Manage your to-do list by doing less, not more

Like many people, it’s easy for me to get caught up in my aspirations for more — a bigger home, more money, greater success.

Harvard Business Review‘s article, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, challenges that. Instead of more [fill in the blank with whatever you are chasing here], focus on the right things.

Author Greg McKeown starts by defining “the clarity paradox:”

• Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
• Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
• Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
• Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

Then he suggests three ways to fight the clarity paradox … I’ve given an extremely condensed version:

1. Use more extreme criteria. Think of what happens to our closets when we use the broad criteria: “Is there a chance that I will wear this someday in the future?” The closet becomes cluttered with clothes we rarely wear. If we ask, “Do I absolutely love this?” then we will be able to eliminate the clutter and have space for something better. We can do the same with our career choices.

2. Ask “What is essential?” and eliminate the rest. Everything changes when we give ourselves permission to eliminate the nonessentials. At once, we have the key to unlock the next level of our lives.

3. Beware of the endowment effect. Also known as the divestiture aversion, the endowment effect refers to our tendency to value an item more once we own it.  Tom Stafford describes a cure for this that we can apply to career clarity: Instead of asking, “How much do I value this item?” we should ask “If I did not own this item, how much would I pay to obtain it?” And the same goes for career opportunities. We shouldn’t ask, “How much do I value this opportunity?” but “If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?”

Check out the full story on HBR here.  And connect with Greg McKeown, CEO of THIS Inc., a leadership and strategy design agency in Silicon Valley, on Twitter @GregoryMcKeown.

I’ve been thinking in the new year about tasks and responsibilities on my to-do list that I should eliminate — but McKeown is challenging our decisions at a higher level. First you have to examine whether you’re doing the right job, for example, before you prioritize your activities.

Related posts on Newvine Growing:

• Be more effective by making better to-do lists
• We all have the same 24 hours a day — how wisely are you using yours?
• Dotmine day planners sprang from goal of better work life

Maybe getting a later start is an advantage, not a liability?

I often find myself wishing I had a time machine so I could go back and get an earlier start on things.

• If I’d taken piano lessons in elementary school  …
• If I’d have been the one to teach myself HTML in our office in the ’90s …
• If I’d bought Apple stock when it was in the toilet …

But then I’m reminded that I’m not alone in continuing to grow into who I am.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article a few years back with the headline, “Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity?” In that lengthy piece, Gladwell writes:

(University of Chicago economist David) Galenson points out in his study “Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.” Yes, there was Orson Welles, peaking as a director at twenty-five. But then there was Alfred Hitchcock, who made “Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window,” “To Catch a Thief,” “The Trouble with Harry,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho”—one of the greatest runs by a director in history—between his fifty-fourth and sixty-first birthdays. Mark Twain published “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at forty-nine. Daniel Defoe wrote “Robinson Crusoe” at fifty-eight.

And a recent Harvard Business Review article caught my eye with the headline, “Why Older Entrepreneurs Have an Edge.” It, too, quotes Galenson as a source, discussing creativity and innovation spiking later life for some.

In his study of artists, University of Chicago economist David Galenson has shown that genius clusters into two categories. Conceptual geniuses tend to do their best work while young, producing breakthrough ideas early in their careers. But experimental geniuses, by contrast, need a long period of time to reach their peak, moving forward by trial and error, slowly accumulating the elements that will be integrated into their fully realized work.

Later entrepreneurship often crosses paths with yet a third later-life trend — the urge to give back. Research shows that half of those who want to become midlife entrepreneurs — more than 12 million people ages 44 to 70 — also want to meet community needs or solve a critical social problem at the same time.

So if you’re Mozart, maybe you’re a prodigy who cranks out amazing works of genius while everyone else is playing hide and seek. But for those whose inspiration come from life experience, gray hair and wrinkles might be a sign we’re hitting our stride.

Do you feel your life experience is fueling your fully realized work? Or do you see your best years in your rear view mirror?

 

Measure your success by more than your title and pay

You might not go to Harvard Business Review expecting a long, personal tale of faith, morals and values — but I love HBR for knowing success means so much more than increasing profits.

Clayton M. Christensen wrote a powerful essay called, “How Will You Measure Your Life?” Not to spoil it for you, but one of the more moving parts of this great reads is below:

This past year I was diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life would end sooner than I’d planned. Thankfully, it now looks as if I’ll be spared. But the experience has given me important insight into my life.

I have a pretty clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies that have used my research; I know I’ve had a substantial impact. But as I’ve confronted this disease, it’s been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is to me now. I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.

I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.

I wouldn’t do his beautiful essay justice to try to summarize it all — really, just go read it — but one big idea that came through for me was about keeping your priorities straight. Know what it is you want from your life and make sure you’re making decisions every day that line up with those priorities.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the daily emergencies and time sucks and forget what matters most.

