The Manager - 116 - Forget Time Management
THE MANAGER - BY ROB LAMBERT
Hi,
I hope you've had a pleasant weekend and are ready for what the week has in store for you.
Last week I mentioned I was writing a new book and getting it ready for a launch on Tuesday. I nearly made it!
I published it on Thursday instead. It needed just a little more energy and attention than I could muster.
https://leanpub.com/energyandattention
And that's really what the book is about. It's about forgetting about time management and focusing on Energy and Attention instead.
After all, we all get the same amount of time. No more, nor less than anyone else, but we don't all have the same amount of energy and attention.
Some activities cultivate energy and attention, some deplete it. Some people have worked out how to generate and reserve energy and attention, some people haven't.
The book isn't just about getting things done, it's also a call to live in the now - because the now is all we ever have. And if we focus on who we are (and who our team are) in the now, we can avoid building a culture of results over behaviours. We can avoid the shortcut, the hack, the results at all cost.
When I work with clients, and they have a toxic work culture, it is usually because they have focused on the prize, the end goal, the sale, the results, the destination - and they have let go of who they are. When results matter more than behaviours, people's behaviours morph, the systems of work get twisted and wellbeing suffers.
Sane, rational, nice people become a shadow of themselves - and it's not them, it's because they've been conditioned to "deliver" rather "be". It's from leaders and managers focusing on results and not on culture.
The acid test of life is to divert our energy and attention to the now - on who we are, on the work that today has in store for us, to spend time with those we love and to strive to be the best person we can every day. We have no idea how long we have left on this planet - so it pays to focus on the now.
It's easier to say than to do - hence I start the book with this philosophy of life and management. I explain why the now is all we have and why our character is really the only thing we can control.
I explain why a painted picture of who we are "being" or "becoming" is powerful to guard against toxic behaviours and to bake wellbeing into our places of work. I then explain how to use goals as a target but to try and let go of the outcomes. I then explain how to use these goals to create routines and processes that set us up in the best way - to try and reach our goals - remembering that the results of these goals are outside of our control.
In the second part of the book I share ideas on where I believe good managers could spend their energy and attention wisely; one to ones, succession planning, coaching, thinking time, systemic problems, learning and more.
I have included the first chapter below - and of course, the usual cool links below that.
https://leanpub.com/energyandattention
Note: I would love to be able to offer you a discount price for the book, as loyal subscribers to The Manager. However I have already priced the book as low as the Leanpub platform allows - hence I cannot discount it further. It's on at $4.99 - although the platform may have a Black Friday deal still running.
It's been a real labour of love. A lot of energy and attention went into this book. I was planning on writing it in just two days - and I did get 90% of it down in those two days, but I spent a long time editing it, proofing it, hacking it around and adding/removing stuff. As with most things in our lives - they end up taking up more energy and attention than anticipated.
Saying that, if you do decide to buy the book then I sincerely hope it is a good use of your most valuable resource; your energy and attention.
This week - be careful if you're scheduling "time". We don't always get the right amount of energy and attention to do everything we schedule. Time is not the same as energy and attention.
And time never responds well to being managed - it keeps flowing no matter what.
Have a great week and I hope this little ditty above, plus the first chapter is enough to get you fired up to manage the tension in your pillars of life - and to focus your energy and attention wisely this week.
Take care and stay safe.
Oh yes - I've also upped my game on Instagram. I really like that platform and find it's a much more fun social media place to hangout than LinkedIn. I've created a Cultivated Management account and plan to post a new thought or idea each day. I'll still be on LinkedIn - just a little less than usual (which is no bad thing I hear you shout).
Rob..
Energy and Attention
This is the first chapter from the book.
Forget time management
Screw time management. Energy and attention is where it’s at.
Have you ever tried to manage time?
How did it go?
Did time stop for you? Did it bow to your requests for more time? Did it give you more than 24 hours a day?
