Putting Distractions Before People

 

Photo by Dan Barrett on Unsplash

In my day job, I get pulled into a lot of impromptu meetings. Sometimes, they’re important. Most of the time, they’re distractions from something else more important.

On a frigid winter morning, I got pulled into another meeting. My boss wanted to share some really good news. I had my phone in my pocket and my trusty running watch on. Right away, they both started buzzing with alerts from text messages and Microsoft Teams chats. I refrained from pulling my phone out of my pocket for almost five minutes, but my mind — trained as it is to responding right now to notifications — was on whatever I was missing on my phone and not on the exciting news my boss had.

We’ve all been in the situation — either as the victim or the perpetrator — when you’re having a conversation with someone and you receive a notification on your device. You pull your attention away from the person in front of you to address the distraction on your device. When you’re engaged in casual conversation around the literal or figurative water cooler, it’s probably okay to interrupt the casual conversation to get back to work. Outside of that, why do we divert our attention from the people right in front of us for things that can most likely wait?

In our hyper-connected reality, the phenomenon has been termed The Attention Economy. People and things vying for our attention are nothing new. What is new is the speed at which calls for our attention come.

Modern technology, particularly social media and communication tools, is designed to capture and monetize our attention. This almost always comes at the expense of our real-world interactions and focus.

For me, focus is the biggest problem. In my work, I’m occasionally tasked with programming workable solutions to complex problems. That kind of work requires deep focus. I share a physical office space with three other individuals. I have also formed a bad habit of keeping email and messaging apps open on my computer and phone all the time. In a given day, I receive more than one hundred emails and fifty to sixty direct messages or group chats.

As I mentioned, I have three employees. The most seasoned has been with the company just over one year. Our business is in a rapidly growing industry, so the dynamics of our work change frequently. Hardly a day goes by that I’m not interrupted with multiple questions and work sessions with those three employees.

However, I often interrupt scheduled training sessions to address an email or a phone call which leaves my new employee, in particular, sitting and waiting.

What message am I sending to that employee?

There will, of course, be instances where my attention is required elsewhere. However, these interruptions are often not important and are rarely urgent.

It’s a question of quickly evaluating the most valuable use of time in that moment, where that value may not be monetary.

I live in a place where during about 7 months of the year, I can do bi-monthly training sessions with my employees while we walk outside. When discussing a new concept where I know taking notes will be useful, I review the concept on the walk then encourage my employees to take notes when we get back from our walk. We leave a few minutes at the end of the training session to clarify anything in their notes.

When attempting to truly connect with my employees, these walking training sessions have a couple of useful advantages:

1. Moving the body has a tendency to aid creativity.
2. When we’re away from the office and the potential for listening ears, my employees are more apt to open up about their thoughts and feelings about things.
3. It’s harder for my boss to interrupt me when I’m not there to be interrupted.
4. Exposure to sunlight generally lifts one’s mood.
5. Since we are mostly “desk jockeys,” it’s good to stretch the legs.
6. Being away from our desks, my employees know they’ve got my undivided attention. As opposed to when we’re in the office, I never pull my phone out of my pocket unless its use is required as part of our walking discussion.

That’s not an exhaustive list of simple ways I can connect with my employees. Even though I’m prone to distractions while in the office, those walking-coaching sessions demonstrate my willingness to be 100% focused on the employee for that 15- or 30-minute period twice a month. It’s not much but does a lot to bolster morale.

These principles, of course, can be extended into our personal lives.

There’s no escaping the fact that we live in a distraction-filled world. Time has perhaps always been a precious resource, but the number of demands on our time each day has made that extremely apparent. The simple act of being present with the people around us is both rare and invaluable. Disconnecting from devices and focusing on real human interactions sends a powerful message to the person right in front of us: that they are important to us. Small, simple, intentional actions create deeper connections and boost morale.

Nobody will ever remember that day you responded to 97 emails, but almost everyone will remember how you made them feel.

How Do You Measure Progress?

 

Photo by Mohd Syahril Khalid on Unsplash

I spent weeks working on a piece of software that accomplished something I’d never done before. On a precise schedule, it would pick up a file from one semi-aged computer system, translate it into something an even older system could use, grab some more information, and push all of that into a third, newer system.

Everything worked flawlessly, right up until the point that we officially went live on the system.

My Fort Knox of code turned into a seeming house of cards that came crashing down. Nothing worked the way it did during testing.

I haven’t resolved the issue fully yet. Somewhere, buried in thousands of lines of code, is something that regularly stops the whole operation in its tracks.

Okay, that’s a bit dramatic. There’s a manual import process that can be used to get around the issue until I figure out what’s going on.

