A reader asked this question: Would you mind writing a post about dealing with multiple job offers and declining some of them — politely and gracefully?
This is actually a question about networking. When someone offers you a job, they have identified you as someone they want to be connected with. That you have multiple offers for this type of connection makes you even more desirable. So when you turn down the offer, your number-one concern should be making sure this person stays in your network.
This means that you should remember networking tips that would apply to any situation. And, before I get to them, I want to tell you that Tahl Raz’s article in Inc. magazine about Keith Ferrazzi is one of my all-time favorite things to read about networking, and it applies to you no matter what your situation is.
But here are four things to keep in mind for turning down an offer:
1. Be nice.
When you turn down a job, thank the person for the opportunity. Tell the person that something about them or their company impressed you. Think of something, even if it’s small. Just make sure you are specific, because that’s the type of compliments that matter most to people.
Then explain why the job you are taking is a great opportunity for you. Don’t explain why the other company is a thousand times better than the company you’re rejecting, even if it is. Talk in terms of the opportunity, and how it will allow you make a big difference to the business and grow personally. The aim is to show that what matters to you is learning and contributing to the organization because that’s what you want the person to remember about you.
2. Follow up.
Do something a week or so later to let the person know you plan to keep in touch. This will make the person feel more like you rejected the job offer and not him, personally.
There are a lot of ways to follow up. You can comment on their blog, if they have one. Send them information you find that you know they’ll like. Or you can invite the person to lunch if you want to spend time together. Or, if time together makes you cringe, take a smaller step and send a LinkedIn invitation. (Introduction to LinkedIn. Advanced LinkedIn.)
3. Suggest someone else.
If you are someone who is specialized, and it’s going to be hard for the employer to find someone like you, you can really endear yourself by referring a friend.
Even if the friend doesn’t ultimately take the job, Ian Ybarra points out that introducing someone to someone else is a gift (list item #6).
4. Assess your own conduct.
Of course, none of this will work if you have been being very difficult and demanding during the interview process and stringing someone along for months and are dropping the ball at the last possible minute. In this case, you might think about how your slow and perhaps-incompetent decision-making process is giving you a bad reputation.
It’s hard to turn down a job offer in this situation without looking like a jerk. So if you have already gotten yourself in a muddle, turning down the job offer will be tough. Face the muddle and help yourself to not do that again.
And if you are not in a muddle, congratulations on the multiple job offers!
It’s hard to look at the job you have and the job you’re looking for and figure out if the gap between them is due to bad job hunting skills or to something else. The best way to get the answer to this is to understand what a good job hunter looks like, and see if you look like that, too.
It used to be that there was a two-tiered job hunt — one for knowledge workers who had college degrees and spiffed-up resumes, and the other for auto assembly line workers and people without college degrees.
Today it’s still two-tiered, but the tiers are different. The percentage of people who have college degrees is increasing to the point where it is the equivalent to what a high school degree used to be. Also, blue collar jobs are decreasing and knowledge worker jobs are increasing, so it’s harder and harder to divide the workforce by blue collar and white collar.
So where does the workforce divide today? Networked, nonstop job hunters and solo, just-for-now job hunters.
A good job hunter is always hunting for the next big thing because you don’t know when, exactly, you will need it, or what, exactly will come. So job hunting is not an event, it’s a lifestyle. And a good job hunter will do these tactics:
1. Network all the time. With genuine interest.
2. Blog and comment on other peoples’ blogs.
3. Use social networking software like LinkedIn.
4. Constantly craft stories to decribe oneself.
5. Write resumes collaboratively – with a professional.
Ask yourself how many of these you really do. You don’t need to be doing them all, but if you are not doing at least a few of them enthusiastically, then you will probably fall into the bad job hunter category, and you’ll probably have a tough time getting a job.
You need to connect with people. In most cases sending your resume to blind ads just doesn’t work, so the list of good job hunting is all about knowing what you want and making genuine connections with people to help that happen.
It’s a great market for job hunters. The unemployment rate is low, and businesses in many sectors are stressed about employee shortages. So if you are having trouble finding a job, you really need to look at what you’re doing. Ask yourself if you fit into any of the thought patterns on this list of job hunt sabotage:
1. Do you really want to get another job or do you want to stay where you are?
2. Do you resent how quickly the world is changing? Are you aiming to resist?
3. Are you looking for a realistic job?
At some point, if you are not getting a job, you need to force yourself to do something new. It might be to try things out on the first list. It might be to ask yourself the questions on the second list.
But when you are stuck, you have to change something. Curt Rosengren has a nice post on The Occupational Adventure called Getting Unstuck. So start there, and use the list of good job hunt tactics as a starting point for setting your goals.
There is plenty of data to show that diversity is good for the workplace. But in general we don’t really create it for ourselves, because we like to work with people who are similar to us.