Or did it just keep flowing?
I tried to manage time for a while. It didn’t go well.
Time has a habit of flowing - constantly passing. It doesn’t bow to my requests; it pays no attention to my demands and it doesn’t care what plans I have.
It doesn’t care how I feel, or how close I am to a goal, or what’s going on in my life.
It just keeps going. It never stops, no matter how much I wish it would.
It never gives me more than anyone else. Nor less.
It never stops so I can get more done.
Time doesn’t respond well to being managed.
I discovered the more I tried to manage time, the more I would struggle to live my life in the moment. The more I determined to get more done, the more frustrated I would be at obstacles life put in front of me.
The same was true for my team. Obstacles would scupper plans, roadmaps and timelines. And no amount of detailed planning stopped time from flowing by.
As a manager, this resulted in me missing the joy of living in the moment. It prevented me from appreciating the good I had done. I would spend my day focusing on the future and planning, instead of living in the moment and moving with the now.
The now is all there ever is. The essence of this book is how to enjoy the now.
Even if, as a team, we hit our goals and targets at work, we would be left wondering “what next?”.
There are always more targets, more goals, more demands, more problems, more people who didn’t get it, more to get done. And these demands would never fit into the time I was trying to manage.
Was this it? To spend our lives on a treadmill - chasing destination after destination?
That was until I learned to ignore time and the concept of a destination.
I started to focus on energy and attention instead, and directing it towards the now.
I still set goals for the team but used them to steer habits and routines to get work done, but we didn't become wedded to outcomes that we couldn't control.
I set a painted picture of the people we wanted to become, so we could build a culture and team that we all wanted to work in. An ideal that we knew we would never obtain, but we would try anyway. An ideal that helped inform our decisions on how to behave in the now. After all, life unfolds in the now.
By focusing on who we wanted to become as people, we also didn't fall foul of shortcuts, hacks, growth at all cost and other nonsense being espoused in the mainstream media. We didn't put our results down to positive thinking, nor did we skirt around the hard work.
Some people have more energy than others - I realised this quickly. Some people know how to cultivate energy. Some people burn energy on the wrong things.
Some people give their attention to social media, the opinions of others and the whims of the world. Some people pander to irrational bosses. Some people are distracted by silly side projects for years. Some managers cause these distractions.
Some people avoid hard work and take the path of least resistance. Some managers let them do this. But the path of least resistance rarely teaches us anything of value.
I discovered that true effectiveness and happiness comes from living in the moment. It comes from controlling where I (and my team) focus energy and attention, not on time management.
On a personal level I used the same approach. I painted a picture of who I wanted to become, what I wanted to bring to the world and who I wanted to help.
I set goals in order to build routines and habits that kept me from being distracted; from burning my energy and attention on the wrong things. I did the same for the team.
I started to focus on the here and now, not on a destination that I had little control over reaching. I encouraged my team to do the same.
I dealt with obstacles then looked up and kept heading towards the painted picture of who I was trying to become. As a team, we did this too, always aware of who we were trying to become and using that to deal with the present day realities of messy work.
I focused on energy and attention. Our team did too.
More importantly, I focused on the present. The now. Because it’s really all we ever have.
This book is about being in the moment and living life as a manager in the now.
The past has happened, the future is unfolding every second and the now is where life is lived.
It is a hard thing to do. We are conditioned at work to strive for the next thing, but most of this is outside of our control.
Behaving in positive ways and focusing our limited energy and attention on the right things is not outside of our control, nor that of our team.
In this short book I will share some of this thinking, plus ideas on where I believe managers could focus their energy and attention. It is not about time management. It is a call for you to work out how much energy and attention you have, and to spend it wisely whilst you have it.
Just because we can schedule 7 hours of work into a day, doesn't mean we will have the energy to do something constructive for those 7 hours. Every activity in our calendars will use energy and attention. Some activities drain energy, some give us energy. Time management is not the key, energy and attention is.
