Clear Your Head

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Arjan Zuid­hof is a guest author and effi­ciency coach based in the Netherlands.

Pre­par­a­tion:

  1. Have pen­cil and paper ready.
  2. Make sure you’re in a quiet place without danger to be dis­turbed before read­ing on.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tza/3214197147

This is a simple yet power­ful way to get all those plans and ideas that are buzz­ing around in your brain all day long under con­trol. These thoughts are con­stantly dis­tract­ing you, pre­vent­ing you from mak­ing short– and long-term plans.

Truth is: they can’t help it, it’s you that haven’t decided any­thing about them that will make them keep nag­ging you. What you need is a reli­able external sys­tem to get them out of your head.

One of these com­pletely reli­able sys­tems is David Allen’s Get­ting Things Done (GTD) sys­tem. But it takes at least a month to read the book and start mak­ing this method our own. We don’t have that long right now.

There a huge issue with all those loose ends circ­ling around both in your head and head­ing your dir­ec­tion from the out­side world. You will be reminded about the stu­pid­est things at the least expec­ted moment. Even worse: don’t do any­thing about them, and they will finally just dis­ap­pear. Too bad, because while most ideas have no future value, some of them are real gems. One of them might even change the world. So make sure you do some­thing with those gems! How? Read on …

Start Writ­ing

Grab that pen and paper that have so patiently been wait­ing next to you. Dur­ing the next ten minutes you will start to write down lit­er­ally everything that’s in your head. This will range from small actions that need imme­di­ate atten­tion up to big future pro­jects whose impact you can­not yet even fathom. It doesn’t mat­ter what it is, once it’s writ­ten down it will be out of your head. Things you might encounter:

  1. Clean­ing up the backyard
  2. Find a good school for my kid
  3. Improve my jobskills
  4. Learn how to use Prezi instead of Power­point for presentations
  5. Write an ebook about … (fill in your specialty)
  6. Update your daily administration
  7. Empty your e-mail inbox
  8. Pre­pare present­a­tion for quarterly meet­ing next week
  9. Get XYZ pro­ject back on track with Isaac and Charlie
  10. And so on, and so on.

Don’t spend any time think­ing about those weird things you’re jot­ting down. What you’re going to do with them later is irrel­ev­ant now. By the way, did you notice that most things on the list above — apart from items 6 and 7 — are big­ger things than just 1 action? In GTD-speak they’re called pro­jects, “all desired out­comes that take more than one action to com­plete” or goals. Goals are good, but can not be acted on imme­di­ately. They need to be made more spe­cific, and nor­mally fol­low the route from defin­ing pro­jects first and actions later.

Now start writ­ing. Take your time and keep writ­ing, until your head is com­pletely empty. If ten minutes of frantic writ­ing are not enough, hold on. Later you’ll thank your­self! OK, there we go, I’m wait­ing for you …

Ready? When everything went accord­ing to plan, you now have an impress­ive list in front of you. Full of action­able items, pro­jects and the more fuzzy goals. With less than 30 points you either have an extremely laid­back life or cheated. In the lat­ter case: maybe write a little more? Until the num­ber approaches 50 or even 100 you’re prob­ably not done yet. This only works if your head is really clear of every loose end — you will know when you’re done.

What you have achieved now is that everything is in a trus­ted sys­tem out­side your head. Now it comes down to the most import­ant thing: really doing some­thing with this inform­a­tion. First look at things that can be done in one step: your actions. These go on an action list, to be done the moment you are ready for them. The rest of your items are either pro­jects or goals. Put them on two sep­ar­ate lists, and keep them current..In the future, these lists make it easier for you to focus on what’s requir­ing your atten­tion now (pro­jects) and to check whether your actions are in line with where you’re head­ing in life and work.

Bonus Tip

Over­whelmed by a huge pro­ject list? Do not shoot the mes­sen­ger  ;-) this is all your stuff. Who says you are required to com­plete the entire list? Take a crit­ical look at the pro­jects that don’t give energy and that you can elim­in­ate without risk of get­ting in trouble. Be hon­est, there’s more to be deleted than you think. You are your own judge.

A waste of time, all this list­mak­ing? On the con­trary! You have found a way to get those loose ends out of your head. This will give a tre­mend­ous amount of energy and focus. From now on you’re doing only things that are import­ant to YOU. It’s hard to come up with a bet­ter timesaver than that, I’d say.