“In terms of innovation, diverse teams way outperform non-diverse teams, but people are very comfortable working with people they have worked with in the past or people who are like them,” says Frans Johansson, author of Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation.
Before you start commenting about how you are the exception, and your office is diverse, let’s be clear on what diversity is. The research about diversity at work is about diversity of experience, perspectives or work styles. This means that teams you might assume are diverse may not be – for example a multi-racial team of prep-school and Ivy-league graduates might have had a homogenous experience. This also means that places we typically think of as diverse, like San Francisco, are actually more homogenous than we realize (#6).
Diversity is a popular idea, but we misuse the idea of it all the time. We can learn a lot about diversity from preschools, by way of politics.
Wisconsin recently voted to ban gay marriage. Voters of Madison, where I live, strongly opposed this measure. The sentiment here is indignanation that their own state passed such a discriminatory law. Yet gay marriage is not about diversity in Madison. Gay people are part of the mainstream here, and are widely accepted.
A better gauge of Madison’s ability to accept diversity is whether their school system is willing to spend the money to comply with the Individuals with Disabilities Act at the preschool level. And the answer is a resounding no. The school system violates case law precedents and no one is standing up for the kids who are different and demanding that they receive fair treatment under the law.
Another preschool example: New York City preschools cost more than $10,000 a year. Most offer no financial aid, and on top of that, the admissions process is so difficult and grueling that many parents hire consultants to help get their kid in. (I hired a very popular one for $4000.) Almost all the schools talk about the importance of diversity, but how you can have diversity among people who will pay $10,000 a year for preschool? You have already eliminated 99% of the U.S. population.
Do you know where there are truly diverse preschools? In Head Start, where kids come to school speaking no English, where some kids have parents with Ph.D’s, and some have parents who can’t read. And you know what? These classrooms are very, very difficult to manage, because diversity is very difficult to manage.
And this brings me back to Johansson, who says that truly diverse teams are not easy. “Making diversity work requires a lot of effort up front. So you won’t get results as fast as you’re used to.” People must know this instinctively because we talk about diversity all the time, and create it only rarely. “People talk about it because they know they should,” says Johansson, “But they just don’t believe it.”
So what can you do to change things?
1. Understand that we each have an inherent bias against diversity.
2. Test your team for diversity. Did you mesh right away? Then you’re probably not coming from such different perspectives.
3. Embrace the multi-generational workplace. The reason generation is such a big issue in the workplace today is that in many instances, it creates diversity that you can’t escape. Usually you can decide to not to work with the person who would bring diversity to your team. You don’t need to give a reason, you just choose someone who is more like you. But what do you do when a whole generation is not like you? You have to learn to work with someone who has different pespectives.
So, the bad news is that we’ve been talking about diversity for twenty years, and accomplishing very little. The good news is that the fireworks at the multigenerational workplace are not just conflict, but the first signs of widespread diversity at work.
Forget the idea that networking is a job-hunting tool. Networking is the job hunt. But networking is not just passing out your business card and e-mailing your friends’ friend. Networking is making yourself buzz-worthy so people want to be connected with you.
This is not the old networking that celebrated extroverts and crushed introverts. Building buzz celebrates the diligent information broker and crushes the relentless self-promoter. Build buzz for yourself by processing information in new ways and connecting people and ideas in ways that are interesting and provide new experiences.
Here are four things to remember when you want to build buzz:
1. Be known for good work.
This is the most powerful tool in your career. Even if you start with no reputation and no connections, it’s not unrealistic to get known for doing outstanding work.
“If you’re great, people will notice you,” says Dana Zemack, founder of Zemack PR & Communications.
David Weekly is a programmer who has built such a strong reputation for having good ideas that popular blogs such as Slashdot, BoingBoing, and Lifehacker reliably post links to his new products.
“I want to build a reputation as someone who comes up with interesting things and tries to be useful,” Weekly said. “I use my reputation as a launch platform for my ideas.”
His current company is PBWiki, which offers a service that gives people a simple way to collaborate online, in a wiki, for example.When he announced the company he got 1,000 customers on the first day, just from being mentioned on those blogs.
2. Contribute to the community.
For Weekly, building buzz is not a single project, but an ongoing commitment to giving quality work to a larger community. And this should be how you think about yourself, as well.
The days of just pushing plain old information out to an audience are ending. Stories, not raw facts, are what people can relate to. “A great way to connect with people is by way of stories,” says Zemack. “When you build experiences or create a story around a something, then it becomes more engaging and personal.”
You can do this many ways but maybe the easiest is to add your comments to blogs. This is a way to broker information in a useful way, sort of like inviting yourself to a party, but it’s OK to do so, as long as you make relevant contributions.
