I realize that’s rather blunt.  But it’s true.  Often my biggest motivator is fear of being terrible.  I don’t want to turn in a crummy project to a client because I’m afraid they’ll think I’m an idiot.  I edit, and re-edit (and sometimes re-re-edit) blog posts because I don’t want people to think I’m a lousy* writer.  I’m driven to succeed because I’m afraid of failure.  Afraid of being laughed at.

And I bet you are too.

Yet the  fear of failure is ironic.  It seems to drive people to greatness.  Not everyone.  But enough.  Artists, writers, engineers, and bureaucrats throughout history have produced brilliant work because of these fears.  We can succeed because we are motivated through our fears.  We all know that a parent can motivate their child by yelling.  We see this play out every Sunday as football coaches yell at their players.  So clearly it works.

However the more I think about how we should apply our meaning to our work, the more I wonder if this is the right way.  Let alone whether it is healthy.  Yes it works, but does it get compliance, what what we really want is greatness?

One of the philosophies of Meaning to Work is that we should set people free, not “push” them.  When we push, we can get things to happen.  Unfortunately the moment we stop pushing, stuff stops happening.  When we “set people free” the creativity never stops – a natural outpouring of being set free.  This is why we fight for the cubicle class at Meaning to Work.  Being trapped at your desk will never let you live up to your potential.

I believe this idea of pushing verse setting free is at odds of creating out of fear.  Sure I can create a training program, give a talk, or write copy for a website because I’m afraid of what would happen if I didn’t.  It might be good.  It might even be great.  But what would happen if instead of working from a place of fear, I was working from a place of passion?  What if I put in all that effort not to avoid getting laughed at (or yelled at), but because I loved what I was doing?  How much better would my product have been?  Writing out of fear can get me to do some pretty cool things, but can it get me to a place of greatness?  Will it unleash the full potential of my creative skills?

I admit I create a lot out of fear.  Maybe it’s time I change this.  The more I think about it, the more I see that’s not how I’ll ever do my best work.  How about you?  Do you create out of fear?  Is this really the best way for you to create?

*I used to have an English teacher who hated that word, he would ask us if we really meant we were full of lice.

image provided by flickr user CarbonNYC

We often think of empathy as “feeling your pain.”  (Thanks Bill Clinton!)  But it’s actually more than that.  True empathy is the ability to recognize and relate to other people’s emotional states.  Both the good and bad emotional states.

So how does this relate to our work?

Well, all of us experience aches and pains in our daily lives.  Maybe we have a chronic illness.  Maybe we’re just sick.  Or maybe we didn’t sleep well the night before and we’re in pain from an uncomfortable mattress.  (Or because you have a 5 week old baby who refuses to sleep.)

When we experience these aches and pains, we have a need to emotionally unload those feelings.  This usually results in gossip, complaining, or just general lollygagging (which is a scientific measurement recognized in the Ukraine.)  In terms of productivity, though, our aches and pains create an obstacle in our path that derails our productivity.

Having an empathetic boss removes that obstacle by reducing the chance we’ll complain about those ailments.   Instead of trying to find a way to unload our frustrations, we have our need met by our empathetic boss, which in turn improves our work.

So the next time you’re feeling the aches and pains of life, instead of “venting” at the water cooler or to a random co-worker (or Facebook!), find someone with real empathy, and talk to them.  Not only will you feel better, but you’ll be more productive.

Scott, BA, Colquitt, JA, Paddock, EL, Judge, T  “A Daily Investigation of the Role of Manager Empathy on Employee Well-being.”  Organizational behavior and Human Decision Processes. (2009) 

photo provided by flickr user makelessnoise

For the second year in a row I managed to complete a 50,000 word book.  And yes, I did that in a month.  This is both impossibly harder, and wonderfully easier than it sounds.  Make no doubt about it, 50,000 words is a lot.  But at the same time, writing 1,667 words per day is actually pretty manageable if you’re willing to put in the work.  Which, of course, is like most things.

As I close up NaNoWriMo for the year, I realize that I’ve never really had writer’s block.  At least not since I became a blogger.  And as I thought about it, I think there are reasons for this lack of writer’s block.

1.  Practice Effect.  When you need to come up with content day in, or in the case of Meaning to Work, week-in, you have to keep at it whether you feel like it, or whether you are inspired.  So you write, write, and write some more.  Which means you end up practicing the things that make your writing better (i.e., writing.)  This practice effect is probably the single biggest reason I’ve been able to avoid writer’s block. 