Only you will know how much energy and attention you have. We will all have differing amounts of both. Only you will know which activities deplete energy and which ones give you more. Only you will know which activities use more energy than others. Only you will know how much energy to divert to what activities.
Throughout this book I offer suggestions on where to focus your energy and attention. I will also focus on booking "time" to get certain activities done. But time and energy are two different things. Our energy and attention is what is important. I will talk about using time wisely, but only you will know whether you have the energy and attention for everything you have allocated to your time.
It's not about time management, it's about where to focus your own personal energy and attention. And please also consider that not everyone in our teams will have the same energy and attention levels that we do. In my case, they often have more!
As much as this book is for managers, I can’t help but feel that a lot of it is useful for anyone wanting to do great work and live a good life in the present moment.
I would like to say how grateful I am that you are giving me some of your most valuable resource; energy and attention. For that I am thankful, and I will try not to waste it.
I’ve tried hard to keep this book short, to the point and valuable. I share ideas that work for me personally, and from my experience as a manager. That’s all I can do; learn what works for me and share it with others with the hope it will work for them. I’m still becoming who I want to become. I’m still learning. I’m still trying to be the ideal person. I will never achieve it, but that's the point. It is an ideal, something to encourage me everyday to be the best person I can be. After all, I may not get a tomorrow.
This book contains concrete examples of where to spend your energy and attention, but for any of this to make sense I must first briefly introduce the philosophy of management that underpins these activities. Not a philosophy in terms of theory and rhetoric, but a philosophy to be lived. Like all good ideas, it needs implementing.
I wanted to create a book of action, but to do so, we must first go through a few chapters of the underlying principles. You may not agree with these, you may be intrigued by what I shared, but this is the philosophy that has worked tremendously for me.
It's about three main things; where to focus your energy and attention, how to live in the moment and how to become the best person you can.
I hope you find this book helpful and useful.
And in the spirit of not using up your valuable energy and attention, let’s crack on.
Rob. Winchester. October 2020.
FOOD FOR YOUR MANAGEMENT BRAIN
1. Managing someone who's life has been upended - https://hbr.org/2020/11/managing-someone-whose-life-has-been-upended
2. Genius - how Microsofts new productivity scoring tool could be seen as workplace surveillance. Come on, it't never the reporting, tech or measures that's the problem - it's the people that use that data and why that's really an issue. If you're a manager don't relying on any "measures of productivity" alone. Instead, work with your people, get to know them and find out how the rules, red-tape and systemic of work, often created by management, is either helping or hindering them - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/26/microsoft-productivity-score-feature-criticised-workplace-surveillance
3. Kindness is measured by the benefit of doubt - https://nireyal.medium.com/kindness-is-measured-by-the-benefit-of-the-doubt-29d7018ded47 (If you've reached your max limit on Medium - open a private tab and paste the link in there)
4. Exhausted and overwhelmed - try this useful list of resources, ideas and articles - https://onbeing.org/starting-points/for-the-exhausted-and-overwhelmed/
5. HR policies should be adapted to reflect your culture. Good article....but really? We've only just worked this one out? https://lattice.com/library/resourceful-hr-policies-need-to-reflect-your-culture-and-people
6. James Clear's newsletter is by far the second best newsletter on the web (after this one of course :) ). Great little thought from James this week about why good social skills are super skills. Couldn't agree more - it's why I created the online Super Power workshop.
“Amazing social skills are a superpower.
The ability to deliver bad news in a good way is a superpower.
The ability to de-escalate a tense situation into a calm one is a superpower.
The ability to transform a lose/win situation into a win/win situation is a superpower.”
7. Not sure whether "world backup" day actually exists or whether Seth Godin made it up - but pays to read this little ditty if you use Google Services - or any other for that matter. https://seths.blog/2020/11/google-is-not-your-friend/
Learn with me
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Thanks
Rob..