Also, give away good information. There is so much information available that hoarding it will get you nowhere. People will just look elsewhere to get ideas. Instead, share as much as you can with the community, to build your reputation into what you’d like to be known for. “Information is not the main ingredient. It’s knowing how to enact it,” says BL Ochman, author of The What’s Next Blog.
3. Shape your own destiny.
How people see you online matters. For example, most young people would not date someone before Googling them, and we do this kind of electronic research routinely before buying products and services as well. Recruiters also use the Internet to identify job candidates rather than sift through piles of resumes. So you need to manage your online identity to make sure people see you as the person you want to be.
Peter Himler is author of The Flack and founder of Flatiron Communications in New York. His decades of experience in the public relations and communications field includes serving as spokesman for major companies, chairing organizations and giving lectures. He is all over Google, but had little control over what Google served up. By blogging, Himler shapes his online image — his “digital footprint” — because his blog now comes up first when you Google his name.
You can also take control of what people see by removing the bad stuff. There are no guarantees, of course, but if you want to clean up your online identity, ReputationDefender has proprietary resources for both finding the dirt and cleaning it up.
4. Think in terms of experience and get off the sofa.
The more types of meaningful connections you can make with an audience, the more effective the buzz will be. “The best way to generate buzz about what you do is to combine an offline and online experience,” says Zemack.
Advertising industry veteran Steve Hall, editor of Adrants, rattles off many fun examples of effective buzz-generating tactics that do not include a computer. For example, Canon paid couples to carry around its new product and ask passersby to take their pictures. That person who took the picture inadvertently learned how to use the camera. And, if things went as planned, the unsuspecting photographer would also hear a few benefits of using the camera: “We just love the zoom lens, could you use that, please?”
This is an experience you could never have online. (Though today the ethics of this particular promotion seem flawed.)
Also, just like people go to blogs to learn something and have a fun engagement with a community, people like to do the same thing offline. Throwing a party is one of the oldest tools in the box for building buzz, and it still works.
Zemack has made a name for herself, and her communications firm, by throwing ice cream parties and chocolate-tasting parties. The exotic flavors described by well-versed wait staff and perfectly complimentary hipster circles mingling over tasty cones allows people to learn something new, and to make new introductions — just the kinds of experiences Zemack wants a reputation for creating.
Over the course of the last year, I’ve interviewed a lot of people about entrepreneurship. The common thread running through all the interviews is that entrepreneurship is different than it was even five years ago. Barriers to entry are lower than ever, and if you measure success in terms of personal growth and flexible work, then the success rates for entrepreneurs is sky high.
Entrepreneurship has changed to become more appealing to a wider range of people. Here’s a list of the old and new ways of thinking when it comes to starting your own business:
Old: Entrepreneurs are born with a specific set of character traits.
New: Entrepreneurship is learned. There is no, single way to be an entrepreneur.
Old: Raise money and spend a lot of it on advertising.
New: Raise no money and spend no money on advertising.
Old: Women will get power in corporate America and change it.
New: Women are getting what they want by leaving corporate America to start their own businesses.
Old: The self-employed are happy because they are doing what they love.
New: The self-employed are happy because they have control over their work and they have a flexible lifestyle.
Old: Climb the coprorate ladder, learn the ropes, then start a company.
New: Start a company to get out of climbing the corporate ladder.
Old: Entrepreneurship is all or nothing.
New: You can test the waters by starting a company while you have a corporate job.
Old: Starting a business is risky.
New: Staying in corporate life is risky. Most businesses succeed, most jobs end.
Old: Do a lot of planning and make sure it’s going to work before you start.
New: Forget the big plan. Just try it. If it doesn’t work, you can just try again.
As thousands of U.S. companies ship jobs to other countries, the resounding response from young people is, “Who cares? I wouldn’t want one of those jobs anyway.” To the new U.S. workforce many of those jobs look boring, routine and uncreative – the equivalent of a manufacturing job to a baby boomer.
Kris Helenek is a software engineer at Student Universe, an online travel resource for students. He’s not particularly worried about losing his job to someone in, say, India, because he’s involved in discussions concerning product features – something difficult to outsource to someone lacking a deep understanding of the customer. But what about his future? Helenek says, “I’m confident that I’ll always be innovative enough and skillful enough that people will want to hire me.”
We are entering a new age in economic history, and it will elevate those who are nimble and creative. When we moved from industrial economy to the information economy, jobs became more interesting; coal miners were unemployed, tech support centers hired like mad, and secretaries became small-time database operators. Now we’re in the early stages of the “conceptual age” in which data will be less important than creativity, and jobs will be more fulfilling.
Daniel Pink presents this one-minute economic history in his book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. He says, “Key abilities will not be high tech but high touch,” and we will value the ability to make meaning and connections in a world where information is a commodity.
