Emails!

Back in 1999, I got my first email account. 

My friend and I went to a cyber cafe next to college. While surfing the net, we were intrigued and excited. We fumbled with the keyboard, mouse, and UI.  Soon we had opened our accounts in yahoo.com. We were the first recipients of each other´s first email. We felt happy that day!

In the first few years since then, worldwide web felt like an exciting, unique, and possibly fruitful addition to life.

A decade down the line, emailing is not a unique or exciting experience anymore. But is it usually fruitful? I still am not sure!

Now the internet encompasses our lives. 

I have a smartphone. I can access the internet at a click of a button and I have access to my emails at all times. Or rather emails have access to me all the time! :)

So I realized over a period of time that I was not sleeping well at night. I felt that the phone will ring anytime, and slept light in anticipation of that.  

I tried keeping the phone on silent, but even then I found myself waking up every few hours to check my emails on phone.

So now I don´t keep my phone with me in bed when I sleep at night. Rather I keep phone on table- and that´s quite a distance away from my bed.

Now I atleast get a few hours of being just with myself.

At work, we usually spend our time reading, writing, or replicating emails every second minute.  With so much emphasis on staying connected, I have been wondering what all might we be missing out on at work.

Over last month, I have been trying a new way of responding to emails. I check and respond to my emails only twice a day – for about 45 minutes each – 1 slot in the morning and 1 slot in the evening.

All the other times in the day are creation/relationship building/contracting/project times. 

This POA seems to be working for me.

I feel my day is more easy paced. I do more and better work. I feel more satisfied at the end of the day. I manage to clear and respond to all my emails too.

Importantly, I have defined and contracted on what timely response to emails means to me – response within 24 hours until and unless an email is marked as High Importance.

Work seems to be more meaningful now, inspite of barrage of emails I receive every day!

In this connected/networked world , what has worked for you in doing things beyond emailing?

-                                                           

Sourav

Rhythm!

Here is 2nd post i had written over 5th-6th Feb weekend.
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Would you associate the word 'rhythm' with word/terms 'stretch' or 'burning the midnight oil'?

If  rhythm (what we do as part of our day-to-day work) causes us to 'burn midnite oil' over a significant period of time, what does it tell us?

For a start, it tells me that things aren't in rhyhm/flow.

There can be various reasons for this, viz:

• Work unit may be understaffed.
• Work plans/processes may have redundant (can be removed) process steps
• There might be too many 'streams of rhythm/flow' running simultaneously. This might cause a sense of lack of rhythm in the larger picture .

Are these the reasons at play or is it something else?

Well! I will be intentional about finding out and finding back a daily rhythm in life and work.

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Sourav

Language We Use at Work

Language we use supposedly influences what our mind focuses on. So if we say that ‘I want to have an ice-cream’, our mind focuses on ice-cream and that’s where our energy is drawn. But if we say that ‘I don’t want to have an ice-cream; even then our mind focuses on ice-cream, but not on the ‘no’, and our energies are drawn towards ice-cream again.

So a better way of saying that ‘I don’t want to have an ice-cream’ maybe would be to say ‘I feel like dieting today’ J. That’s the closest I could get to forming a positive, affirmative statement in this case.

If we were to implement this learning in the organizational context, what all organizational terminologies/phrases would change?

Let me talk of a few commonly used organizational terminologies and their possible ‘more positive’ alternate.

• 0% offer rejects or 100 % offer accepts (in recruitment)?

• 0% employee attrition or 100 % employee retention?

• Compensation or Rewards?

• Reduce Dissatisfaction or Increase Engagement?

• Reduce conflict or Increase co-operation/collaboration?

• Don’t make mistakes or Do things right?

• Think out of the box or Think in another box?

• 0% deviation or 100 % compliance?

• Don’t intellectualize too much or Its time to action?

• Do things beyond ordinary or Innovate?

• Don’t be so task focused or Be task and people focussed?

• Don’t be inauthentic/artificial or Be authentic and genuine?

• Don’t be harsh/nasty or Be sensitive?

• Reduce stress or Enjoy and be happy?

I can instantly relate to the 2^nd option in each of the above cases.

I could also think of how some of the language we use outside work can undergo changes too:

• I want to lose weight or I want to be in shape?

• I want to reduce my health problems or I want to be healthy?

• I don’t want a meaningless and boring life or I want a meaningful life?

What are some of the languages, terminologies, and phrases you use that you might want to change?

Can you think of some other ‘negative focussed’ terminologies/phrases frequently used at work?

What ‘positive focused’ terminology/phrase can we use instead of their ‘negative focused’ counterparts?

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Sourav

A Meaningful Life!

So what should our focus be: Work or Life? Do we live to work or do we work to live?

Maybe we need both. Work and Life are integral parts of our existence and hence probably the focus on ‘Work- Life balance’.

But then why do we separate work and life? Are we saying that work has no life and life has no work?

I disagree! Some year’s back I realized that work and life are intertwined and inseperable. Why do I say so? Well, I’ll probably talk about that in a different post.

Let me devote this post to a journey I have been living through over last year. A journey best described as ‘There is more to life than work and life’.

Life is not all about working hard and partying hard/enjoying to the fullest.

But that requires us to first relook at the definition of work and what we expect from it.

We have our own preferences, interests, and aspirations. We look at work as a platform which would provide us/allow us to completely express ourselves or be ourselves. Is that a reasonable expectation? We play a certain role at work and that role may not have the scope for us to do work which we find ‘complete meaning’ in.

Charles Handy talks of an inverse doughnut. We have an inner circle which is our work, but we also have a series of outer circles which represent the other things that we want to do. I like the way he verbalizes it ‘What work would you be willing to do at ‘zero’ cost/salary?”. These ‘zero costed’ set of work would constitute the outer circles of the doughnut and provides significant opportunities for us to do meaningful work and grow.

So there are two questions which we need to ask ourselves:

• At work, what work do I want to do a) beyond my KPI’s?, b)that doesn’t necessarily furthers my career growth?
• Beyond work, what work do I want to do even though I may get zero money for it or maybe to have pay some money out of my pocket to do that work?

We can be nostalgic our past, build for our future, but we can create only in the present. Are we creating enough in the present to feel that we are leading meaningful lives?

As a manager, what we can do is probably sensitize our team members to the question “What all would you want to do for zero salary or non-monetary benefit?”. We may not get an answer straight off but atleast we have got our team members to start thinking about what gives meaning to them.

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Sourav