Tag Archives: results

How to dare yourself into success

28 Jun concert

Most goals are hard. There’s a high degree of difficulty, and therefore a high risk of failure. And I never want to show up in front of friends, family, coworkers or (gulp) my boss as a failure.

But I am risking it all now.

My current goal is a biggie—it’s losing the equivalent of a gold brick in weight. I’m doing it the old-fashioned way: no pills, no programs, no prepackaged meals or bars … just good, old-fashioned counting calories, eating real food and literally walking my butt off. And it’s working.

But unless you live under a rock, you know that anyone who has tried to lose weight has failed (often more than once). So don’t you think I’m a bit crazy to admit that I’m doing something hard, something I’m likely to fail at, to everyone (including you, dear reader)?

Yup. Crazy.

But I’ve decided that this is exactly what I need to be successful. If I hide my efforts, it gives me the motivation-sapping opportunity to make excuses. To slack off. To quit. And that would most certainly make me a failure.

So, instead, I’m telling the world. Telling my marathon-running boss, my pageant-winning coworker, my REI-model coworker, my gloriously-skinny-after-two-kids cousin, even friends who will probably judge me for holding onto the equivalent of a spare tire’s worth of weight after each of my own two kids.

Oh, man. If I fail at this, I am in trouble.

But I would argue that getting to a goal requires a declaration that is exactly this big and bold. It means Continue reading →

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Busting the myth of “PJs, soaps and bon-bons” for work-from-home

1 Dec WFH laptop

Hi! I’m here with another fifteen minutes about work, purpose and time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about productivity, especially since I work from home and am always trying to make a greater impact with the hours I have. Ultimately, I am not judged by how long my rear is parked in my chair, but by the quality and quantity of my final deliverables.

Perception vs. reality - this might be how some people imagine working from home, but the reality (at least for me), is and must be intensely focused.

Often, when I tell people I work from home, they say, “Oh, that must be nice. Working in your PJs, setting your own schedule.” The implication is that it’s easier than working from an office.

But after five years of doing this, I conclude that’s it’s just the opposite. Although WFH creates tremendous freedom, it comes with a price: tremendous accountability.

That means if you beat your head against a brick wall for forty hours trying to produce something that really should have only taken eight, that’s what you get credit for. Eight hours. And no matter how hard you worked on that forty-hour project, everyone will assume you spent eight hours working and the other thirty-two watching soaps and eating bonbons.

It’s often a can’t-win situation. So, if you work from home sometimes or all the time, here are a few tips I’ve developed to help me make the most of my time.

  1. Establish a work schedule. Since I generally need to end my workday by 5:30 or 6:00 because that’s when daycare closes, I often do extra work in the evenings after the kids are in bed.
  2. Set limits. I am willing to answer my office and mobile phones outside of work hours, but I don’t answer during dinner, don’t obsessively check email while away, and I rarely work weekends to maintain balance.  
  3. Jealously guard your workspace. Make it the prettiest, tidiest, most user-friendly area in your house. I painted my office terra cotta orange, bought a custom desk, got dimmer lights and more.
  4. Keep up appearances. My home office is in a very large bedroom—so large it accommodates a 13-foot L-shaped desk, two monitors, two printers, four filing cabinets, two book shelves, a white board and two cork boards. It looks like a real office. The problem is, the room is so large that we put an extra bed on the opposite side (we have a separate guest bedroom). Since my webcam is set up on my computer monitors, it points away from my great desk and office space, and directly toward the bed. It looks like I’m attending a meeting from a bedroom (so tacky!). So, I hung a small curtain rod in the middle of my ceiling and bought two beautiful silk drapes. Now, on videoconferences, I look like I’m in a studio.

    Do NOT work from the couch. It will kill your back.

  5. Invest in your space. Buy a space heater, foot stool, cozy blanket, coffee warmer or whatever to keep yourself comfy and at your desk. Don’t work from your couch, it will kill your back and arms.
  6. Establish a hygiene routine. For me, it works to get up, immediately review and reply to e-mail, check my daily calendar, then go get ready, shower, change and eat breakfast.
  7. Think differently about wardrobe. Instead of a workweek/weekend division in your clothes, your closet will morph into ultra-casual (think yoga pants) for WFH, cute casual (jeans and jackets) for any reason to leave your home, and dress-up (for office visits/going out). Keep your PJs as PJs (that is, always dress for work, even if it’s just yoga pants), and always dress well when leaving the house or having people over.
  8. Dress nicer than necessary when visiting an office. They’ll think of you that way even when you’re at home in yoga pants.
  9. Open your windows, be sure you get a lot of sun and connect to the outside. Otherwise, you might start to feel like a mole underground. My desk overlooks my whole backyard and some seriously busy squirrels.
  10. Light a candle while you work. Let it be a centering reminder of what’s important. I also use a handwritten task list to keep me focused.

I’m out of time, but not out of tips. (Again, working from home demands I’m strict with myself about time management.) Tomorrow, I’ll be back with ten more ways you can improve your work-from-home experience and productivity.

What is your work from home experience? What tips do you have to share? Comment below!

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Key question for innovators: How can we make this more fun?

30 Nov Fun paint

As part of my social media experimentation and engagement strategy (that’s code for “learning it by doing it”), I sometimes participate in one of Harvard Business Review’s #HBRchat sessions on Twitter about leadership.

These can be a great—if chaotic—place to discuss business and management issues with other leaders on Twitter. Even if you miss the weekly chat sessions, the posted recaps always include a few insightful zingers, in tidy 140-character bites.

