. In fact, I just attended a stress workshop this week around being more present. The facilitator defined stress whenever our minds are out of our body – when we’re doing one thing and thinking about the next task at hand.

The Chronicle of Higher Education had an excellent long article today called, You’re Distracted. This Professor Can Help. I was pretty blown away in the first place by his approach. Many instructors have banned laptops in the classroom as a way to combat the distracted nature students bring into the lecture hall. Instead of removing the temptation, Professor David Levy actually teaches students how to build focus through meditation at the beginning of each class.

I’m not a meditator myself (but I’d like to be). This goes beyond the actual practice of meditation and brings up the idea of a ritual to get yourself focused on the work ahead of you. How to you start your morning? If you are good and don’t let e-mail run your day from the get go, what is that gets you “in the mood” for big thinking around work projects?

I schedule out time for projects, which maybe works for me about half the time (I work in a place with many interruptions). Others might put on headphones to block out the world. I know some colleagues that remove themselves from their cube and work in a conference room to plow through work that needs to be interrupted. If you don’t have a work ritual for big work, it’s probably worth thinking of good strategies that might work for you.

I don’t think everyone should be amazing, since we all come to work each day with different perspectives about what that 40 or more hours means to each of us. That said, a recent post in Inc. on the 10 Things Really Amazing Employees Do got me thinking about the subject.  I like their list and there are 4 standouts for me that I try to exhibit:

• Enthusiastically Learn All Aspects of Business
• Demonstrate High Standards, With Low Maintenance
• Grow Themselves, and Others
• Stimulate Happiness

Learn it All. When you show up to work, putting in the time is a given, and striving to learn more about the current context and future direction of your industry is very important. For my job in particular, this means staying attuned to what’s happening at Stanford across the board from the student experience, major sports, university priorities and understanding my primary audience, faculty and their world. I regularly read university publications, look for Stanford in the news beyond, pore through every set of Faculty Senate notes and stay current with the makeup of the student and faculty bodies. Beyond Stanford, checking in with colleagues at other Ivy Plus institutions and keeping tabs on the latest in content and online learning is incredibly important. Knowing this background helps inform my work and honestly, it keeps me energized and full of purpose.

High Standards, Low Maintenance. I have incredibly high standards and find myself having to dial it back and pick and choose my battles. In managing staff, it’s very important to hope for the best and motivate others to maintain a similarly high level of excellence so you don’t have to micromanage their efforts. Despite the high standards, the low maintenance part is key. How many times have you been a part of a project where you aren’t the most senior person related to the decision – you do a huge amount of work and it can be derailed when it’s brought to decision makers? For those with certain expectations, especially leaders and decision makers, it’s paramount to articulate must haves from the get go so that others can be on the same page, or build in check-ins before others have gone down the wrong path.

Grow! It’s an expectation in management-level positions to grow others around you, but I’ve found it’s one of my favorite things about work. This doesn’t even have to be a formal mentor relationship, but taking the time to get advice from senior-level staff or peers can be invaluable. Asking for feedback in tough situations can only help your job to better, and let’s face it, people love to be asked for these kinds of things. Don’t devalue the impact of little things, like providing feedback to peers, or just being a listening ear when a colleague needs to vent or work through a difficult situation. Regular readers know from my blog that I am a voracious consumer of all things learning. The more professional and personal development you can do from productivity to technical skills to exercise/nutrition will all make you a better and happier person.

Exude Happiness. We work more than we sleep, more than we spend time with our loved ones…more than anything. In some ways, that means that work is life. I don’t say this in a negative way at all, but when you do the math around your day and factor in your commute, it’s a lot of time. You are valuable and you should enjoy what you do and why you’re doing it. If not, find something else. We all have some level of agency in choosing our careers, so find something you love and show up with a smile and ready to connect with colleagues and tackle projects. This isn’t only important for really amazing employees, but for everyone.