Good luck clear­ing your head. Did it work? Share your exper­i­ences below.

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Snakes and Corporate Ladders

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The career path of a man­ager on her way to the board room is full of unex­pec­ted sur­prises. It might some times even feel like you are play­ing a game of Snakes & Lad­ders, the pop­u­lar children’s board game.

At Hypo­thet­icorp we have cre­ated the ulti­mate career sim­u­lator for a bit of fun and games. Who will get to the board room first? Down­load the pdf file and play our Snakes & Cor­por­ate Lad­ders game and find out whether you will make it all the way to the board room.

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Managing Ambigiously

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A little while ago I was asked how well I handle ambi­gu­ity. My impuls­ive answer was that I prefer to resolve ambi­gu­ity by ana­lys­ing the situ­ation. I answered from the per­spect­ive of an engin­eer – using reason and logic to resolve the ambi­gu­ity inher­ent in real­ity. I did not real­ise at the time that this was the ‘wrong’ answer as I was expec­ted to embrace ambi­gu­ity and seek oppor­tun­ity or some­thing fuzzy like that.

Philo­soph­ic­ally the world is ambigu­ous, e.g. light is sim­ul­tan­eously a wave and a particle; eth­ical judge­ments are rel­at­ive and based on cul­tural pref­er­ences and the notion of abso­lute truth is philo­soph­ic­ally unten­able. How­ever, our brains are wired to resolve ambi­gu­ity. As soon as we observe light it will col­lapse into either a wave or a particle and within a given cul­ture, eth­ics are pretty much abso­lute. Inside a par­tic­u­lar frame of ref­er­ence there can be only one truth. The most effi­cient tool to resolve ambi­gu­ity is reason. But reason itself has its lim­it­a­tions and some­times ambi­gu­ity remains no mat­ter how much we ana­lyse the situ­ation. It is at those point that intu­ition comes into play.

Man­age­ment is a frame of ref­er­ence in which ambi­gu­ity in most cases needs to be resolved. Cus­tom­ers don’t appre­ci­ate organ­isa­tions that are ambigu­ous and require pre­dict­able qual­ity. Ambi­gu­ity in pro­cesses also means a busi­ness is not work­ing effi­ciently as employ­ees need to spend time assess­ing each situ­ation in order to make a decision.

Man­age­ment the­or­ist David Wilkin­son argues that lead­ers need to embrace ambi­gu­ity in order to ini­ti­ate change. This is cer­tainly true, but only to the extent that recog­ni­tion of ambi­gu­ity is needed to be able to gen­er­ate pos­sible out­comes and the manager’s abil­ity to recog­nise the best solu­tion. A pref­er­ence for res­ol­u­tion of ambi­gu­ity does not pre­clude tol­er­ance for vague situations.

Suc­cess­fully man­aging a busi­ness is based on being able to make clear decisions. Without clear decisions a busi­ness will not achieve its object­ives but without a recog­ni­tion of ambi­gu­ity a busi­ness can not evolve.

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All the world is but a stage

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All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely play­ers: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts (Wil­liam Shakespeare, As you like it).

Pro­fes­sional social net­work site LinkedIn has con­duc­ted a sur­vey to ana­lyse buzzwords in user pro­files. It seems that almost every­body on LinkedIn is cre­at­ive and effect­ive. These are, how­ever, mean­ing­less state­ments as cre­ativ­ity and effect­ive­ness are not fixed states but vari­ables on a slid­ing scale.

The use of mean­ing­less buzzwords is pan­demic across the globe, although there are regional dif­fer­ences. Pro­fes­sion­als from coun­tries with a high level of indi­vidu­al­ism1. prefer to be cre­at­ive, i.e. have indi­vidual and ori­ginal ideas. While in Spain, a coun­try with a high tend­ency towards uncer­tainty avoid­ance, prefer to be per­ceived as ‘mana­gerial’. Most Itali­ans are prob­lem solv­ers, which is not sur­pris­ing given the eco­nomic situ­ation in this country.

Decep­tion and per­cep­tion man­age­ment is very com­mon in soci­ety and an integ­ral part of being human. Our self is not an innate prop­erty of the per­son, it is care­fully con­struc­ted. Soci­olo­gist Erving Goff­man uses a the­at­rical meta­phor, inspired by Shakespeare’s lines open­ing this post. We use scripts, buy props and cre­ate back­drops for the roles we lay in society.