2.  Jump to What Inspires.  If there’s one lesson that NaNoWriMo and Meaning to Work have taught me it’s that you should follow what inspires you.  The same goes for your writing.  When you begin to feel the first signs of true writer’s block, shift gears.  Write a different segment of your story.  Start a new chapter.  Go back to an old section.  Whatever you do, don’t just sit there staring at the same text.

3.  Have Goals.  Goals provide the structure for your inspiration.  If you just jump to what inspires, then all you do is have a bunch of spastic activity, and not progress.  Goals help you structure what inspires you into something meaningful.  Goals get you to where you need to be.

4.  Sticking With It.  It’s easy to do the first three steps, and then not follow through.  I used to do this in college.  I’d work my tail off for the first 90% of the semester, then come finals time I would be too tired to finish strong.  And I’d slack off.  As a result I never turned in my best work.  The older I get the more I understand pacing (and therefore avoiding procrastination).  But I also understand the need to finish strong.

While I use these techniques to write.  The truth is they also apply to other work.  You can use these four ideas to become a better chemist, a better project manager, or even as a way to brainstorm new ideas for your business.

So where can you apply these ideas in your life?

The problem is, most of us have long since left the factories (at least in America) to work in “create on demand jobs” (i.e., jobs where you must come up with a new idea when needed.)  Because of this, we must look at work differently.  We can’t just assume what used to work, will continue to work.

To be great in our modern creative economy you need to have the desire to create.  The only time you create exceptional work is when you’re motivated.  Now if you’re a company and you just want average work, then that’s one thing.  But if you want exceptional work, chaining a worker to a desk is pointless.  In fact it’s probably harmful.  This is true in most industries, but especially true of industries that are chronically understaffed or have a lot of responsibilities “off the clock.”  (I’m thinking specifically of churches and ministries here, but marketing firms and R&D labs would be the same.)

Why does our motivation matter?

Because we’re burning ourselves out.

Kris Dunn writes the excellent HR Capitalist website.  In a recent series of posts he explores the burnout factor of employees.  He talks about a 5 year shelf life.  And discusses how you need to take charge of your stagnation / motivation.  And he’s absolutely right.

We need to do fresh things.  To learn new skills.  To build new talents.  But I think far too many organizations add to this burden by making completely unnecessary demands of their employees.  Do you really need to be at work from 9 to 5?  Do you really need to take a lunch break?  Do you really need to sit through the same pointless meeting every week?

Companies burn out great employees by destroying their intrinsic motivation.  When we force employees to do unnecessary things over and over again, we’re only asking for turnover, and a disgruntled group of employees.  It’s intrinsic motivation that makes us wake up in the morning ready to go through the challenges and trials of creating something new.  And if your job is to create something new every day, how long before your desk becomes a chain?  How long before you too succumb to burnout?

So if you’re in charge of an organization (or even just a team), eliminate the unnecessary stuff.  Don’t burden great employees (or volunteers) with useless tasks.  And if you feel it’s necessary, at least explain the reasoning.

If you’re an employee, reinvent yourself.  Learn new skills.  Read.  Take charge of your career.  Find routines in your life that recharge your intrinsic motivation.  And then stick with them.

What you can’t do is sit around just because that’s what you’ve always done.

photo provided by flickr user wwarby

Not only that, but believing goals are impossible can lead people to take unethical actions.  Students are more likely to cheat on tests where they think they don’t have a chance, and believe no amount of studying would help.  Business people are more likely to use fraud or investment schemes if they think there’s no way they can compete with another business.   Even in sports we hear this.  Athletes accused of using performance enhancing drugs often cite, the fact they felt “pressured to win” as the reason for their drug use.  So again, impossible goals are a bad idea.

But goals that are too easy are just as bad.  Why?  Because easy goals encourage us to slack off.  If you can do 40 pushups, are you going to find a goal of 30 pushups motivating?  You might enjoy 10 less pushups, but that’s not really moving you towards improving your performance.  When goals aren’t challenging we work to the point of slacking off.

Of course this balance between difficult and attainable can be challenging in and of itself.  If you put something too far out there it won’t be motivating.  We see this all the time in exercise.  If you run a 15 minute mile (a common time for non-runners), setting a six minute mile is not going to help, because a 6-minute mile is going to seem worlds away.  Sure it’s specific.  And yes it’s measurable.  Both traits of a good SMART goal.  But it’s not attainable.  Not without an awful lot of work.  And odds are, with such a difficult goal to reach, you may not stick with it long enough to actually make it.

When creating goals, whether for volunteers or yourself, make sure to create goals that are difficult, but still attainable.  Too far in either direction won’t get you where you want to go.

image provided by flickr user gnuckx

It’s moved past the point of overwhelming to the point of exhaustion.  And I’m guessing if you’re reading about a site identifying (and taking) your meaning to work, then you have felt the stress and exhaustion that comes with competing priorities.