From a progress standpoint, it’s interesting how just before things toppled, I felt like I had made tremendous progress. Now that things aren’t working, there’s a sense that I never made any progress at all.

Of course, that’s not true.

In the flow of time, the future becomes the present and the present the past quite literally with each passing microsecond. In the passage of time, we have a tendency to over-inflate the importance of what just happened and place too much value on what’s in the future. That’s why so many wellness and mindfulness coaches try to teach the principle of being present.

It’s hard to stomach, but even when life-altering events take place, we have an opportunity to dwell on them, endlessly, forgetting that we are capable of moving forward, or learning from them and moving forward as best we can given our new set of circumstances. Our experiences don’t define us. What we learn from them (or not) does.

Eve Arnold is one of my favorite writers on Medium. She recently completed a year of major life overhaul which included spending considerable time rehabilitating an old house she’d moved into. In a moment of reflection on being more present and measuring progress differently, she wrote:

I want to live more in the moment. I want to enjoy this bowl of porridge, I want to taste the golden syrup, the oats, the creaminess of the milk.

I want to bake bread but pay attention. I want to repot my plants with focus and care. I want to enjoy the experience, not just rush through it to tick it off my list.

I don’t want my life to become one big, endless, to-do list.

Reading that prompted thoughts I had about how I define progress and success. Lately, I spend most of my waking hours working, and I spend far too many hours awake each day.

I had a day in the last week where I arrived at my office at 3:15 am to work on solving a problem that is only about 10% my making.

Why?

Why would I do that to myself?

Why am I so loyal to an employer?

If I’m being honest, I have a hero complex. I derive a lot of personal satisfaction from being able to solve difficult-to-solve problems.

I sacrifice a lot for that.

Too much.

And measuring progress toward resolution isn’t easy. Will it take five days or five weeks?

As a general rule, businesses — particularly large ones — are not primarily focused on improving the lives of all their employees. Most businesses exist to make money, and an outsize share of that money is funneled to a relatively small number of people within the organization. As a result, measuring progress in a business often looks very different from measuring progress in life. Additionally, and importantly, there is no one-size-fits-all metric for measuring progress.

For example, let’s suppose two students attend the same university to earn a degree in cyber security. Student #1 comes from a family where there is adequate money that they don’t have to work to put themself through school. Student #2, however, is required to work a full-time job to be able to afford their education.

Given their circumstances, you can’t predict whether one student will outperform the other. Either student or both may do well in the program. When done, either or both may attribute their success or failure in the program to their life circumstances.

So, how do we measure progress?

Here’s the thing: progress is rarely linear and it’s not easy to quantify. Progress is often more about the journey than where we end up. If you set out to be able to squat 400 pounds and only make it to 375 before the risk of injury is too great, are you a failure?

Of course not. Today, I can’t squat 150 pounds (in addition to my own bodyweight), so achieving 250 pounds would be a massive improvement for me.

The real value of progress isn’t in the perfection of outcomes but in the effort we put into it.

What we often overlook or forget is that setbacks — like the ones in my software project — are not the opposite of progress, they’re an essential part of it.

Measuring progress needs to be less about metrics and milestones and more about the depth of our experience. It’s about the lessons we take with us, no matter how winding the path might be.

The Problem of Too Much Willful Will

 

Photo by Christian Erfurt on Unsplash

Pedro was a man who believed his work was of the utmost importance. Every day, even on weekends, he arrived at his office before dawn, ready to tackle the day’s challenges with an iron will. Pedro’s job, in his eyes, was not merely a job. It was a mission. He worked for a large corporation, managing a team responsible for a critical project that could determine the company’s future. At least, that’s what Pedro told himself and his wife as he canceled their seventh straight date night.

Pedro’s dedication was unparalleled. He drove his team relentlessly, pushing them to meet deadlines which they often did through sheer force of will. He was convinced that his team’s success — even the entire company’s success — depended entirely on his ability to control every aspect of the project. His personal mantra: “I can sleep when I die.”

As the days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, something began to shift. The more Pedro pushed, the more his team seemed to resist. Tensions rose, mistakes became more frequent and severe, and the project began to fall behind schedule. Instead of easing his grip, Pedro tightened it further, convinced that he could will the project to success through his determination alone.

On the first cold day in October, Pedro was called into the CEO’s office. He expected praise for his tireless efforts, but instead, he was met with the unexpected: he was fired.

Pedro was stunned!

“I’ve given everything to this project!” He practically shouted at the CEO. “I’ve worked harder than anyone.”

The CEO sighed. “Pedro, no one doubts your dedication, but sometimes, working harder isn’t the solution. You’ve driven your team to burnout. Nobody wants to work for you anymore. I had three people from your team give notice this week. Your unrelenting push has become a burden to everyone around you.”