What better time than elections to focus on what kind of agency we all have in our lives. More and more it seems like everyone feels inundated with work and overwhelmed by all of the details that go into living our daily lives. On some level, I think this is true. On another level, it’s a mix of first world problems and the inability to gain perspective about how much control we actually have over our own existence. We all make choices and those decisions lead into what makes our days what they are. I urge you all to recognize that you have power over your life and you can make changes…pretty easily, actually.

It starts with saying no to some things. Just take quick stock of some of the regular time sucks in your life that you aren’t getting rewards from and figure out a solution to getting your time back. I recently came across a short piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education on Saying Goodbye to What’s No Longer Working, even when it seems like a fun or regular thing.  As my job has moved over to alumni education responsibilities, I felt this anxiety about how some of my previous duties don’t really have coverage at this moment while we’re staffing up. When I decided to just stop attending those meetings, it was a relief. Although someone will need to make sure those areas get covered, ultimately, it’s not my responsibility, and letting go of that weight on my shoulders felt like a relief.

It’s not really fun to say no, but often it’s necessary. Your time is valuable and so are you!

It feels amazing to say yes. I love being able to help out co-workers and now that I’ve been here for awhile, many colleagues across the university still reach out to me as a resource or for advice on various things. Although this can be seen as a burden or time suck, I carve out time for it, because it feels like such a reward to me.

Check out The Huffington Posts’s piece on Be Loved: How to Get More Love in Your Life. The short synopsis is to do the following to get more love coming your way:

• Sleep!
• Stay inspired and creative
• Find calmness in yourself
• Let go and indulge in play

I think these suggestions ring pretty true. I’m hit or miss on the sleep part. I definitely stay inspired and creative. I feed my brain by reading so many books and always keep the arts in my life with dance performances and museums. Yoga helps with the calmness. Yesterday, my instructor and friend noted that it’s simple to find calmness in a dark room, wearing comfortable clothes on a mat, but we should stretch to bring that regularly into our day. And I could probably play more…who couldn’t?

I’ll leave you on that note and hope you take some time to empower yourself with agency in your life. If you’re not feeling fulfilled, make some changes!

I have 2 more days in the office until I’m on vacation. 4 days off and 6 days of fun in total.

I’m glad before I left, this article on Vacation Sabotage got my attention with the line, “Before I go on vacation, even for a week, I prepare as though I’m headed to the coroner. I empty the in-box, clean the piles on the desk, put away all the laundry, dust.” Matt Richtel notes that we arm ourselves for vacation as if we’re preparing to die.

Of course, this is an exaggeration, but I’ve always found that the language co-workers use around vacation is a bit troubling. You hear about how stressed the week beforehand is as the person gets her affairs in order. The week of it, there’s talk about checking e-mail and the mounting load of work. Upon return, more than the memories of the trip, it’s all about the 100s of e-mails to pore through.

Why do we allow ourselves to get into this mental trap? I certainly argue that’s what it is. I like how this article identifies that we do it to ourselves. When you’re gone for 3 days, it’s not such a big deal, but adding a couple more seems to change that for some reason. I think the magical thing about vacation is when you return, processing e-mail is 10x faster than normal. Many requests have already been handled by colleagues and others are just pointless or past relevance.

So starting Saturday during my time off, I’ll take my own advice and truly get away. There will be no “cubicle in my pocket” and I won’t be thinking about my desk or my projects. Thinking from afar is never productive; it doesn’t get things done.

Even when not on vacation, I challenge you all to change your relationship with your device and not let your smartphones tempt you into working whenever you have a spare moment in line or standing around. Instead take a deep breath and remember what it was like to be bored. Remember those days, when we didn’t feel like we had to be doing something every second of the day?

I haven’t been taking my own advice of breaking seemingly big things into smaller pieces. In the last month, I’ve gone to several influential trainings and talks ready to be blogged about. I had this lofty idea to combine them into one post, but I think that feat seemed so big I’ve never gotten around to it, so today I’ll just review one of the them.

In May, I went to a workshop by Dan Klein at Stanford entitled, Improvisation: Collaborative Creativity and the Art of Making Stuff Up. The experience was a bit of a game changer for me in that it’s shifted the ways I’m approaching my every day life. He reviewed some basic improv principles.