Of course I don’t need to know your personal story to figure that out – I can just look at the number of people on anti-depressants and medication for stress related illnesses.

As long-time Meaning to Work readers know, I’m a big fan of goal setting.  Usually we talk about setting SMART goals as a way to accomplish projects.  Or as a way to stay focused.  But now I want to add one more to the list: you can use goals to reduce stress.

In a world with competing demands there is always a “next” project to work on.  There’s always an excuse to avoid down time, because there’s always another important task to do.  Simply having a “to do” list isn’t enough.  Instead, use goals to reduce stress by identifying what’s important o accomplish.  And when it’s done, stop and relax.

My wife and I have instituted a goal system (in part based on SMART goals and in part based on the book Accidental Creative) to reduce the stress a house and busy family provides!   Our system looks like this:

The Big 3: Identify 3 goals we want to accomplish in the month.  For us this looks like Big 3 -
1.  Demo son’s room
2.  Enjoy remaining weeks of wife’s freedom from the school year
3.  Organize Laundry / bathroom / living room / dining room

Weekly specific, measurable goals that work us towards our Big 3.  These goals are much more specific, but they all tie back to one of our Big 3 goals.  The idea is to have 3-6 goals per week that we can accomplish.  And once we check them off the list, that’s it.  We relax and wait for the goals of the next week to come.

Weekly #1
1.  Tear out walls
2.  Clean up mess
3.  Go to Kings Island Amusement Park

Weekly #2
1.  Buy materials for son’s walls
2.  Insulate walls
3.  Eat outside 3 nights in the week
4.  Take daughter for nightly bike rides – Monday – Friday

Weekly #3
1.  Celebrate wife’s work (and thank God she has a job!)
2.  Hang Drywall
3.  Run electric
4.  Pick paint colors
5.  Get daughter geared up for school

Weekly #4
1.  Paint son’s room
2.  Build crib
3.  Go to the swimming pool as a family

If we accomplish the Big 3 in August we’ll be in great shape.  These goals help give us focus, and they help the task-oriented personalities of our family feel a sense of accomplishment.  But most importantly they end the constant feeling of always having “another project” to work on.

Of course these can be applied to work just as easily.

These are my family’s goals for August.  What about your goals for work or life?  Do you have a Big 3 you can follow?

image provided by flickr user orangeacid

Yet I can’t help but wonder: why does it take so much effort?

It’s not just government where this happens.  My daughter spends vast amounts of energy trying to define the phrase “go to bed.”  She wants to know if there’s a fire can she get out of bed.  How about if she’s sick?  Or needs to go to the bathroom?  What if she’s cold?  Hungry?  Thirsty?  Tired?  (Yes, she once told us she was too tired to go to sleep.)

She will spend hours finding reasons for getting out of bed, and then complain she can’t fall asleep.

We’re like this at work too.  We’re told to be at work from 9:00 to 5:00.  So we start asking, “what if I show up at 9:05?”  Or take an extra 15 minutes for lunch.  Or leave a few minutes early.  Maybe I can make a few personal calls.  And so we end up with 20 pages of regulations about what’s “allowed” at work in our HR manuals.

So much effort, so little back in results.

I was struck by this as I was reading the Federal Trade Commission’s definition of the word “endorsement.”

It took them 12 pages to define the word.

We all have a tendency to make our lives more complicated than they need to be.  And we do this because we want to leave ourselves wiggle room.  My daughter wants a way out of bed that won’t get her in trouble.  The FTC knows that advertisers will break the spirit of the law, instead of following the law.  And both Republican’s and Democrat’s know that whoever controls the purse controls the government.

It’s an issue that boils down to loopholes vs. trust.

Which means if your life is overwhelmingly complicated it’s likely because you’re busy trying to find loopholes in why you shouldn’t go to the gym, or how you can get off a work committee or skip out on a meeting.

Our desire to find loopholes, and the desire of others to stop us from exploiting those loopholes means we have 500 word disclaimers on email.  It means we can’t just walk up to a bank and withdraw money; we need 27 different forms of ID.  It means our life is more complex than it needs to be.

But complexity is not a solution.  At best it’s a Band-Aid.  At worst it stops you from doing what’s important.  If you want to be more productive in your work, then simplify it.  Let your “yes” be your yes and your “no” be your no.  Don’t create 500 word disclaimers saying that on Thursday’s your “yes” really means “no” unless it’s raining.  Then it means a “maybe.”

So where is complexity overrunning you in your own life?

picture provided by flickr user uberzombie.