Pro­fes­sional life is, how­ever, a spe­cial case as the selves we cre­ate in the work­place are mostly very dif­fer­ent from that which we are in per­sonal life. Goff­man once wrote that exec­ut­ives gen­er­ally are:2.

“… blind­ing them­selves and oth­ers to the fact that they hold their jobs partly because they look like exec­u­tives, not because they can work like executives.”

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Notes
  1. Hofs­tede, G. (2001). Culture’s con­sequences: Com­par­ing val­ues, beha­vi­ors, insti­tu­tions, and organ­iz­a­tions across nations. Thou­sand Oaks, CA: Sage. [↩]
  2. Erv­ing Goff­man (1959), The present­a­tion of self in every­day life, Anchor Books. [↩]

Toilet Paper and Consumerism

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Valuable toilet paperWe all use it, we all need it and we all buy it every week: toi­let paper.1.

Buy­ing toi­let paper is one of those many decisions we make in the super­mar­ket every time we visit. The amount of energy we are will­ing to invest in a decision depends on the level of involve­ment we have with the product.2.

Research sug­gests that the type of toi­let paper we use is a mat­ter of low involve­ment.3. Low involve­ment products are hard to sell because, by defin­i­tion, con­sumers don’t pay much atten­tion to them. This is why mar­keters developed tech­niques to increase the level of involve­ment and in effect cre­ate a mar­ket where one pre­vi­ously did not exist. This prac­tice star­ted in the 1890s when the Scott Paper Com­pany became the first to offer toi­let paper on a roll and advert­ise it with a range of images show­ing luxury.

Product involve­ment demon­strates the import­ance of the mean­ing of the object to the ego struc­ture or the consumer’s inner self. The products we pur­chase are an exten­sion of our self, a means to con­struct an iden­tity.4. Toi­let paper man­u­fac­tur­ers have used this psy­cho­lo­gical con­struct to cap­ture the mar­ket. In super­mar­ket aisles we are bom­barded by a pleth­ora of types of toi­let paper to choose from. The bewil­der­ing array of choices ranges from one, two or even three ply, scen­ted, non-scented, hypo-allergenic, recycled, non-bleached, rain­forest cer­ti­fied and so on, and so on. There is a type of toi­let paper for every seg­ment in the mar­ket. It is only because we are sub­jec­ted to this wide range of choices that we are forced to make it.

involved con­sumers pay higher prices

The main reason toi­let paper man­u­fac­tur­ers spend so much money on devel­op­ing new types of toi­let paper and advert­ising their product is because they want us to care about toi­let paper. Not only by devel­op­ing a product vari­ant for every ima­gin­able pref­er­ence, but also by adding emo­tion to an oth­er­wise bor­ing product. Toi­let paper advert­ising fea­tures cute puppy dogs, baby’s and other images that trig­ger emo­tions. When con­sumers are involved they are hes­it­ant to choose lower price altern­at­ives and sup­pli­ers of toi­let paper use this by cre­at­ing a high level of involve­ment and char­ging higher prices than they oth­er­wise could.5.

This is no bet­ter illus­trated than by what I observed dur­ing a recent visit to a super­mar­ket in Kangaroo Flat in Aus­tralia. They sell rolls of spe­cially prin­ted Christ­mas toi­let paper for $4.49 each, almost ten times as much as nor­mal toi­let paper. Clean­ing your bot­tom with jolly mes­sages and images makes life just that much more worth living.

Christ­mas is a time when people are pre­pared to spend money on silly items and a roll of spe­cial toi­let paper can provide a lot of value because it becomes an instant con­ver­sa­tion starter, as evid­enced by this post.

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Notes
  1. This post is inspired by a dis­cus­sion between Ian Wat­son and prof. Rhett Walker on this topic. [↩]
  2. Zaich­kowsky, J. L. (1985). Meas­ur­ing the involve­ment con­struct. Journal of Con­sumer Research, 12(3), 341–352. [↩]
  3. Ratch­ford, B. T. (1987). New insights about the FCB grid. Journal of Advert­ising Research, 27(4), 24–38. [↩]
  4. Belk, R. W. (1988). Pos­ses­sions and the exten­ded self. Journal of Con­sumer Research, 15(2), 139–168. [↩]
  5. Cohen, M. (2000). Con­sumer involvement–driving up the cost. Con­sumer Policy Review, 10(4), 122–125. [↩]