The Reassessment

It never happens all at once.  It’s a slow creep.

I’m sticking to my diet hardcore.  I mean, at least 6 days a week.  And not counting the glass or three of wine during must-see TV.  Red wine is supposed to be good for you, right?  And the cookies Gladys brought to work and left in the break room.  I mean, what’s the point of all this exercise if I can’t indulge myself from time to time.  Look at Ethel, she’s having birthday cake and she’s rail thin.  One slice won’t kill me.  I’ll just go super extra hard in the gym tonight and work it off.  I gotta get it in before happy hour tomorrow.  That’s like socializing for work and stuff – can’t skimp on what’s best for the career.  God, this diet stinks.  I’ve stuck to it for a month and I can’t see a difference at all.  I think I’ve plateaued or something.

I’m totally learning Spanish this year.  I head to Spain in July, that’s plenty of time.  I got these Rosetta Stone tapes.  One hour a day should do the trick.  Yo hablo Espanol muy bien.  So very bien.  I’m so bueno.  5 nights this week.  Maybe not an hour, but mas o menos.  Oh snap.  Happy hour!  Un margarita, por favor!  Gabriela is from Ecuador.  I’ll talk to her for a minuto.  Ugh, this is hard.  She’s getting annoyed at me begging her to “Repite.”  It’s too loud in here.  Oh well.  Wonder if I’m too old to learn a new language.  Why didn’t my parents raise me bilingual?  Instead it was tee-ball.  Not exactly playing for the Braves, Mom and Dad.  What?  It’s July?  Who cares – I’ve got an iPhone.  There’s an app for when I need to find la biblioteca.

The path to hell is paved with good intentions.  We mean so well.  What happened to that seemingly dedicated motivation to lose weight or learn Spanish?

The brain is a strange thing.  We haven’t gotten it quite figured out yet.  I’m convinced that we know as little about it as we did about medicine this time last century.  It wasn’t that long ago that a trip to the doctor was as likely to bring a recommendation of an exorcism or amputation as herbal tea or bed rest (note: probably not true, but you get the point).  What we do know now about the brain is that it’s very good at fooling us.  We lie to ourselves about what we’ve done, about what we’re going to do.  About how closely we follow our diet.  About how hard we really tried to learn Spanish.

The solution to this is not hard.  Keep track of what it is you’re really doing.  But that brain is a tricky one.  It’s more clever than even you are.  Just from reading the “keep track” sentence, many excuses will come to mind as to why it’s too difficult to keep track – even harder than doing what it is you’re trying to do.  “I hate counting calories.  Takes too long.”  Really?  Harder than eating right and exercising?  Why not just keep a food diary, write down what you ate?  Takes two minutes at the end of each day.  You’ve spent at least 3 or 4 minutes just getting to this point in this blog post.

This is the line of thinking that spawned the “Reassessment.”  Here’s the deal: keep track of what you do, all day, every day, for a week.  Takes one piece of paper and a minute or two at the beginning or end of each day.  Rough estimates are perfectly fine – just update at least once every day.  You’ve got 168 hours in each week.  How much time did you spend sleeping?  Working?  Getting ready in the morning?  Commuting?  There’s going to be a large percentage of your time, the majority for most people, that you are doing things you pretty much have to do.  Sleep, work, eat, commute, bathe, etc.  After that is taken care of, your 168 hours will probably be whittled down to 40-60 hours.  That 40-60 hours is how much time per week that you actually get to choose how it’s spent.  Less if you have kids, a second job, etc.  Even for those folks, I’d bet almost all have at least 20 hours of discretionary time.  How are you spending those hours?  That will probably be a good indication of where you are in your life.  Or where the answer is to why the diet/language learning/blog/novel/career change got knocked off course.

I did my reassessment recently.  Why am I not doing the things I say I want to do?  Where is all that time going?  I certainly feel high-functioning and productive.  The average person watches 35 hours of TV per week.  I’m not one of those.  Right?  During my first week of Reassessment, I found I had 53 hours of discretionary time after sleep, work, commuting and getting ready in the mornings (note: please do not share with my boss).  Hard to argue I don’t have 3 hours of exercise in me per week after looking at that.  Easily a good trade for my time there.  Found 17 hours of TV watching.  Really?  I only watch one or two shows.  And a few movies. Can I really see Ironman too many times?  And that preseason football game… Aaah.  Ok, point taken.  I think I can spare a few hours here and there to finish that book I was reading after all.  With still plenty of time for a Spanish lesson, as it turns out.

