Don’t be good, get better

Posted on May 2, 2012 by tannage

Photo by Ben Burkland/Carolyn Cook

There is a saying in the martial arts, “The moment you stop trying to be better, you stop being good.”

Like all sweeping generalisations on this blog, this also applies to life. The moment a villan or the hero starts to think, “o have discover the ultimate technique” you know they’re about to get a good kicking. Like all sweeping generalisations on this blog, this also applies to life. If you think you know it all, you’re no longer receptive to any feedback that tells you how you could have done it better.

That one thing is a huge obstacle to any further progress. No performance is totally perfect, there is always room to improve, but to improve you must always keep your mind open to how to improve.

Its a mindset, head fake thing. Concentrating on honing your skills makes you use mistakes as feedback rather than failure, another really important factor in mastery.

There are a lot of other goodies () you get from a “get better” mentality as this 99percent article on Getting Better vs Being Good:

  • The freedom to open to new opportunities
  • The ability to get more ideas out of your head and into action
  • The courage to ask for help

Celebrate incremental progress, it all adds up in the end.

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The 5 types of work that fill your day – and what to do with them

Posted on March 15, 2012 by tannage

If you’re a knowledge worker, by and large your work every day falls into five categories according to the99percent:

Problem Solving – where you apply your creativity to come up with solutions to problems and advancing projects that you’re working on. Typically I find this is the part of my day that requires the most energy, as creativity and good thinking is what you need space and energy to do, so I tend to schedule the biggest problem solving tasks for the early part of the day when I have the most energy and are sharpest.

For me, typically most of my problem solving occurs in Steven Covey’s quadrant 2, important but not urgent.

Reactionary – Where you have to react and deal with something urgent in response to a situation that might have arisen, e.g. your IT servers blowing up, or a colleague off sick when an important report is due. This would be quadrant one stuff, important and urgent. You need to get it out the door. Just two things I’d say about reactionary work.
If you spend most of your time doing reactionary work, and it’s taking up most of your day, it’s worth taking a look at how you can clear the decks and start spending more time in quadrant 2. Certain types of work that requires a lot of creative thinking are not best done when under pressure, I find I don’t do very good creative work if I’m under heavy time pressure
If you spend most of your time doing important/not urgent stuff, you’ll be a LOT less stressed and better able to deal with a reactionary task when it comes up.

Procedural – Admin/maintenance – this is the stuff that we all need to do but don’t do enough of as it’s never fun. Paying bills, tax returns, tracking communications and reviewing projects. This is mechanical stuff, put lots of processes and habits in place to get through these things as quickly as you can with as few errors as possible. Technology helps.

Planning – Scheduling, prioritising time, managing energy, allocating your two most precious resources, time and energy. This goes with the Problem Solving to some extent, because creative use of time can be something that gives you a significant edge.

Insecurity – This would be the time that you spend not advancing anything, it’s mostly checking stuff to ease your emotional state, and doesn’t add value. Most of the time you’re not aware you’re doing this.

It’s very useful to figure out how much time you spend doing each of the above. Ideally the bulk of your time should be spent doing problem solving, because it is the solutions that really add value and advance everything you do.

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What You Don’t Know About Marriage

Posted on March 14, 2012 by tannage

Jenna McCarthy gives an interesting talk on TED about staying together in marriage.  The short version is to:

  • Marry someone who’s slightly more attractive than you are if you’re a guy
  • If you’re a guy, do the housework
  • Stay away from divorcees

Whilst its entertaining and funny, it does highlight a few things that we could all probably do to spruce up our marriage.  She’s right, if it were all easy they’d call the whole damn thing a honeymoon.  I’ve not looked into her work too much, but she does seem to know a fair bit about what successful couples do to stay together for a long period of time, and I liked some of her insights into what it’s like to be married.

We’re all different, but we’re all more similar than we think we are (after all, how would fortune tellers make any money?) and so I think there’s a lot to learn from the experience of other people, especially if it’s something that’s as important as your (my) marriage.

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Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates us – Dan Pink

Posted on January 7, 2012 by tannage

Motivation is one of those unintuitive things. The obvious ways of motivating people, e.g. reward the behaviour your want may or may not work depending on the task at hand. Dan Pink sheds some light on the surprising truth of what motivates us in his book Drive.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by the discovery that carrot and stick methods of motivation do not work. I’d known this for some time, as the motivation to progress certain projects of mine always started high but waned as the project matured, but there were projects for which the motivation was always fresh, and now I know why. Intrinsic motivators e.g. Personal interest, quest for mastery are more effective motivators an extrinsic ones, e.g. I’ll give you more money of you work harder.

There is a strong scientific and behavioural basis for all of this, studies have been undertaken all over the world to test performance and motivation with the carrot on stick model. They rewarded people small sums of money for their performance at different tasks. If the task was a manual one, the size of the reward motivated people to perform better, however if the task require any cognition at all, the largest rewards produced the worst results. This study has been replicated again and again all overt the world, and this phenomena appears to be a behavioural thing, innate to humans rather than anything cultural.

