The KUPMC Blog

With the recent reading recommendations of the Emerging Leaders Academy experienced public servants panel, I’ve been re-reading Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I’m listening to it this time, actually, on cd during my drive time and it seems particularly meaningful to hear the guidance in Covey’s own voice.

I’ve just gotten to habit 3, put first things first, where he discusses the value of planning your time so that you’re spending much of your energy in “quadrant 2″ (see graphic below), on the things that are important but not necessarily urgent.

They are the things that are most likely to get sidelined when we operate in a more reactive mode, organizing our time around oiling the squeakiest wheels rather than around our principles.

This reminded me of the terrific opening of a post on the Be Awesome Online blog from last week. Catherine Caine writes:

“Do you know, dearest, why to-do lists, vision boards and affirmation notes on your mirror work?

“It’s because of attention. We direct our attention to the things in our field of vision. If we don’t give ourselves conscious reminders then we default to whatever’s around: our inbox, the thousand-fold distractions of social media, the furniture… nothing meaningful, nothing long-term, nothing great.

I’ve deliberately added more reminders to myself as the study has become my work-centre. I have Charlie Gilkey‘s famous line Do Epic Sh** on a sign on the study door. I have artwork I bought because it reminds me of how I want to rock the world. And I’ll be daring the Wrath of the Real Estate Agent to put up some work on the wall behind my monitor. All of these small changes have helped, a lot.”

What Catherine Caine and Stephen Covey both want to remind us of is that we can all be pretty willing to be distracted from the Important Stuff when it can be hard and even scary to dive into it. But by scheduling our time around it, putting reminders in our field of vision, blocking out the “urgent” distractions (that generally aren’t quite so urgent), we can dip our toes into working on the Important Stuff and start to feel some of the satisfaction that comes from doing what matters.

For me, this has meant actually turning off my email for a couple hours at a time over the last week in order to get some writing done on my dissertation. It’s just too easy to attend to the urgent otherwise. And you know what the best part is? It’s working.

What do you do to make sure you’re spending some time on the important-but-not-urgent?

It may be as easy as learning to say no to what you don’t love and don’t have to do. Of course, this requires recognizing which things we don’t actually have to do even though we might feel some twinges of guilt in letting them go.

For those who struggle with this (that is, most of us), blogger and simple living advocate Tammy Stobel offers some excellent guidance on how to decide what you can indeed say “no” to and how to do so gracefully. Click here to check out her advice.

Useful guidance? Any tips you’d offer that she leaves out?

In a post today on the Harvard Business Review blog, Marshall Goldsmith makes this very important point:

“People have less time today, which means the value of that time has increased. Leaders who waste their workers’ time are not looked upon favorably.”

I’d simply add that this applies to co-workers as well. If you make an effort to be sure that you’re using your portion of the meeting time and presentation time well, your colleagues and staff will notice and appreciate it.

The challenge, of course, is asking ourselves which details are truly relevant to the situation at hand. We’d love it if others were interested in the full back story and all of the supporting reasons for our decisions.

But in practice, we get antsy and impatient when others share more information than we need. We need to get in the habit of remembering this when we’re doing the sharing.

What can you do to make sure you aren’t eating away at others’ time and patience when you have information to share?

It would not be a surprise to anyone I know that, when I completed Gallup’s StrengthsFinder assessment, my top 5 talent areas did not include any that could be understood as detail-oriented.

I am a terrific idea generator. If you need a strategic thinker to help map out a good course of action, I may be your gal.

But if you need a messy stack organized or a spreadsheet created to track the minutiae, you’ll likely get better assistance from your dog than from me.

Yesterday, for example, I arrived to teach CPM without a pen in my bag, and managed to misplace not one but two that I borrowed from participants during the day. My brain just doesn’t track the details well.

Lucky for me, I also have a reasonably low tolerance for clutter. Since I can’t organize very well, I try to get rid of things so that I don’t have to make decisions about where to file or store them.

This is especially fortunate in moments like last week Tuesday, when we moved the KUPMC and Public Administration offices from one floor of the KU Edwards Campus to another. I didn’t have too many files or piles to try to keep track of as we loaded in one office and unloaded in the other. And those I do have are made up more of reference materials than things I use on a daily basis.

As such, most are still sitting in their boxes while I ponder (in a vague, back-of-the-mind way) whether I’ll put them in the equivalent locations to where they were in my other office or identify new spots. Or whether, as is looking increasingly likely, I’ll determine that most of the items are so seldom needed that the mental clutter of having them in my space exacts a higher cost than it would to look them up again online or elsewhere when I next need to refer to them.

Because while I don’t have so many piles, I still have some. And they tend to line the edges of my desk because I can’t quite decide how to file them. But since packing these up to move to the new office, my desk has been a lovely, wide-open space. I look at it and imagine the amazement the pioneers felt as they emerged to the west of the tree-covered plains of the east and gaped at immense spaces of the prairies.

Okay, maybe it’s not quite the same.

But I do very much appreciate the way the clear desk has had something of a calming effect on my mind this week, and it reminded me how much our physical surroundings affect us. As I’ve been typing this I’ve realized that I need to move my printer further away from my computer to create more openness in the area of my workspace that I most use to hopefully further leverage this feeling of calm to support my work. This two-minute task will be utterly worth the trouble.

To some extent our workspaces are fixed–we have real walls or not, windows or not, and we often inherit furniture that is not quite matched to our functions, let alone taste.

But don’t overlook the little things you can fix to make a big difference in decreasing your annoyance factor or improving your ergonomics in subtle but important ways: scoot your phone over so that you can stop nearly tipping over your coffee mug with the cord every morning. Move your trashcan or recycle bin so that it’s located within reach of where you generate most of your trash or so that it’s finally out of range of your knees. Ask your facilities folks to raise your overhead cabinets further up the metal rails that hold them so that you can stop having to be careful about bumping your head. Order a new mouse that will actually track whenever you use it, not just when it wants to.

Fix something little in your space so that you no longer have to expend the energy it takes to be annoyed. Then tell us what you changed in the comments below so that the rest of us can maybe borrow from your ideas.

The ideas in David Allen’s book on productivity, Getting Things Done, struck a chord with many readers who had struggled with other methods of organization, myself included.

A big “aha moment” for me occurred when he suggested that instead of listing entire projects on one’s to-do list, instead list the next action steps to be taken. Thus, “plan banquet” might be replaced with “call to check on room availability.” Where “plan banquet” can seem somewhat overwhelming and thus hard to handle, making a phone call is a contained step that can be taken care of and checked off the list. And, importantly, small steps are far less daunting and we’re more likely to act on them.

This recent post on the Magic Words blog is a great reminder that taking a first small step on a big project can propel us forward in a way that changes everything. What big challenge on your plate could benefit from a first small step?

Every night as I set my alarm, I think about what time I need to be at work in the morning and back into the time I need to get up. It’s not an exact math problem as there are many variables: do we need to get the baby to daycare or is it a morning that his dad stays home with him? Which of my offices am I headed to? Is there something I want to get done before I head out the door?

But even when I think I have built in enough extra time, I nonetheless often find myself leaving later than I intended. I can’t seem to get a handle on the “how much time will it take?” equation.

According to social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson, I have fallen victim to my own version of the “planning fallacy,” the rather predictable human tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task–no matter how much experience we have with how long it really does take.

Yesterday’s post on Heidi Grant Halvorson’s blog, The Science of Success, reviews some interesting research on the planning fallacy and offers some useful tips on being more realistic in planning how much time something will take.

Are there certain tasks that you consistently underestimate how long it will take you to complete? What strategies can you recommend to make sure we really allow enough time to get something done?