The CEO stood and excused Pedro with a note that his personal belongings would be shipped to his home.

Pedro left the office, wandering in a daze.

How could this have happened?

At times, there is likely a bit of Pedro in all of us. In certain respects, I’m a willful person. Using sometimes extreme measures, I’ve gone long seasons of my life sleeping little more than 3 or 4 hours per night. The last marathon-length run I did was on 3 hours of sleep and a pulled muscle.

Make no mistake. There’s nothing heroic about what I did. It was foolish. There’s a real risk of injury that takes a long time to heal when you do something like that.

On the flip side, we often find inspiration in the stories of people who do the impossible with single-minded focus. Michael Phelps is a favorite example because of what he accomplished in the 2008 Olympics. Then, he kept doing it over and over again.

But, at what cost? It’s hard to have much of a life outside of training when you’re trying to break your own records all the time.

In 2016, Phelps officially retired, though he still maintains that with enough training he could be competitive against anyone in the pool. However, the cost is not worth it to him anymore. Rather than swim relentlessly, he’s chosen to be involved in philanthropic efforts and to spend time with his family.

Ryan Holiday recently wrote, “We think that to be great at what you do requires complete and total dedication. That there’s no time for anything else.

“Nonsense.”

He also shared the poignant story of Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria, who literally worked himself to death. Holiday then posits a question:

Is that what you want to be? A workhorse that draws its load until it collapses and dies, still shod and in the harness? Is that what you were put on this planet for?

Those are deep, existential kinds of questions.

Sometimes, it’s difficult to accept the reality that ending up in a place of too much willful will is always self-inflicted. Some people, in a fight just to make ends meet, make that choice out of a sense of duty to provide subsistence for the people they love.

For too many of us, however, it’s about pursuit of some vague ideal imposed by the society around us. In the 1900s (I’m from the 1900s), it was termed “keeping up with the Joneses.”

I often reflect on a sage bit of wisdom from a friend, that we are all running our own race. We’re not required to keep up with anyone. Of course, we can take personal care to an extreme just like anything else, but we do owe it to ourselves to care for ourselves first. That enables us to show up in more meaningful ways for the people around us.

The trouble of too much willful will is combated by, first, recognizing that the work we do is not so important that it’s worth sacrificing everything else for, and, two, that there are those around us who are eager to help lighten our load without unduly increasing their own.

I’ve been working on a development project for some time. For more than 20 years, I’ve been a DIY developer, leaning only on the non-interactive internet to help me solve my problems. Yesterday, for the first time, I engaged with a developer who has skills I don’t have but need.

I’ve known for some time that I needed to hire others to help, but my willful will has driven me to make an attempt at doing it all myself. My conversation yesterday truly opened my eyes to the idea that I can get more done by sharing the load with others.

Then, I can finally get out of the pool.

The Portfolio of Your Enthusiasm

 

Photo by Joe Caione on Unsplash

I met a man recently who was built like a bodybuilder whose work for the last 30 years has been maintaining the casted dies in an aluminum extrusion facility. His job: check the dies to ensure everything is within tolerance so the shapes created by the dies are to customer specifications.

I visited with him in his shop for close to forty-five minutes. He wore a huge smile as he talked about the love he has for his work because of the new challenges it brings everyday.

His shop was inside a bustling factory, heated to uncomfortable levels by the furnaces that soften the metal prior to forcing it through the dies like the $500 million Play-Doh shape factory it is.

The late author Jim Harrison wrote, “We go through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms,” then followed that with a need that we have to seek “jolts of enormous electricity,” to “freshen up your feelings about being alive.”

In an elegant essay that quoted the same thoughts from Jim Harrison, John P. Weiss writes:

In other words, don’t melt into your couch and stop living. Don’t give up on life just because your portfolio of enthusiasms has diminished. There are always ways to squeeze more out of life, even if you’re old and less able to do things you used to.

It’s the case for many people that work consumes more than half of our waking hours. If you’re one of the lucky ones who manages 8 hours of sleep in a night, you might spend more than 50 percent of your awake time for 35 years working.

I don’t believe that most people love their jobs. I think most people work the job they can to provide for a family, to make ends meet, and to hopefully save a little for a rainy day. I think most people also have the cards stacked against them making escape from their current employment situation seem impossible. Fortunately, much of the time, people find fulfillment and happiness outside the workplace.

I believe it’s also true that the harder a person’s job is on them mentally, physically, and emotionally, the more difficult it is to expand the “portfolio of enthusiasms” at one’s disposal. Commercialism and consumerism have also made Western society, in particular, unsustainable. That is especially true as the cost of living in most places has far exceeded wage increases. Translation: you’re doing less with more money.