The book also details ideas for motivating yourself, your organisation or your children. I for one am going to apply this to my child, and also to myself. The knowledge is so valuable because it is presented in a way that allows you to run with it. Reading this, I could see ways to use the knowledge to motivate myself and my son.

5/5 – valuable information, more valuable if you find ways to implement these ideas

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How to Adapt in the Workplace (and anywhere else)

Posted on December 5, 2011 by tannage

This may just be me, but we’re very good at getting comfortable in what we do. Marshall Goldsmith explains that What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.

We’re going to have to adapt, especially in today’s workplace and adapt fast to changes that are happening around us, not only to keep up, but also to progress and keep ourselves moving forward.

The INO method, Investment, Neutral and Optimise is a good way to structure how to go about doing this. You identify what activities in your workflow require Investment – to progress yourself, e.g. acquiring new skills and new knowledge. These have the potential to return many times your time and energy investment.

Neutral tasks give as much as you give them, and Optimize tasks like paperwork don’t add value for lots of hours spent on them.

I think it’s a good idea, to analyse and structure your areas of development because we’re not always good at looking at the next step we need to take when we get comfortable

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A Telemarketer Phone Hack

Posted on October 14, 2011 by tannage

If you’re getting lots of spam calls from a telemarketer, set the ringtone to that spam contact on your phone to silent.

That way you’ll never even hear it ring.

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The “Dead” Zone

Posted on July 21, 2011 by tannage

Anyone who spends a lot of time at work firefighting will probably be familiar with that odd vacuum that occasionally happens when you’ve got through all of the things you can move on right now.

It’s like a dead zone. Nothing obvious left to do It’s a slightly uncomfortable feeling. You’ve got all the critical stuff out of the way… What do I do now?

The answer isn’t obvious. The thing is, if it was, you’d probably have done whatever it is by now.

What you can use this time for is either progressing your projects or improving your processes.

We’ve all got “stuff” that needs doing that we’ve not really thought much about either because you’ve not had a chance to or you’re procrastinating on (hey we all do it). Now’s a good time to pick those things up and shake them to see what you’d need to do to advance them.

Alternatively You can work on your process. If you’ve been given a bad business process it will inevitably lead to lots of firefighting because bad processes generate more work than is necessary. It makes sense to do some creative work here and see if you can change the business process to save you some time or increase the quality of your work.

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A Remember The Milk Time Hack

Posted on July 6, 2011 by tannage

I like using Remember The Milk to track my tasks. I love it because it’s easy to use, and above all, quick. You can type things in in natural language and it’ll interpret it right.

Sometimes when I get a billion tasks in a day to do it doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t get them all done. I just assign a time estimate to each task, and look at the total it gives.

Obviously if there’s more than 24 hours worth of tasks to do you’re not going to get it done in the day. My threshold is about 14 hours, because even on a good day, I don’t think I’ll get 14 hours worth of productive time out of me per day.

If there’s too much, I just re-prioritize or reschedule the tasks for a time when I know I can get them done.

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Energy in The Life of Tan

Posted on July 5, 2011 by tannage

I’m somewhat anally retentive about tracking all the stuff I have to do. Now that I’m a Dad, there’s a lot more to do and nobody ever gets more than 24 hours in a day, so as I can’t really work harder, I have to work smarter.

Every now and again, I take a look at everything I’m working on both in my personal and professional life. I drew a mind map, and this is what it looks like.

My first thought was… Crikey.. I’ve done it again, promised time and energy to too many things. There’s far too much to get done, although there aren’t too many things on that map, they break down into tasklists that are pretty scary.

The “Butter” Effect

Whenever I’m in a situation like this, I always think my time and energy become like a small bit of butter spread over a very big piece of toast. It’s spread too thin.

With this amount of “stuff” on my radar, I’m going to end up making very little progress with all projects because I don’t have the time and energy to keep all of them advancing.

Backburner Projects

One solution is to keep a list of backburner projects. These might be projects that aren’t quite so immediate, or in my case, not so urgent to do and keep reviewing them, so that when the right time comes to re-start them you’ll be ready.

But this only works if you can ignore a project for a length of time. That mind map shows all the projects that demand my attention right now. I have to progress all of them, but not all of them progress at the same rate, and they almost never progress all at the same time.

Energy Allocation

What I find works better if you have projects like mine, is to prioritise them, and then allocate energy to each depending on their relative priority. The one that can or needs to be advanced now gets most of my energy whereas those that don’t or can’t get some nominal amount of energy to make sure they’re not going stale.

Reviewing projects that your focus isn’t immediately on does have an interesting benefit, you sometimes get some really good ideas when you review them because your brain has had some space from them.

Be honest, review, review, review

Provided you can be honest with yourself when you draw up that original list of all the stuff you’ve got on your plate, making sure you allocate the right amount of energy, and also keeping a good review habit up should keep everything trundling along.

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Keyboard Kleaning

Posted on June 4, 2011 by tannage

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have a particularly clean keyboard, not because I’m lazy but really because I really have no idea how to go about doing it, but this post is a guide to how to clean your keyboard without destroying it. Nuff said..

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