I won’t go into every detail of my week here, but suffice it to say that I was pretty shocked at what my hours per activity said about my priorities.  So I reassessed.  And decided to spend at least as many hours on that list of “stuff I know really is important to me” as “tv watching that honestly wouldn’t kill me to miss.”  And had one of the most productive and satisfying and fulfilling weeks in recent history.  And when you’ve written down on paper how different one week can be from the next just by consciously allocating your time rather than floating along and hoping that “Wednesday You” remembers how motivated “Sunday Night You” was when the week started… it’s hard to forget it. Rather than thinking that the diet stinks, or that you’re too old to learn a foreign language, you might just recognize that it’s actually you that’s sucking.  It’s hard to go back to recommending amputations when you know penicillin might do the trick.

Think about whether there’s something you wish you were doing that you’re not (there is).  Then track where your time goes for a week.  Don’t change anything, just go along your day normally and jot down where the hours went at the beginning of the next day.  Then add it all up at the end of the week and see where your time went.  You will undoubtedly see some room for improvement.  The next week, choose one activity to cut back on.  And fill it with what you know you can do.

Unclutter your desk, life

Something that I have been focusing on over the past year or so in Mastermind is decluttering my space, both at work and at home.  I know it’s a good thing to keep my room clean, but it wasn’t something that I thought really had any effect on anything other than, well, cleanliness. I remember justifying my messy room in high school with my parents. “I know where everything is,” I’d say.  “What good does it do to make my bed when I’m just going to mess it back up that night?” “A cluttered desk is a sign of genius.”

We’ve all seen the stereotype of the scatter-brained genius, the mad scientist – the great mind with the brilliant ideas that can’t seem to keep his laboratory clean or organized.  Think Doc Brown from Back to the Future.  Or Einstein and his wild hair. When we look at some of the greatest minds, we almost expect them to also be disheveled and practically tripping over gadgets and inventions in their house.  The cliché is so pervasive in our society, we’ve come to expect geniuses to be lacking in organization – as if their minds are so consumed with these brilliant thoughts that they’re having that they can’t possibly focus on things as mundane and cleaning, organizing and filing.  There’s even a facebook group called “A messy room is a sign of genius” with almost 100 members.

I used to buy it completely. What changed my mind happened after I got to college. Finally there was no one to tell me I had to clean my room.  I could keep it as messy as I wanted to, I could stay up as late as I felt like, I could play Super Nintendo (yes, I’m dating myself) for hours.  So I cleaned as often as I felt like it, which was somewhere between “not often,” and “when absolutely necessary.”  I never felt like cleaning.  But when it came time for me to pull an all-nighter to study for a test or finish a term paper, I found myself cleaning my room instead.  At first I wrote it off to just procrastination, myself finding one more way to avoid doing my paper.  But that same pattern continued, throughout college and into law school.  Why was I constantly having the impulse to clean my surroundings when it was time for work to get done?

I now realize that I was subconsciously trying to remove all other distractions so I could focus fully on the task at hand.  Whether I realized it or not, I was uncluttering my space so that my mind wouldn’t be pulled in several different directions when I was trying to get work done.  Once my room was clean and desk clear, I could get down to work.

Scientists have now backed this idea – saying that having a bunch of unfinished tasks or clutter sitting around your house keeps you from committing full focus to your task at hand.  I love the way this article from Unclutterer puts it:

“The clutter competes for your attention in the same way a toddler might stand next to you annoyingly repeating, “candy, candy, candy, candy, I want candy, candy, candy, candy, candy, candy, candy, candy, candy, candy …” Even though you might be able to focus a little, you’re still aware that a screaming toddler is also vying for your attention. The annoyance also wears down your mental resources and you’re more likely to become frustrated.”

All of the little outstanding things in our lives do this.  Say there’s a piece of furniture that you’ve been meaning to fix – a wobbly leg on a table, for example.  You walk past it every day in your house, and at least on a conscious level, you barely notice it.  But subconsciously, your mind makes a note every time you walk past it that there’s something there that needs to be done.  It’s just in the background, a slight nagging that rarely, if ever, rises to the surface.  But all those slight nags add up. And it wears on your brain.  A clog in the pipe.  Build-up in your engine.  You know it intuitively, you’re not operating at 100% when you’re surrounded by chaos.