One of the questions I recently answered was “What are the qualities of a great leader?” My immediate tweet back? “A sense of fun.”

Leaders generate better ideas (and greater innovation) when people are willing to take a chance in proposing a wacky idea. Fun breaks down the barriers and fear of failure.

During the chat, I went on to argue that the most effective leaders make a conscious effort to build a sense of fun in their teams. They are intentionally approachable, which in turn encourages people to go out on a limb, look silly and even fail.

Let me put it another way: I strongly believe that leaders with a sense of fun will get better ideas from their team, because their team members will be less afraid to propose or pursue them.

I can tell you this: I can offer up the most hair-brained idea to my CEO fearlessly. While I typically put serious effort and thought into honing things before they get in front of him, I still feel the sense of fun, the permission to be foolish that makes innovation possible.

For example, at Pixar, mistakes are celebrated along with successes—the nothing-ventured, nothing-gained mantra is “He who fails the most wins.” Pixar’s appetite for risk has removed layers of fear that stifle creativity and limit an individual’s willingness to go out on a limb with a crazy idea.

What I love is that Pixar hired top-notch creatives who were considered “unmanageable” and gave this group free reign to do their best work. Result? Their film, The Incredibles, won Academy Awards and became a best-selling DVD, even though its budget per minute was lower than any previous Pixar film.

I have to imagine that fun was more than just a movie goal. It was an essential mandate for being part of the team.

Google tells a similar success story; it enables its engineers to spend one day per week or up to 20% of their time working on anything that interests them. Here, I see fun at work as a product of autonomy—getting to choose to do what you love.

Both Google News and Google Product Search were spawned by this permission to innovate. Pulitzer-winning author David Vise explained, “Google … technologists think first of ways to solve problems; only later, if ever, do they worry about how to ‘monetize’ them.”

For an extra helping of fun, take your meeting outside, or somewhere more interesting than your office.

One of my most successful projects was proposed twice, dismissed twice, and finally left for dead by a boss that fostered a sense of fear, not fun, in the workplace. It’s hard to keep pushing your idea at what feels like a brick wall.

But, when things changed and I had a new opportunity to pitch my idea, the project was resurrected (and we had a lot of fun doing it).

Fun beat fear, and the results speak for themselves.

What’s getting in the way of your ability to innovate? Maybe it’s a lack of fun, or the presence of fear of failure. So instead of tackling the innovation problem, consider taking a step back and asking a simpler question: How can we make this more fun?

GO.

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The first fifteen minutes

2 Nov What do I do in my first 15 minutes? Get quiet, get focused, and figure out how to create accomplishment. Photo by Photo by John Althouse Cohen

What do you do during the first fifteen minutes of your day?

Check Facebook? Twitter? Read blogs or news feeds? Read and respond to e-mails?

Yep, I do that too. But not in the first fifteen. The first fifteen are mine, all mine. They’re a chance to take a breath and figure out how to really put points on the board.

I imagine that sometime my boss might call and ask, “So, Heidi, what have you been doing all day?” And you’d better believe I’m going to have a good answer. I work from home, so there’s no way for him to tell whether I’ve been hard at work in front of my computer or watching soaps and eating bon-bons. Or doing laundry, or napping, or cleaning the kitchen, or any number of things that doesn’t involve putting my butt in the chair and getting to work.

To quote my favorite editor from my news reporting days, “Heidi: Shut up and type.”

In five years of working from home, I’ve been forced to develop enormous self-discipline. It’s easy to be distracted by the call of the DVR or a phone call from Mom or the treadmill that really would like me to spend some more quality time with it. (If we were dating, you’d call it an on-again, off-again relationship.)

Regardless of whether I work 40 hours per week, or 30 or 50 or 80, I am accountable to producing results. It’s the yardstick by which I am measured, and so when I find myself spinning my wheels on projects and not really moving the ball forward, I get antsy. Sooner or later, I’m going to have to deliver.

What do I do in my first 15 minutes? Get quiet, get focused, and figure out how to create accomplishment. Photo by Photo by John Althouse Cohen

So the first fifteen minutes are a little strategy session, a big-picture assessment of what matters and where I need to go for the day. I keep a handwritten list to the left of my keyboard (I’m left-handed), mouse on the right, and it keeps me focused far better than a micromanager ever could.

Sometimes I divide my list between “what’s important” and “what’s urgent.” Sometimes, it’s a list of “what I want to do” and “what I have to do.” Sometimes I separate out the deep-dive projects from those little things, like sending five emails, that just gotta get done.

In the same amount of time I use to write this blog, I plan. I consider where my energy is, whether I’m ready to focus on just one thing, or if simply crossing a dozen small things off the page will be most satisfying.

Some studies have found that most people have at least 80 hours’ worth of work on their desks at any one point. You get to the end of a 40- or 50-hour workweek, and guess what? New requests have rolled in. There’s more to do. The 80 hours of demands on your time are still there.

That can easily get overwhelming, so I change my perspective. If there’s no way I can get it all done—if I simply make the choice that it won’t get all done—then I am also free to choose which things will get done.

And there is such power in priorities.

With the freedom to choose, I can let my priorities—my mission, my values, my purpose at work—be my guide, rather than feeling the tyranny of an endless to-do list. I can feel like I’m accomplishing what matters, rather than spinning my wheels and wishing I’d traded and hour of time-wasting email exchanges for one glorious nap.

Today, I won’t choose just to do things, just to tick off a list. Today, I’ll choose accomplishment.

What will you choose?  GO.

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