Supercharging your effectiveness

If you’re on a plane and that plane starts losing altitude and the masks drop from above, do you fit your mask or the mask of the child beside you?

You fit your own mask because as a stronger, fitter adult, you are of more use to people if you are awake and alert.
This is the way you should approach your business.

You are no good to anyone if you work too hard

Daniel Morcombe’s parents fought for long and for almost a decade to find out where the son was. They set up a child safety education charity to keep Daniel’s case front and centre. They also had the mission of reducing the number of families that could potentially face the same nightmare they did- a child missing with no idea of where he was.

Considering the magnitude of this kind of situation and what is on the line in this sort of situation, you may be surprised to know that the Morcombe’s also made it part of their fight to have a holiday house in a state where they weren’t as recognisable, and to book regular holidays with their remaining sons.

But they knew something that many small business owners, freelancers, agency workers and hard working professionals forget- that you are no good to anyone if you work too hard.

We live in a culture that applauds overwork. Where we think the things we do to make sales, produce products, launch marketing campaigns, service clients and make money are extremely important.

And they are to a certain degree because they give us purpose and they give us the money we need to live while fuelling the things we want.

Yet the importance of the things we perform is grossly disproportionate to where we sit in the grand scheme of things.

Hopefully, none of us will ever have to go through the agony of actively searching, campaigning to the media, maintaining pressure on law enforcement and government or remaining so visible with the public as the Morcombes.

But we can take a leaf out of their book and start realising that a life out of balance is not the kind of life we should be gifting to ourselves, our clients, our workmates, family or the people who are invested in us.

In short, if you want to climb the business ladder and be the most effective you can be, you have to have life in balance. You need to take a break.

You and your brain

In 2012, the University of Wisconsin did a study on working memory. They found that with even simple tasks like remembering to buy the milk on your way home, if you’d allow your time to daydream, you had a better chance of remembering to do so.

If you encourage those moments where your brain gets to stop, take a breather and refresh, the better your memory becomes.

But it doesn’t stop there.

In 2007, the University of NSW found that staying up all night to work was the equivalent of turning up the next day with a blood alcohol limit of .05 and that this level of impairment is unsatisfactory in a working environment.

A lack of sleep also impacts your ability to work out what is relevant. We tend to focus on too much of the emotional side and not enough on remaining logical, reasonable and objective.

If you work all through the day and slim down your time between crawling into bed, or if you swap your work times around so that you continuously do not have time to enjoy yourself and employ some free thinking, you’ll be fair less likely to be able to switch off your brain.

Your brain needs you to reach a deeper state of sleep in order to dump toxins and reboot the system on a function level. If this doesn’t occur, you’ll have a bunch of chemicals running around in your brain that will increase paranoia and anxiety while also making you feel less rested and more fatigued.

The impact of a lack of sleep and too much work has a very high cost. A study of 4th year bankers who average 65 hours of work or more, found higher rates of depression and anxiety while their creative thinking and their ability to accurately judge situations were drastically reduced.

Our brains are designed for work, rest and play (thanks Mars, you chocolately bastards for stealing that one!).

So beyond stopping the misnomer of the always on, superman pulled another all-nighter culture, what can you do?

Effectiveness comes from flow

You can read all the “the 3 things that make you most effective” blogs you like, but the truth of the matter is true effectiveness comes from entering a state called “flow”.

To understand flow, there is a cracking TED talk by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi you should take a look at called Flow, the secret of happiness. It’s a far better 18 minutes spent than any sitcom or cat youTube.

Flow is in essence the state we enter when the task or work we’re doing is challenging enough to be enjoyable, but not so challenging it knocks us flat. It’s about finding that balance between the things we can do, and the things that stretch us enough to truly enjoy it.

It’s stretching ourselves without the sense of being overwhelmed.

So what is flow?

1)It’s being completely involved in what you are doing
2)It’s a sense of ecstasy outside of yourself where you feel great about the work you are completing
3)A sense of greater inner clarity- you know what needs to be done and you know how well you are doing it
4)You feel evenly matched- you’ve got the right skills for the task at hand
5)You enjoy a sense of serenity- you aren’t worried when you work outside the boundaries and you can see the bigger picture of the work unfolding before you
6)Timelessness – being so engaged and involved the time flies enjoyably by
7)Intrinsic motivation- whatever you are producing offers you it’s own reward through that production

Jim Henson was a master at flow. He was indeed a proud work-a-holic who gained satisfaction and fulfilment from the work he did. To his workforce, he was someone who was always open to creativity and could always be counted on to produce works of high calibre. His dedication and enthusiasm for the work is well-known.

For Henson, obtaining flow in the work environment was easy and essential.

This love affair with work also cost him his marriage and saw him spend a lot of time away from his young children. So his approach is far from ideal for anyone who wants to remain in balance with the work side of their life while still enjoying the strong, fruitful relationships inherent with family and friendship.

But the lesson here is achieving flow at work helps us to get through the day and feel great about what we do.

Exercise in activating flow

• Think about your working day.

• Now think about your work habits- good and bad.

• Consider things like exercise and diet, eating at the desk, working long hours, the amount of meetings you go to, what you spend time in between work doing and the whole picture of your week.

• Now think about the work you do- write down the work you like doing and the work you don’t.

• Write down the 3 biggest impediments to you getting in the flow each week.

• Write down a couple of remedies to those impediments.

It may be as simple as instituting a social media blocking system. Or it could be as involved as re-training an existing clients contact habits. The point is admitting there may be an issue and seeking an achievable solution helps you change the way you work and improves your flow.

It can be short or long term.

Exercise in perspective

Break that feeling of all or nothing with your work by injecting a little bit of perspective.

• Write down the top 10 things you value in life

• Write down the 5 things that makes for a great weekend

• Compare that to the things you have on your MoSCoW lists re: your business and your day-to-day client workload

Pretty soon, you’ll see that the goals and dreams you have for a happy life may cross over into work, but the work isn’t the whole ball game.

Whenever you feel crushed by someone else’s expectations, make sure you pull out these lists and remind yourself that now is important to now, but it’s not the whole she-bang.

And remember these words from Jim Henson:
The feeling of accomplishment is more real and satisfying than finishing a good meal or looking at one’s accumulated wealth.

Being the fastest, most revered and popular freelancer in town with a fat bank account doesn’t mean anything if you don’t enjoy what you are doing.