Take the metaphor as far as you want to take it.  Your brain won’t let you focus on the bigger things until you unclutter your environment.  If you are looking for a place to start in making a change to a more successful life, you could do a lot worse than cleaning up.

Personal Investment 101

What in the world is an IDP?  I really must’ve skipped the foreign language coursework in college to help me understand and interpret the multitude of business acronyms that exist.  Talk about alphabet soup…some days I feel as if the only way to properly speak is by spelling out all of my words.

Recently I had an opportunity to work on putting my career plans on paper through something called an IDP (Individual Development Plan) and to be honest with you, I was truly blown away by a simple tool I’ve never instituted over the course of my professional career.  What I found to be more beneficial than the tool was the mindset it began to perpetuate on a daily basis, which spoke specifically to what we do in our Mastermind Group all the time.  I’m now ready to go to work…for Me.

How many times have you sat in your office looking at coworkers and thinking you could do their job better than them?  You could “tap dance” circles around Jimmy?  How in the world did Monica get that promotion?  Let’s be honest.  You’ve probably done it at some point if you have a competitive bone at all.  Now take it a step further.  How often have you thought about your job and simply said “this” just isn’t it?  Spent time daydreaming about the ideal job and how success wouldn’t evade your grasp or the adoration of your colleagues would be unrelenting?  It all sounds great and it’s how we go about stroking our own egos to make us feel better about the individuals we are and where we’re destined to go in life.

Now lets back to my good ol’ IDP.  I’d like you to consider something beyond the wonderful acronym I was told it stood for and allow me to customize it for each one of us.  Let’s redefine IDP for the sake of this conversation and dub it our universal practice for success in life, period.  It now means just this…Invest Daily in your Progress/ Potential.  Yes, I took the liberty of seemingly adding an extra “P,” but just humor me for now.  As part of the Mastermind approach to life we all set goals for this week, month, and year with SMART attributes (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely).  There’s nothing greater than having desires in life and looking to achieve your goals, but the only sure way to get to where you want to go is with a plan and strategy.  So do you have a plan in place to accomplish your goals?  If not, let’s make that a priority, of course, but incorporate the IDP (or IDPP) in your process.  We all remember the image of the Jackass being motivated to move forward by the unattainable carrot dangled in front of him/her.  Let’s make sure that if the carrot is our goal we have a method in place to gain ground on the target to definitely hit the mark.  Nothing can be more self-defeating than setting unattainable goals or not doing “temperature checks” to make sure we’re still on the path to the carrot.

What are you doing today that is definitely contributing toward your success?  If you want that promotion at work are you doing everything you can to make sure you’re not only productive, but visible to the decision makers in your organization?  Things typically don’t simply fall in the lap of individuals that put their nose to the grindstone and focus on the task at hand unless they’re overly patient and willing to wait forever and a day for their “turn” to arrive.  The rude awakening I had in college was that even though I went to a prominent institution, performed, and graduated on time I wasn’t guaranteed a job (go figure!).  As if that wasn’t enough, I had to learn the lesson a second time in the corporate environment when I realized that no matter how hard I work and how well I perform I have to shout my praises and announce my victories or they may go unnoticed.  What are you doing on a daily basis to further your own cause?  If you have health goals and plan to lose 30 pounds in 6 months what are you doing today to make sure you cross the finish line?

My point is this…at some point in time we have to be fully invested in ourselves and not just the job at hand.  Regardless of the title you may have at work you are still a manager with a direct report. Your direct-report is your current state and it must regularly report in and account for the steps taken in the right direction.  We have to learn to step out of our own shoes and determine what is truly the best method for getting to where we want to be 2-3 steps from now.  Draft your plan with your goals and hold yourself accountable for each step of the way.  When you have documented goals the metrics by which you are measured are now set and You manage your progression.

So before you take another block of valuable time talking about Richard’s progression with his career or personal life take a step back and pause for a moment.  Consider the very value of every minute lost on distractions and non-productive conversations and plot what you can be doing at that very moment to capture the victors cup.  I invest in myself daily.  If I don’t how can I possibly believe someone else would want to do it?  We are our greatest assets and potential is an unending resource as it feeds on desire to fuel it.