When your breath is short, your legs heavy, your mind numb, your motivation low, there is really no reason why you should muscle through the situation.
The best thing you can do is slow down, stop even, take a few deep breaths, and find your own pace.
There is nothing more important than you living your life at a pace you can sustain. Not even an olympic medal.
When companies grow and get to a certain size – say, 3-400 employees – the tendency is to add layers of management and middle-management to set the stage for the future growth.
That’s when something typically happens that ends up actually hindering the growth they are seeking.
It is the time when the company stops solving interesting problems and starts serving individual agendas.
It is the time of more and more meetings to find alignment, the time of blaming it on others, the time of politics and gossiping. It is a time dominated by opinions and personal anecdotes. Facts lose importance. Indeed, they barely get measured because everyone is busy pleasing those up the ranks while trying to come out first among peers.
It is where motivation dies and talent retention becomes a serious problem.
So when you hire or promote managers for your growing company, ask them not about their previous experience and their track record. Ask them instead how they plan to manage their team, how they will be handling conflict and contrasting ideas, how they will be making decisions and manage the change that comes from those decisions.
These hires will determine your possibility to get to the next phase. Be intentional about them.
Going back to the office. Continuing to work from home.
It would be nice if for once we would not make out of this an ideological dilemma. There are good arguments for both sides, and when you think about it, it is not really a dilemma. Managers just need to find the courage to ask their employees where they prefer to work, and then follow up to make sure that their choice is respected.
There are different ways to contribute to the success of an organization.
What is the thing you want to absolutely achieve? Tomorrow, this week, this month, this year.
What is it that you need to do to make it happen? Make a list.
Go through the list, one point at a time, and do not shift your focus until the list is done. Do rest, relax, take breaks. Particularly if the list is long. But do not invest energy, time, and meaningful work on a new shiny object.
Once you are done, reassess and celebrate the work you have done.
That’s it.
Nobody likes the idea of being irrelevant, and yet a growing incapacity to focus and control our attention is making us more irrelevant than ever.
What will you do about that?
People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand. […] they actually think they’re more productive. They actually think they tend to – and most notably, they think they can shut it off, and that’s been the most striking aspect of this research. […] unfortunately, they’ve developed habits of mind that make it impossible for them to be laser-focused. They’re suckers for irrelevancy. They just can’t keep on task.
Clifford Nass, The Myth of Multitasking
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