Our first exercises caused us to think about how often we say “no” or “yes, but,” which turns out to be a no in reality. This thinking made me reflect upon how many times I’ve heard “yes, but” in the workplace, especially right after someone brings up an issue or idea. We practiced some exercises where our job was not to be inspired, but to inspire our partner through building sentences. The message really resonated with me on being an active follower.

Around coming up with ideas and tackling problems, Dan had many catch phrases and words of wisdom including:

• imagination is as easy as perception
• raise the stakes. allow it to be important
• don’t fight against the cat (when you’re trying not to think about something in particular and it’s all you can think about)
• every exercise is a good excuse for a debrief
• be average, be obvious
• how do you signal status in your interactions

When he noted that this is where you end up:

Yes = adventure

No = safety

It makes the choice pretty clear that Yes is the way to go. It doesn’t mean you are always committing to the idea, but that you’re open to dialogue and newness. One of my favorite exercises we did was one designed for a group to constantly make mistakes when you’re ‘on stage.’ The idea was for us to go through messing up over and over again, failing cheerfully, and taking a bow. It was pretty fun to go through the motions and actually raise your voice with a “ta da!” for my actions. Improvisers love mistakes and think about how they can use them to their advantage. Of course, this also has implications for our daily work life.

Most impactful for me about the workshop was saying yes more often and accepting all offers from the world. When something falls into your lap personally or professionally, why not give it a chance and see what happens? Opening doors can only show you the possibilities life has to offer you. I challenge you all to think about accepting offers that come your way.

If you prefer a video recap of improv, watch Jane Lynch’s commencement address to Smith College.

PROCRASTINATION

Believe it or not, I’ve had procrastination as my next blog topic for awhile, not only because this post is long overdue. Fast Company had a great article, Get to Work by Meeting Procrastination Head-On, with some quick tips to consider. Basically, to do the following:

• declutter and do any tasks immediately that take less than 2 minutes
• avoid busy work – stop organizing your to do lists and just do it!
• do the heavy stuff instead of pushing that to the bottom of your list
• avoid priority dilution (don’t just respond to incoming e-mail!)

LETTING GO

Another interesting post I ran across focused on the things we hold onto that prevent us from being happier and better. Perhaps it’s appropriate it comes from a site called the Purpose Fairy: 15 Things You Should Give Up to Be Happy. My favorites to think about around the workplace include:

• give up your need for control (aren’t all project managers control freaks on some level?)
• give up complaining (it’s infectious in a team environment)
• give up the luxury of criticism (some times your feedback is more valuable than others. it’s not always necessary to weigh in.)

While you’re letting all of these other things go, what you should hold onto the most is a deep seated feeling of expecting the best out of your colleagues. Especially in matrix organizations, it’s easy to point fingers, place blame or just group co-workers in categories. When things go wrong (or right!) the best course of action is always to expect the best – that person didn’t mean to drop the ball – maybe I forgot to send a reminder – he or she probably has another huge priority project. When you expect your peers have the best intentions, it really creates a more supportive and friendly atmosphere. If you put out that good energy, hopefully the universe (and your co-workers) return it back to you.

This week’s post is brought to you by special request, since several people at the Alumni Center will be moving around in the next couple of weeks.

Creating a great workspace can be one of the best ways to get your work done.

PAPER FILES

Pictured here are my paper files and kanban, located to my left when I turn from the computer. The kanban (post-its on the top) is how I track what’s in the hopper, no more than 7 projects I’m working on, and what’s done already. I’ve set aside 15 minutes every Tuesday to review where I am to make sure it’s all current.

Also, I revamped my paper files in the last few months so they are color coded. Here’s my system:

• Yellow: Alumni Education
• Red: regular check-in meetings
• Purple: Events
• Blue: regular administrative meetings/forms/finances

When my project is over, I recycle the files. I use the paper during an event or program, but once it’s over, I go through to make sure everything’s on the office shared drives and get rid of the accumulating paper. I’m even regularly dragging MS Office e-mails into the shared folders for invitations or important correspondence that colleagues might want to reference one day.