For almost every person caught in the consumerist tide, income will never keep up with the insatiable desire for more stuff.

Pursuing stuff diminishes our ability to expand our portfolio of enthusiasms in a meaningful way.

Imagine investing your time, energy, and resources in experiences that lift your spirit rather than in accumulating more possessions that do the opposite.

The man I met, drenched in the heat of his small die shop beaming with pride, reminded me that it’s worth chasing those “jolts of electricity,” and refusing to let enthusiasm be withered by things of little value.

In the end, our passions shape and define us in ways that possessions never will.

Confirmation Bias and the Apparency Paradox

 

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

In my day job, I’ve traveled a bit for work of late. I’m accustomed to carrying a water bottle with me most places.

On a recent trip, I went into the bathroom at the hotel to fill up my water bottle. Without checking the depth of the sink, I unscrewed the lid of my water bottle, set both bottle and lid aside, then took one of those paper cups wrapped in plastic, opened it, and began filling my water bottle one cup at a time. Three cupfuls in, I realized I was wasting more water between pours than I was getting into my water bottle.

“Huh,” I thought. “I wonder if my water bottle will fit in that sink.”

Turns out, it did. I was able to fill my water bottle the rest of the way without wasting another drop.

What happened?

There are two pervasive mental models that our brains employ unconsciously based on our life experience: confirmation bias and the apparency paradox.

Let’s discuss the last one first. The apparency paradox refers to a situation where something appears to be one way based on assumptions and initial experience, but when we look at it a little harder, we see things a different way. It’s a paradox because our perception and expectation based on our experience and appearances lead us to overlook practical or efficient solutions.

The apparency paradox is a common trope in movies where a super smart scientist-type can’t figure something out, then a junkyard mechanic comes in and with a whack of a hammer resolves the issue. The scientist couldn’t solve the problem because their own perception made the simple solution invisible to them.

Next, confirmation bias. This is when our initial beliefs about something cause us to overlook evidence that might contradict those beliefs. It’s also something that shows up when someone’s ideas often work out, so they always believe they have the best ideas.

In my case, my initial judgment was that the sink was probably not deep enough for my water bottle to fit. I’ve stayed in plenty of hotels where the sink wasn’t deep enough for my water bottle.

The example is a bit sophomoric, perhaps, but it highlights that the apparency paradox and my own confirmation bias limited how effective I was at filling up my water bottle, at least initially. I didn’t even consider that my water bottle might fit in the sink because of my past experience.

Neither of these world views is a bad thing. We’re faced with so many insignificant decisions and situations everyday that if we had to stop to analyze every one of them we’d never make any progress.

When we’re faced with more complex decision-making scenarios, however (whether personal or professional), becoming mired in these ways of thinking can make us less effective at solving the problems in front of us.

As far as I’m aware, nobody’s life was adversely impacted by the cupfuls of water that were wasted before I realized my bottle would fit in the sink. However, there are times when the apparency paradox and confirmation bias can cause significant personal or professional problems.

Here’s a more dramatic example. Let’s suppose an aged neighbor has often complained about chest pain that has largely been fueled by anxiety. One day, however, he comes over and seems a bit off, complaining about chest pain. Because of his prior history, it’s easy to brush it off as anxiety again.

Later, the neighbor suffers a fatal heart attack. Because of the many “false alarms,” confirmation bias led to the conclusion that nothing was seriously wrong with him.

Or, maybe it’s the apparency paradox causing a business leader to put too much confidence in their own idea against the advice of other key employees that leads to major financial issues for the company.

The challenge with business, in particular, is that the scenario of the leader who goes against the tide of advice who then secures a major win is touted as heroic.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with these mental models inherently. Where the problem resides is when we rely too frequently on our own judgment and nothing else. A good practice is to regularly challenge our own assumptions.

Before settling on a solution or conclusion, it’s often instructive to consider alternative perspectives. I could have solved my water bottle problem easily by quickly checking the depth of the sink. The time cost would have been far less than a single cupful of water.

Another help can be asking other people for their opinion. This is particularly true when tackling something new in life or business. By discussing ideas or assumptions with others, we can gain insights that challenge biases.

Steve Wright said, “experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.” While perhaps a bit sarcastic — and somewhat ironic considering the topic — our own prior experience can be beneficial in solving problems. The key, again, is to ensure we don’t blindly take our own advice if challenging our own assumptions would serve us better.

These mental models are useful shortcuts that make everyday life possible but also risk leading us the wrong way when more complex problems are in front of us unless we’re willing to challenge our own way of thinking on a regular basis. This will not only help us avoid potentially costly mistakes but also enhances our capacity to make good decisions.