Alexandersmap

    Category: Productivity

    • The Value of Work

      “Understand the superior value of getting what you want through hard work.” — @robertgreene

      Want a bit of perspective on work? Spend a weekend digging holes for fence posts, raking the yard, hauling bags of cement or other manual labor. That was my weekend, and I’m grateful for the reminder of what can be done with applied effort. But you sure feel it the next day. Thinking on your feet and or tapping on a keyboard can be pretty stressful, but usually your whole body doesn’t ache the next morning.

      The thing is, I enjoyed the manual labor as much as I enjoy writing or helping people solve problems in their business. Paying a little sweat equity now and then is good for the soul. Our bodies weren’t designed to sit on a chair in front of a monitor all day. Getting out and doing what needs to be done offers a chance to transform a small piece of our world.

      Work is closing the gap between current state and desired state with deliberate action. It’s not office politics or how much money you make or dress code or how long your commute is, these are job-related nuances that attract or detract from the real purpose. To make a meaningful contribution for the collective good. That might be digging holes for fence posts, or it might be building a presentation for a meeting, but we ought to add value to it through our effort.

      Unhappy with the gap between here and a desired state? We don’t always want to hear it, but the answer is often simple. Get to work.

    • Incremental Awareness

      As the days grow longer in the Northern Hemisphere we detect the changes around us. The changes were happening anyway, but it seems to accelerate. Just this morning I watched the sun rise through a window where I haven’t seen the sun rise since last autumn. A mix of travel and weather conditions made it a complete surprise when it happened.

      And what of the changes we take ourselves through? We exercise, eat the right food, read and write every day and nothing seems to come of it. And one day we catch ourselves in surprise at who we’ve become without realizing it. Hey, that’s me! The light dawns on Marblehead, as they say in Boston when you’re the last to know. We know we’re changing, but don’t often see it in ourselves.

      Until we do.

      Why don’t we have more incremental awareness? Why don’t we see the smallest of changes in ourselves as we’re making them? Are we lacking self-awareness or are we just not giving ourselves the credit we deserve for doing the work? It’s as if we’re trained not to notice that we got up and worked out for three days in a row, we have to wait until we have washboard abs to be allowed to celebrate.

      The only way to be incrementally aware is to track ourselves. To write it down. To draw a big X through another day on the calendar (especially when you didn’t really feel like doing X that day). It’s not about the washboard abs or the number on the scale or the published novel, it’s about the process — saying we’re going to do something and following through on it. And then doing it all again tomorrow. Incremental action isn’t suddenly seeing the sunrise after your first day, it adds up over time and reveals itself slowly.

      When it will suddenly dawn on you.

    • Create Evidence

      “Belief in yourself is overrated. Generate evidence.” — Ryan Holiday

      What does your personal scorecard look like as we crossed off the first 100 days of 2022 earlier this week? What were your highlights? What hasn’t met your expectations when we began the year?

      Doesn’t that inform us of what needs to change immediately?

    • These Next Five

      “Excellence is not a ‘hill to climb;’ excellence is the next five minutes.” — Tom Peters

      Tom Peters tweeted a one page summary of accumulated wisdom yesterday. I’ve quoted Peters’ “next five minutes” statement before, because it lays it all out there for us so succinctly. I’m using it again with fresh perspective after attending a trade show these last few days and reconnecting with so many people who have been integral in my career. It’s always been about now, not next quarter or even tomorrow. What we do with the rest of our life is nothing more than these next five minutes, stacked incrementally one after the other to form its substance.

      We can’t sustain high levels of urgency, but we can celebrate the ripe potential of each moment and remind ourselves to do something with it. Life is now, we all sense that. The concept of time is very human. Five minute increments are but a basis of measurement, conveniently contained in one hand. Imagine what we can do with these next five.

    • Plans

      What is an intention when compared to a plan? —Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

      What you intend to do is meaningless.

      What you actually do is everything.

      What requires a why for fuel in its darkest hours.

      What flounders without a plan.

      Habits carry plans to their completion.

      Plan your habits wisely, then follow through as if your life depended on it.

      Doesn’t it?

    • The Battle Inside

      “The greatest battle of all is with yourself—your weaknesses, your emotions, your lack of resolution in seeing things through to the end. You must declare unceasing war on yourself.”
      — Robert Greene

      We all have our moment-to-moment skirmishes with ourselves. We fight through our worst traits or we succumb to them. It’s easy to let things slip, easy to settle for good enough, easy to wrap up early or scroll through Twitter or your social media feed instead of focusing on what must be done in the moment.

      Seth Godin calls it our Lizard Brain, this thing that prevents us from doing the things we most want to do. Steven Pressfield calls it the Resistance. We’ve all felt it when it comes to following our calling: imposter syndrome, distraction or lack of focus, busywork, putting others first… and on and on.

      Routine breaks through the bullshit. Habits force a reckoning with the truth of the matter. We must get past ourselves and simply start doing what we were called upon to do. The battle inside rages, but it becomes a war of attrition. We either give in to it or we see things through to the end.

      Every moment we take meaningful action towards our calling or we slip backwards or sideways on the path. Becoming is dirty work full of blood, sweat and tears. The largest battles are with ourselves. But don’t we have to fight them? Decide what to be and go be it.