This is interesting because of the second reaction I had – I realized that while I long ago gave up my dreams of chemistry success, I never gave up my love of learning.  A love of learning that was inspired by MacGyver.

In our busy culture, we often boil things down to “can I use this?”  And if it’s information we toss it aside and call it “not practical.”  How many college or high school students have made this complaint? It’s even part of the super-popular Getting Things Done
system.

Yet all knowledge is practical in the right circumstance.  That was the main point of MacGyver.  The reason he could fly to the moon just using a stick of gum, was that he knew so much about so many things.  He could improvise because he was intellectually prepared.

In the pilot episode, MacGyver is questioned about the contents of his bag.  He responds saying, “the bag isn’t for what I take with me, it’s for what I find along the way.”

How different would your career be if you had that kind of attitude?  If you’re finding yourself unmotivated, or worse, depressed about your job, maybe the issue isn’t your job – but you. No job is dead end if you’re willing to learn.  No job is so tedious that you can’t find something worth learning.

Maybe what’s needed is for you to take your career back into your own hands. Not another job. Maybe you need to be willing to show initiative when it comes to learning.

So take a tip from MacGyver and learn from everything.  Although you might want to avoid the mullet.

photo provided by flickr user david55king

How do you solve a problem like that?

One approach might be to rant and rave.  To jump up and down and yell until you’re red in the face.  Unfortunately about the only thing that will do is raise your blood pressure and get a temporary “boost” from those around you.  (Until, of course, they calm back down and work slower than before as retaliation to your antics.)

Another approach is to follow the same three step process that stops our own procrastination.

1.  Focus on Strengths.  Whether leading employees or setting up a project with coworkers, it’s important to focus on getting the right people in the right place.  Do you have the extrovert writing reports?  Do you have the writer stocking shelves?  Do you have the high-energy person sitting in a cubicle by themselves?  As a leader your job is to know your employee’s strengths so you can unleash them to do what they do best.  Not only will you get better quality work, you’ll see a lot less procrastination.

2.  Understand why employees are avoiding the task.  We avoid tasks that we are afraid of or tasks where we think we’re going to fail.  When outlining a project, make sure you explain what positive outcomes will happen once the project’s finished.  Don’t assume they know – spell it out.

3. Clarify your goals.  Using our good friend the Realistic Preview, make sure to clarify what you want to get out of the project.  Talk about the good and bad of what’s going to happen.  Get people on board.  Don’t leave room for doubt or confusion.  Be specific.

By acting on these three principles, you’ll be amazed at what will happen.  Most people want to work hard.  Most people want to be productive.  But it’s very easy to get distracted or emotionally worn out.  As a leader you have the power to keep your employees (or co-workers) on track.

This is part 3 of a 4 part series on improving your productivity.  Photo provided by flickr user ralphbijker

related research: Seo E.H., (2009) The Relationship of Procrastination with a Mastery Goal Versus an Avoidance Goal.  Social Behavior and Personality. 37 (7), 911-920.

People have a limited amount of psychological resources to withstand stress, uncertainty and to produce creative and unique works.  In other words, if you keep going back to the well, with no chance to replenish it, it’s going to run dry.

So how do we replenish our psychological wells?  It turns out just “having” a weekend isn’t enough.  We need to do certain things.  And the more we focus on these activities, the more rested we’ll be for the coming week.

1.  Relaxation.  This is exactly what you’d expect it to be.  Relaxing activities are those things that take little physical or mental activity.  Like listening to music, watching TV, going for a walk.  The things we do to “unwind.”

2.  Mastery.  When we engage in hobbies, we get the added benefit that comes with pursuing things that excite us.  With Mastery we’re gaining experience, knowledge, and skills that excite us.

3.  Control.  Despite the technological revolution in working from home, most of us are still trapped in desk jobs and time clocks.  We’re expected to sit in one place for 40 hours and that’s how we prove our “value.”  Because of this, we often feel that things are out of our control.  Taking time to act on things we can control during the weekends, is a way we can regain a sense of independence and individuality.

4.  Detachment.  This is simply being away from work.  It’s a psychological separation from thinking of work, stressing about work, or focusing on work.  Or, you guessed it, working on work.

While all of these things can improve our moods and productivity, control is the least important.  So if you’re going to focus on something, pick one of the others first!

This is part 3 of a 4 part series on improving your productivity.  Photo provided by Heather Elizabeth Studios.

Related research:  Fritz, C., Sonnentag, S., Spector, P.E., and McInroe, J.A., (2010)  The weekend matters: relationships between stress recovery and affective experiences.  Journal of Organizational Behavior.  31.  1137-1162.