You get flattered because your boss offers you a promotion, but do you stop to consider whether the extra pay is worth the increased stress and time away from your family? You don’t have time to exercise or see your friends or play music because you’re so busy … but we all have the same 24 hours, so could you choose to use them differently?

You don’t have the money to visit your parents or best friends, but are there things you buy that matter less to you than those core relationships?

We all have to evaluate life’s trade offs against our own needs and values, and the first step in that is knowing what it is you value.

Here’s a snippet that I especially liked:

a company’s strategy is determined by the types of initiatives that management invests in. If a company’s resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different from what management intended. Because companies’ decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.

Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.

Have you given thought to how you measure your life’s success? How are you doing at achieving it?

HBR: Developing rituals can help achieve your goals

A recent Harvard Business Review suggested the best way to achieve your goals is to not demand too much of yourself.

That’s not to say set your goals low — but if you want to reach a goal, don’t make it harder than it needs to be to get there.

In a post headlined “The Only Way to Get Important Things Done,” Tony Schwartz advocates making it as automatic as possible to do what matters — for example, scheduling your exercise for the same time every day so you don’t have to make a decision about whether you feel like going to the gym and how to fit it into your day.

Dotmine day planners include this idea of a master calendar -- what happens every Tuesday morning, for example?

Schwartz writes:

It turns out we each have one reservoir of will and discipline, and it gets progressively depleted by any act of conscious self-regulation. In other words, if you spend energy trying to resist a fragrant chocolate chip cookie, you’ll have less energy left over to solve a difficult problem. Will and discipline decline inexorably as the day wears on.

“Acts of choice,” the brilliant researcher Roy Baumeister and his colleagues have concluded, “draw on the same limited resource used for self-control.” That’s especially so in a world filled more than ever with potential temptations, distractions and sources of immediate gratification.

At the Energy Project, we help our clients develop something we call rituals — highly specific behaviors, done at precise times, so they eventually become automatic and no longer require conscious will or discipline.

The proper role for your pre-frontal cortex is to decide what behavior you want to change, design the ritual you’ll undertake, and then get out of the way. “It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing,” the philosopher A.N. Whitehead explained back in 1911. “The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”

I’ve been playing with this approach recently, writing to-dos on my list each day including “exercise,” “take vitamins” and “practice piano.” These are all things I know I should do, but because I’m really motivated by checking items off my list, seeing them in writing helps make sure I don’t skip a day.

I also put an appointment in my Outlook calendar every work day to hold one hour for whatever I designate as that day’s top goal. It’s especially helpful because I know I’m most productive in the afternoon so my calendar chimes with a reminder to put that after lunch brainpower to use on what matters.

Now I think the next step is to figure out rituals to further advance my professional productivity: restricting email and social media to designated times of day, establishing set days and times for business development, reporting on sales and web traffic, etc. Deciding that Thursday morning is when I check online traffic, for example, can both keep me consistently paying attention without obsessively wasting time doing that whenever it pops into my mind.

I like the idea of freeing up some my limited reservoir of self control to help me to bigger, better things.

Do you use rituals to help you achieve your goals? Does it help?

Past blog posts on setting and achieving goals:

• HBR’s nine tips for achieving what you want
• Guidance to help you get lucky
• Feel the fear and do it anyway
• Setting my goals for 2011 as a comprehensive view of my life
• Be careful what you wish for: setting goals you’re sure you want
• Christine Kane: How to Create Anything (Even When You’re Scared, Inexperienced and Don’t Believe in Yourself)

 

How do you achieve what you want?

I’m a big fan of setting goals but writing down what I want is not the same as achieving it.

My friend, Sara, and I have agreed to hold each other accountable for moving forward on our high-flying aspirations, since creative types often excel at using our creativity to procrastinate in new and interesting ways.

That’s why I loved this Harvard Business review article headlined “Nine Things Successful People Do Differently.” It doesn’t imply that success is about being smarter or more talented than average. It spells out some reasonably simple ways to go from having dreams to achieving them.

A very abbreviated peek at the nine pointers:

1. Get specific. When you set yourself a goal, try to be as specific as possible. “Lose 5 pounds” is a better goal than “lose some weight,” because it gives you a clear idea of what success looks like.

2. Seize the moment to act on your goals. Did you really have no time to work out today? No chance at any point to return that phone call? Achieving your goal means grabbing hold of these opportunities before they slip through your fingers.

3. Know exactly how far you have left to go. Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress — if not by others, then by you yourself.

4. Be a realistic optimist.  Most goals worth achieving require time, planning, effort, and persistence. Studies show that thinking things will come to you easily and effortlessly leaves you ill-prepared for the journey ahead, and significantly increases the odds of failure.

5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good. Many of us believe that our intelligence, our personality, and our physical aptitudes are fixed — that no matter what we do, we won’t improve. As a result, we focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills. Fortunately, decades of research suggest that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong — abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable.