PRODUCTIVITY HELPERS

Here’s a list of important elements at your desk to help you work more productively – consider what should be at your fingertips on a regular basis:

• calendar (I need a lot of calendars for my project management so I have a crafty 1 month one right under my monitor, a large 3 month view, and a small 2012 one)
• staff directory with important phone numbers (highlight frequent contacts)
• pens, post-its or other FREQUENTLY used supplies
• voicemail message pad to log phone calls
• large monitor. It’s a proven fact that more screen space makes you productive, especially if you’re coding, designing or working in spreadsheets often.
• goal statements, organizational motivators

INSPIRATION

I’m a firm believer that we spend a lot of time in our cubes/offices and the space should reflect you, making you feel inspired and happy. You can tell I have a lot of stuff on my walls from the photo and the whole ambiance of my cube makes me smile every time. Consider having the following around to keep you grounded:

• some of your favorite things
• preferred lighting (I don’t have this, but many other co-workers bring in something so it’s not all fluorescent.)
• plants/flowers
• favorite pieces from successful projects
• toys/stress relievers (I have a shaking starfish that never fails to make me laugh)
• photos
• a ball or comfortable seat. I switch out between my aeron chair and the ball for a chance of pace and some core work.
• if you can, think about a stand up desk. I don’t have one, but my husband swears by his adjustable desk, which you can get for about $750 with very easy assembly.

ARCHIVE FILES

I do keep some paper on file, but don’t spend a lot of time organizing them chronologically. Since I’m totally into professional development and learning from peers, I took the time last year to get my overhead cabinet in order by buying some cheap magazine files pictured here. Categories include:

• training materials – tech
• training materials – people
• materials from peer institutions
• Stanford materials (samples of invitations, programs, etc)
• professional conferences
• Reunion registration materials
• Reunion weekend schedules
• special paper and random labels

For more inspiration, check out the following:

• Unclutterer’s Workspace of the Week
• Before and After: A Transformed Desk Area, Martha Stewart

Last week I returned after 7 days off of work, and I highly recommend it. Vacation exists for a reason, and I’ve never understood co-workers that accumulate more than 100 hours in their balance. It’s not healthy when we don’t take breaks and when it comes down to it, we deserve it! If you are one of these people, take this Friday off now, because you need it.

I was at the SXSW film festival, which was a great escape not only because I was too busy to work, but also the wireless was so overloaded by conference attendees, it was difficult to get online. I haven’t been away from the internet that much since my Yellowstone trip.

I made sure to follow my own vacation advice and do a few things:

• Since I was out for more than a week, I had my dates off listed in my signature the 2 weeks before I left to give people a heads up.
• I changed my voicemail and let people know I wasn’t checking it while out. (Really, do you need your messages when out? My experience is that no one leaves messages – amazing.)
• Upon return, I did not complain about how much e-mail and work catch up existed. This is a consistent practice I see people following and I feel like that negative energy is not what one needs after a vacation. Also, why should we make our valuable time off seem like a chore?

I’ve found these resources in the last week or so about our downtime, motivations and impetus to get things done. Check out the links below:

• Why we crave distraction over downtime
• Reclaiming sacred spaces (hint, hint, it takes some discipline)

25 Ways to Get Motivated Today, WiseBread

21 Counter-Intuitive Break Ideas to Boost Your Productivity at Work, Lifehack

• I just did the pinkie-thumb exercise and I already feel smarter
• I especially like the note that going to the bathroom and grabbing coffee doesn’t count as a break – we actually need to be reminded about this!
• I’m seeing the eat an apple slowly recommendation in many places these days
• Out of this list, I tend to read a book and take a break with a co-worker. at Stanford, this is a reminder that getting outside is an easy and obvious thing to do.

