A plant grown in a sunny greenhouse is going to look quite different to one in a dingy corner of a back bedroom.
By which I mean the nature of your surroundings can have a profound effect on all aspects of your growth. Put yourself in a workplace surrounded by people you get on with, working in a way that suits you and you will be more productive.
My new job is not quite two months old, but already I am working harder, more creatively and having greater impact than I have done for some years. But it’s not just work that has benefited from the change; I’m getting fitter and losing weight, getting better control over finances, and even finding myself tidier around the home.
I put this down to engaged colleagues who share my goals, clear goals and a workplace that suits me.
That last bit is important though. If the plant in the greenhouse is a moss or lichen, it’s going to look different from the one in the dingy room, for sure. It won’t look good at all. It’s important that the environment you put yourself in is right for you. Find that environment and the productivity comes for free.
Positive influence
Keeping my focus
If I want to really get on with work I shut the world out with headphones and music. I have a very low boredom threshold however and don’t really enjoy listening to my music collection a great deal so I tend to favour online music with an instrumental bias. Here are my favourite sources:
- Soundcloud is great - I just find wonderful collections of music, often live events, link them up and get a whole days worth of music at the click of a button
- Techno.fm - balls out dance music with two flavours: techno and trance.
- BBC iPlayer - not the day time DJs with their terrible music and inane drivel, but the late night shows on R1, R1x and R6M. Especially low on the bullshitometer are the 6 Mix, the Essential Mix, Friction and Benji B, who does talk a bit, but is less toe-curlingly colon tickling than others with his guests.
- Last.fm - can dig a groove and is better if you want to learn more about tracks you like.
- white noise - no, not a funky station, I like listening to white noise, or more specifically its cousin brown noise, to drown out distraction of all sorts. SimplyNoise is one online generator that also offers a decent little phone app as well.
What debt are you carrying?
The article linked here talks about “technical debt” - the cost hole you have to dig yourself out of if your code has turned into a “Lovecraftian architectural nightmares that challenge[s] the very sanity of anyone charged with maintaining [it] or adding features.”
The same is true however of any part of your business. You could have product debt or process debt in any organisation.
You need to ensure that you aren’t doing your work “on credit”.
Poorly executed products hacked out in the name of “shipping” on time will sap energy down the line when it comes to maintaining or improving. Processes not properly thought through or made up on the fly and not adequately considered at a later point will leave you unable to scale or safely repeat activity, or even realise the benefits of your familiarity.
As my woodworking research tells me “measure twice, cut once.”
This isn’t anything revolutionary, this is simply the headings of a project outline tool that goes by the acronym BOSCARDET. I used it on a project paper recently and the resulting document was very favourably received, so I’d consider using it again.
I found it at the usually reliable Businessballs site. I say “usually reliable” because on closer inspection, the phrase appears to be an corruption of the very much more widely used “BOSCARD” model, standing for “background, objectives, scope, constraints, assumptions, risks, deliverables”.
I can see the latter making sense, since a dependency can be expressed as an assumption, as can, to an extent, an estimate (what is being estimated anyway? Cost? Time?). While timescale seems an obvious addition, arguably that’s a factor of a deliverable, since without a delivery date, how can one deliver? At the same time, risks are really only the flipside of an assumption, surely? Reporting is useful for being defined here.
![Is winning all that counts? Are you absolutely sure about that?
[…]on December 2, Spanish athlete Iván Fernández Anaya was competing in a cross-country race in Burlada, Navarre. He was running second, some distance behind race leader Abel Mutai - bronze medalist in the 3,000-meter steeplechase at the London Olympics. As they entered the finishing straight, he saw the Kenyan runner - the certain winner of the race - mistakenly pull up about 10 meters before the finish, thinking he had already crossed the line.
What would you do with an opportunity like that? Would you run past and claim the gold for yourself? Or would you tell your competitor to run on and get the first place he had so nearly thrown away? See what Anaya did at El Pais English.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/1b0b7924a02ed0f7fd6508a6e6e89523/tumblr_mgw4kwb2Hz1r4uxt5o1_500.jpg)
Is winning all that counts? Are you absolutely sure about that?
[…]on December 2, Spanish athlete Iván Fernández Anaya was competing in a cross-country race in Burlada, Navarre. He was running second, some distance behind race leader Abel Mutai - bronze medalist in the 3,000-meter steeplechase at the London Olympics. As they entered the finishing straight, he saw the Kenyan runner - the certain winner of the race - mistakenly pull up about 10 meters before the finish, thinking he had already crossed the line.
What would you do with an opportunity like that? Would you run past and claim the gold for yourself? Or would you tell your competitor to run on and get the first place he had so nearly thrown away? See what Anaya did at El Pais English.
Make your own copy holder from a couple of printer paper carton lids. Cut the ends of one and mount as shown (I glued previously but used a binder fixing in this case). Trim another lid as shown and wedge at an angle. This one has lasted three years, so fairly robust.
My lenses
In writing a job application I inadvertently stumbled across a simple formulation that pretty accurately sums up my entire approach to work place learning and development:
My four lenses for approaching any performance solution are:
- is this genuinely a training need, or are other factors preventing performance?
- what is it that the learner needs to do? (Not what is it that someone thinks they need to know)
- what is the most effective, efficient way of delivering the outcome required?
- can this be met with resources rather than courses?
It’s possible that the last is really only a subset of the third, but it makes explicit my belief that training is not always, in fact is rarely, the best option, so I wanted to make it explicit.
Great sci-fi always starts with the present and this is so close you can nearly touch it. Or can you?
Your hands are not made to type out memos. Or put paper through fax machines. Or hold a phone up while you talk to people you dislike. 100 years from now your hands will rot like dust in your grave. You have to make wonderful use of those hands now. Kiss your hands so they can make magic.
I needed a year at glance planner to slip in my notebook (yes, I use a real paper notebook and Bic biro for thinking with - crazy!) and couldn’t download anything remotely useful from Word’s online templates (thanks a bunch Microsoft).
So I had to make one. And since I’d made it, seemed only fair to let other people use it if they have use for it. Here it is in PDF and in Docx formats.