    • The Thing About Busy

      “Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.” — Tim Ferriss

      We have a love/hate relationship with busy. We all want for more quiet time, but when we get it we quickly yearn for the energy of hustle and bustle. This is compounded by the story we tell ourselves that those who get ahead are the busiest and hardest-working among us. That might help make you a Partner at one of the “Big Three” consulting firms or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. But how often do we stop and ask ourselves why in the world we’d ever want that title? It’s a Faustian bargain—a deal with the Devil to have it all now in exchange for your soul.

      Screw that.

      Status doesn’t mean you’re successful at living. It just means you ground out more miles. Do we ever stop to ask what really gets ground in the process? Think about the last conversation you had with a “really busy” person. Was it meaningful or a transaction? Frazzled is a posture that doesn’t highlight one’s positive traits. To be calmly efficient is a choice; just as much of a choice as frazzled. But with better hair.

      We can be successful in life without sacrificing 300,000 heartbeats a week for the profitability of whatever stock symbol we happen to align ourselves with. The thing about busy is it’s a story we tell ourselves as an excuse for not doing what we really want to do. It takes courage to stop hiding behind busy.

      Instead we might choose contemplation and conversation and the deliberation of taking meaningful steps. We might seek experience accumulation and relationship building. We could delight in pregnant pauses. We can give ourselves permission to celebrate deep thinking and active listening and finding the right word without Googling it. We can rejoice in finishing what we once so boldly started but put aside because we’ve been so damned… busy.

    • Focus in Chaos

      How do you stay informed in a world gone mad without losing focus on the things that are most important for you? It’s not easy–we can all find something very distracting and completely out of our control just a click away. I allocate time for my daily news update from trusted sources, absorb the weight of it and do my best to keep crossing the stream of time one leap at a time without drowning in the abyss.

      When you refocus on that next leap, does it mean you’ve chosen ignorance, or discipline? For all of us to remain sane in a time of escalating tension, we can’t keep drinking from the fountain of bad news. Be aware, react and refocus on what we can control. We don’t cross the street without looking both ways, and we shouldn’t completely ignore the world around us. But it doesn’t mean we should huddle in fear and never take the first step towards our destination. We can’t bring light into this world without action.

      Just like those before us, our time is full of challenges and assaults on our senses. And like those who came before we must find a way to focus anyway. The only real choice is to assess our place, summon up the necessary audacity and make the leap.

      Be bold, despite it all.

    • What You Put Out


      “Calling yourself creative doesn’t make it true. All that matters is what you’ve launched. Make finishing your top priority… When you’re gone, your work shows who you were. Not your intentions. Not what you took in. Only what you put out.” — Derek Sivers, How to Live

      “When you ship, you silence the lizard brain. You beat the resistance and your ideas get out in the world. It’s not easy, but it’s very important. I am shipping because I don’t want to create art for art’s sake; I want to do work that matters, that makes a difference in people’s lives. Not tomorrow, today.” — Seth Godin, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

      Anyone who does anything creative knows the scorecard. What you intend to do has no place at the table: The only thing that matters is what you produce. If you don’t put it out there you aren’t a part of the Great Conversation.

      I focus a lot on productivity in this blog. More than some think I ought to. For me, productivity is the natural outcome of habits and routines and the gumption to click “Publish” every damned day. The lizard brain is a very real struggle, so is imposter syndrome, and so is the relative comfort of low agency. To overcome each of these hurdles, you must learn to be audacious. For most of us this doesn’t come in a spark of magnificent insight, it comes through incremental daily actions: teaching the brain that this is what is expected of it today and every waking day from here to the very last.

      This daily routine of writing profoundly changes you. I’d read that for years in Seth Godin blogs before I finally started posting regularly. I don’t look at my early posts often, for they’re full of typos and grammatical errors and run-on sentences (some things don’t change). But each brought me here. And here brings me to whatever comes next.

      What you consistently put out builds boldness and audacity and a blatant disregard for keeping up appearances. What I’ve learned during this dance with daily productivity is to avoid telling the world what you’re going to do. All that matters is what you have done. So by all means: ship it. Lizard brain be damned.

    • Best Intentions

      “What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.” ― Pablo Picasso

      “Do or do not. There is no try.” — Yoda

      Intentions. We all have the best of them. I intended to have a stellar week of work and working out. Both have been a struggle. Such is the way. Life is funny and fickle. We either do or we do not. The trick isn’t in the intentions, it’s in the verdict after the fact. Judge or judge not. There is no getting around it.

      You reach a point where you become. You decided what to be and you went out and became it. Or maybe you didn’t, but you had the best intentions. Life is assessing what you are and deciding whether you like it or not, and then deciding what to be next. One hop across the stream of life at a time, you look for that next landing spot, with an eye on the far shore. Sometimes you slip and get wet. Sometimes you took a hop in the wrong direction. Sometimes you park yourself on one comfortable rock a little too long. Intention and action are the only things that get you to the other side.

      Intentions are nothing but a direction we wish to point ourselves in. Intent only matters when it meets consistent action. Which begs the question, what are you doing?