When Office Technology Overwhelms, Get Organized, The New York Times

• Not about vacation, this article reminds us of how technology has made us work differently
• The way to get things done (written by David Allen) is to carve out space for proactive work and brain dumps, where you can empty your mind of all of your to do lists
• I must lodge my disagreement that the alternative to coping with work demands is for us to quit and become a duck at Disneyland…in addition to workers figuring out how to get their jobs done, companies also need to take a hard look and determine if they are asking us for too much. after all, work isn’t life.

Matrix organizations such as the one I belong to, often lead some differences of opinion that sometimes go your way and sometimes don’t. Any job presents situations where within a group, some ideas rise to the top and others sink to the bottom. Additionally, depending on the groupthink involved, the chosen path might be the right one or led off from its the intended purpose. For some reason, I find myself in this situation often – usually several times in a week, perhaps based on my particular job.

Chip Conley did a tangentially related talk on Rypple recently about solving for happiness at work. Most relevant were his comments on anxiety, as he suggests you ask yourself the following questions.

1. What don’t I know?
2. What can I influence?
3. What can’t I influence?

I think this is an immensely helpful barometer to help you choose your emotional battles. Honestly, if you have no influence and don’t have an alternate path to get there, it’s a waste of your time and energy to allow it to take up brain space. It’s the same idea that stress is when you want something to be a certain way and it isn’t. In a situation where you have no power to change it, don’t get upset or find a way around it.

This extends beyond the job. A small example is that there are times when I really can’t stand the slowness of the line in the alumni cafe downstairs. On a busy day, it’s a waste for me to spend emotional energy on getting irritated by the wait. My solution? Either grab and go to avoid it altogether, or get in a short walk in the sunshine and go somewhere else. It sounds simple and silly, but there are plenty of people put into similar repetitively irritating experiences who continue to get fired up – myself included.

Back to the subject of choosing your projects. I care deeply about the work that I do and since I have a perfectionist instinct, I’m always ready to go to bat for my ideas, as exhausting as that can sometimes be. If I feel like there’s a right decision, especially if I’ve invested thought and data into the process, it can be difficult for me to walk away. In a couple of meetings over the last two weeks, I’ve said my piece and when the decision goes the other way, I’ve just let it go, which can be refreshingly liberating.

With a 10 day vacation coming up this week, necessity has altered my perspective on my pile of work as well, and I think it’s a healthy experience. You eventually reach a place where it’s clear that it’s impossible to accomplish everything and decisions have to be made. The key is to know which items can fall off the list and how you manage those expectations. I’ll actually use Basecamp if I had something scheduled to do this week, by moving the milestone back a month or two if I can and don’t think about it until the time arises. Equally important is taking a wide view to determine what’s absolutely critical. In the next two days, I’ll be assessing my work, letting people know what I can’t finish and just let the rest go. This way, I can have a physical and AND mental vacation while I’m out of the office.

Some days, it’s pretty difficult to stay motivated and productive. It’s a funny and plain fact that the way people approach work is not consistent all the time. We have our uber-productive days where it’s unbelievable how much we get out the door and other days where we wonder what happened with our time. I had a couple of those days this week, and it has me thinking about what to do in those situations.

Honestly, the best advice I can throw out there is to try and focus yourself for 5 minutes on a task at hand. If it’s meant to be, this nugget of time will suck you into a project where you forget about your lack of motivation.

If this doesn’t work, doing something is better than nothing. When I can’t get serious projects out of the way, I look for other tasks I’ve been putting off like organizing my folders or checking out webinars or articles I’ve flagged. Have you been chained to your cube lately? Take 15 minutes to consider who you haven’t lunched with at work lately and try to get something scheduled. Sign up for the yoga or exercise classes you’ve been putting off. One of my greatest takeaways from David Allen’s GTD classes is that all work is work. You have so many random things to do in your life and being able to tackle some of those – no matter how trivial or personal they may be – is still helping you accomplish work.

Don’t just take it from me, here are a few more great posts on this topic:

• Wise Bread shares great productivity rules
• Check out Work Awesome’s list for getting through the dog days
• Lifehacker’s tip to handle that dropped e-mail/phone call (that you put off since you’ve been unmotivated)