Pick 88 - Time Value of Money

 

 

 

Pick 86 - Screen Time Burnout

 

Between video chat happy hours, birthdays, catch-ups with friends and family, along with all-day work meetings, it feels like we’re spending all day on camera. And, according to the latest research, we are.

The daily time spent on video chat apps has increased by 277% since early March 2020

With most countries still using social distancing to battle coronavirus, we need to connect more than ever. But all that time spent on video comes with serious side effects ranging from general fatigue to increased anxiety, stress, and even burnout.

The problem is that few of us have ever experienced what an effective meeting culture looks like. 

 

So how do you fix a problem when you don’t know what the solution looks like? You review to data. 

 

In interviews with close to 1,000 business leaders, in-demand freelancers, top developers, designers, and makers, we discovered what makes effective meetings work, and what turns them into a waste of time.

 

Meeting frequency and length has increased over the past 50 years. Today, most people average 9–23 hours a week on them. That's a lot of time. Especially if that time was wasted on frivolous and non-productive topics. But meetings don't have to take over our lives. Highly effective business leaders use these principles to keep meetings effective and productive. 

Remote communication is a different beast than when you’re in an office. You can’t just try to recreate the processes and policies you used in the office when your team’s at home.

 

Instead of sitting at your desk (where you are all day), take video calls on your phone and get out for a walk. As Dr. Suzanne Degges-White writes:

“It can be less stressful when you ‘show up’ in voice only. When we’re not chained into posing as a ‘living headshot,’ we can move around and step onto our porch or sit outside in the sunshine.”

Not only are non-video, video calls less stressful, but they’re a great opportunity to recover from spending all day sitting. Getting fresh air, taking a walk, and being around nature have all been shown to reduce stress and increase our happiness and productivity.

2. Embrace asynchronous communication (aka, why email isn’t as terrible as you might think)

Video chat apps help remote teams feel more connected. However, one of the best things you can do when working remotely is to actually reduce your meeting time. 

There will always be moments where you need to quickly get together and hash out a solution. However, switching your default to asynchronous communication is an easy way to increase your productivity and reduce stress.

Instead of an in-person interruption that is all-but-impossible to block asynchronous communication lets you choose when you’re available and how people can get in touch with you. 

Every communication app has some form or do-not-disturb mode (or you could just, you know, close them).

3. Set communication expectations early and often (i.e. let everyone know it’s ok to slow down)

The reason most people fail at embracing asynchronous communication is that they haven’t set shared expectations.

The only way you get the benefits we listed above is if everyone understands how to properly communicate. Otherwise, you’ll come out of a peaceful and focused do-not-disturb-mode session to:

There are a few ways you can set proper expectations with your teammates about when you’ll be available. 

• Set “office hours” that everyone’s aware of. Discuss as a team what a reasonable time is for a response and set aside a few hours of the day where everyone is available.

• Use your status, email signature, and other tools to tell people when they should expect a response.  

• Lead by example. When we interviewed more than 700 professionals about their email habits, we found that if you check and respond to emails outside of work hours, your team will too. Set expectations and live by them. If they’re not working, talk it through and find a solution that does. 

Pick 85 - Paul Harvey Letter from God

Pick 84 - Daily Routines vs the Pandemic of 2020

Perhaps the most disruptive force of the COVID-19 pandemic was not its threat to our health, but the stress it provoked by forcing us to change our daily routines. 

In his book on the daily routines of creative people, Mason Curry informs us that  all creative people seem to depend on daily rituals and routines to remain productive. In the process of citing many examples, he forces us to consider the hidden value in the rituals we employ to keep ourselves going.

 

Daily Rituals - How Artists Work

Edited by Mason Currey

Apr 23, 2013 | ISBN 9780307273604 

 How do we do meaningful creative work while also earning a living?

 Is it better to devote ourselves wholly to a project or to set aside a small portion of each day?   

 When there doesn’t seem to be enough time for all we hope to accomplish, must we give things up (sleep, income, a clean house), or can we learn to condense activities, to do more in less time, to work smarter, not harder?

Are comfort and productivity incompatible, or is the opposite true: Is finding a basic level of daily comfort a prerequisite for sustained productive work?

Whether work/learn from home was a welcomed change or a nightmare, most of us might agree that breaking routines, developed in childhood, was a treacherous experience. Being forced to do so by an enemy that seemed invincible, made it all the more so.

 

Routines simplify our busy schedules and give us structure.  Sometimes the only way to make it through the week, even in "normal" times was to switch on auto-pilot, turn off our brain, and just let routine take over.  In fact, Psychologists tell us that our brains need routines and rituals to remain well.

1. Routines help minimize uncertainty.
   • Our brains don’t like uncertainty. Uncertainty engages the fight-flight-freeze-appease part of our brains (the amygdala) which can stifle clear thinking. Routines, however, give us a greater sense of control. This creates certainty.  Our brain loves certainty and stability.
2. Routines make space for clearer thinking.
   • In the front part of our brain, the pre-frontal cortex, executive functions like planning, abstract thinking, social intuition, and emotional control occur. However, that part of our brain tires easily. The more we use it, the more it tires which can affect our ability to think clearly, make wise decisions, and relate to others well. However, when we create routines and habits, the brain stores those routines in our habit centers (basal ganglia). As a result, routines free up working space in our pre-frontal cortex so that we can think and concentrate better on new tasks and relationships.
3. Routines can reduce the drain on our daily energy.
   • Ego depletion refers to the concept that we all possess a limited pool of mental resources available for self-control and willpower. And it gets used up during the day. If we spend that resource on activities that could be routinized, we waste energy that we otherwise could dedicate to more important tasks and relationships. Routines help conserve our energy for what’s most important.
4. Routines help us focus and maintain attention.
   • The ability to pay attention to what’s important is a key to successful living, leading, and learning. When we are scattered (Where did I leave those keys?) attention gets diluted. Routines, however, can help us direct our attention toward what really matters.
5. Routines help quiet the tyranny of the urgent.  

•  The tyranny of the urgent beckons us to worry about insignificant issues that seem important at the moment. The term rumination describes the mental process of rehearsing something that happened in the past or something that might happen in the future. The tyranny of the urgent breeds such rumination. Routines help us focus on the life’s essentials rather than spending precious time trying to prioritize everything
  

Since there is hidden value in those routines and rituals that we once took for granted, we should not forsake them entirely. An effective Life Coach would assure us that realigning our daily routine doesn’t have to be difficult — there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Just adapt it to our current reality. We can continue to do the things we normally did before the pandemic disrupted our lives. Simple routines like waking up and going to bed at the same time each day are still under our control. The rushed breakfast and hour-long commute to work can now be replaced by a leisurely and healthy breakfast. This can be followed up with a second-cup of our favorite coffee or tea. Since we, no longer need to spend time getting appropriately dressed for work, we might just brush our teeth, wash our face, and change into a comfortable sweat  suit just in time for our AM Zoom conference.

Over time, we will develop routines that help us grow more comfortable working and learning in the comfort of our own homes. In fact, many of the WFH veterans have grown so used to their new routines that they do not want to return to the old ways of working. So if employers find that WFH employees are equally or more productive than those who want to gather in factories and office buildings, they may find ways to accommodate both.