6. Have grit. Grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty. Studies show that gritty people obtain more education in their lifetime, and earn higher college GPAs.

7. Build your willpower muscle. Your self-control “muscle” is just like the other muscles in your body — when it doesn’t get much exercise, it becomes weaker over time. But when you give it regular workouts by putting it to good use, it will grow stronger and stronger, and better able to help you successfully reach your goals.

8. Don’t tempt fate. No matter how strong your willpower muscle becomes, it’s important to always respect the fact that it is limited, and if you overtax it you will temporarily run out of steam. Successful people know not to make reaching a goal harder than it already is.

9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won’t do. Research on thought suppression (e.g., “Don’t think about white bears!”) has shown that trying to avoid a thought makes it even more active in your mind. The same holds true when it comes to behavior — by trying not to engage in a bad habit, our habits get strengthened rather than broken. If you want change your ways, ask yourself, What will I do instead?

If you’re looking for help deciding what you want and/or achieving your goals, the full article is here with much more detail on each point.

And here are some of my past blog posts on setting and achieving goals:

• Guidance to help you get lucky
• Feel the fear and do it anyway
• Setting my goals for 2011 as a comprehensive view of my life
• Be careful what you wish for: setting goals you’re sure you want
• Christine Kane: How to Create Anything (Even When You’re Scared, Inexperienced and Don’t Believe in Yourself)

What leaders need at work — and it starts with love

As a precursor to this post, can we first agree that Harvard Business Review is not some crunchy granola publication that wants you to be more self actualized by hugging and meditating?

No, Harvard Business Review is the well-respected publication that speaks to the pressing issues of business leaders who want to be more successful.

That’s important because I think the following will surprise some people — even more so when you consider the source.

Harvard Business Review recently ran a piece about what transformational leaders need to succeed.

Number #1 was to love and be loved:

First, and arguably most important, is the need to love and be loved. It sounds touchy-feely, but people who are not both receiving and giving love — and by love I mean focused concern and action directed at another exclusively for that person’s good — cannot be fully healthy, biologically and psychologically. We usually think of love as beyond the pale in the work-a-day world, but the transformational leader vividly understands that tough-minded caring is essential to leading and developing a powerful, fully expressed workforce.

Rounding out the list:

• the need to grow
• the need to contribute
• the need for meaning

I have talked about the Relationship Masters Academy I’m taking — one of the most powerful ideas I’ve taken from that class is our fear of using the word “love” when we’re talking about work. We’ll call work relationships win-win or respectful, but we keep them at an arm’s reach, just a little chilly.

Why can’t we love and be loved at work? Are we afraid it will take away our competitive edge? That it makes us sissies? That we will get hurt if we’re laid off?

If Harvard Business Review says loving and being loved can actually help you become more successful, can that give you permission to have affection for your colleagues — not because they can do something for you, but just because you care about them as human beings?

Recently on my way to work, I heard a classic Dean Martin song, “Everybody Loves Somebody,” which I always thought was called “You’re Nobody Til Somebody Loves You.”

As I sang along — yes, I love Dean Martin enough to sing along in Penn Station — the meaning of the song finally hit me. If you aren’t loving and being loved, you aren’t really living. You’re nobody if you aren’t loving.

Maybe that includes at work, too?

Silencing your inner critic

I failed to find an image from the old Warner Bros. cartoons, but here Homer Simpson gets the angel and devil treatment.

It’s a favorite cartoon technique: a poor, conflicted character has a little angel on one shoulder encouraging him to do the right thing while a little devil on the other shoulder tries to lead him astray.

Let’s think of your inner critic as that devil on your shoulder, pulling you away from your goals, discouraging you from believing in yourself, turning you into your own worst enemy.

Harvard Business Review had a blog post recently about managing your inner critic. Author Susan David writes:

A client — I’ll call her Sonya — is typical of many top-level executives who struggle with an over-eager inner critic. Despite numerous accomplishments, including a graduate degree from a prestigious business school and a partnership at a leading accounting firm, Sonya always feels like an underachiever. Every day she sees herself as a new graduate — tongue-tied, fumbling, and trying to prove herself for the very first time. Sonya is convinced that soon someone will find out the awful truth — that her incompetence will become clear and that she’ll lose her responsibilities, her partnership, and eventually her job. Even though Sonya has never received a negative performance appraisal, she feels stressed, unhappy, and unfulfilled. Sonya is successful — and completely miserable.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

Susan writes that trying to just shut up the critic can actually make it worse. It’s not logical, so you can’t overcome it with logic.

Instead, she writes, you need to get to know and understand that little devil, then act in spite of him.

Check out her full post here to learn more about how to do that.

Do you struggle with your inner critic? Do you have any good ways to quiet that voice of doubt and negativity?

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