According to Pink, the people who will do best in this economy are those who don’t just take and give orders but also move smoothly between boundaries, like the technical guru who understands marketing or the accountant who speaks four languages. “But,” Pink warns, “you cannot get a move-smoothly-between-boundaries aptitude test, so a lot of this is about self-discovery.”
Here are some traits you need to develop to do well in the conceptual age:
- Empathy. Think emotional intelligence on steroids. The most empathetic people have the ability to see an issue from many different perspectives. And work that can be done without infused empathy begs to be outsourced.
- Aesthetic eye. Pink says, “Design sense has become a form of business literacy like learning to use Microsoft Excel. Smart business people should start reading design magazines.”
- Ability to negotiate and navigate. The conceptual age will be filled with possibilities that point to no single truth. Pink says, “People must learn to do something that is not routine, that doesn’t have a right answer.”
Bottom line: You’ll have to be creative to stay employed. But really, who doesn’t want to be creative? It’s inherently more rewarding to be creative than to be an information drone.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology at the Claremont Graduate University and author of Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, says that, “Being creative is a way in which life becomes richer.
“But if you want to be creative you must learn to do something well. You need to learn a set of skills, and then, once you feel comfortable you can ask yourself how you can make it better.”
Those with no patience for methodically developing a special talent, pay heed: Innovation without a good knowledge in that area is not creativity but dilettantism. Not that dabbling in topics you know nothing about isn’t fun, but that lifestyle will not create the kind of value that allows you to flourish in this new economy. To find what you love to do, Csikszentmihalyi recommends exploration.
“A richer life is one in which you have access to different aspects of the world.” Sure, you need to find your talents to figure out where you will put your creative energy.
But Pink reminds, “Failure is a part of mastery.” So give yourself room for missteps.
This is good news for Helenek. He invested in Boston-area real estate as a way to hedge his technical career. He planned to live in half his duplex and rent out the other half. But after the deal closed a pipe burst, and now Helenek is working on a fixer-upper. Tough work, but the good news is you can’t outsource floor sanding to India.
My second son was born a year and a half ago with hemifacial microsomia. That means half of his face is deformed. I’m not linking to a description of the birth defect, even though I know you will Google it. I’m not linking because the pictures are always the worst cases. He does not look like the pictures.
Still, I knew he was deformed the minute he came out. The nurse handed him to me, and his face looked uneven. I tried to tell myself that maybe it was because babies’ heads are scrunched right after vaginal birth.
His Apgar score was fine, but after a few hours, when my husband left the hospital to go home to sleep, I went nuts. Summoning every available professional — there were very few that late at night — to tell me a diagnosis.
In the morning, they did emergency tests on his hearing, because his ear was deformed, and on his breathing, because the inside of his mouth was deformed. Then someone came to do a kidney test because the kidney and ears develop at the same time during the pregnancy and when one is deformed the other often is, too.
The baby did not pass his hearing test and one kidney did not look right. The doctor told me that the kidney problem is common and he just won’t be able to play contact sports.
I must have looked really bad because social workers started streaming in. I don’t remember what I said, but my brother remembers my first phone call to him: I am crying so hard it takes five minutes for him to hear that the baby is deformed. Then, when I calm myself down enough, I tell my brother that my husband will die when he hears this so I have to hide it from him forever.
This is when my brother says, “I’m coming there.”
I say, “No. I don’t want you to see the baby.”
The world can publish ten thousand books about how parents love any child they get. And it’s true. But it’s also true that there’s a moment, a short moment, when you think you might die from the news.
Right after the phone call to my brother, my husband came back, and I said, “The baby is deformed.”
He said, “Are you kidding? You think I can’t see that? I know.”
We took the baby home two days later. We diagnosed him by looking at pictures on the Internet. We were absolutely stunned to see a whole population of children who had the same weird deformity.
I brought him to New York University’s Institute for Reconstructive Plastic Surgery. Hemifacial microsomia is very complicated because it can affect eyes, ears, nose, throat, heart and nervous system, all at once. Many specialists work together to come up with a plan for surgery. At my son’s doctor’s appointment, I presented him at the front of a room, with a social worker next to me, while fifteen doctors asked questions and examined him.
Here’s what happened: My son’s surgery was performed by one of the best teams in the world for hemifacial microsomia. All the doctors were incredibly compassionate. The support team of social workers, speech pathologists, and administrators always knew what my son and my family needed before we did, and they figured out how to get it. My son has a scar, and his face is a little uneven, but many people don’t even notice at first glance.
I told myself that I should write thank you notes. The team at NYU changed my son’s life, and helped my family at a time when we really, really needed it. That was six months ago. It’s been on my to-do list for six months. It moves up and down. A few times, when I’ve been really industrious, writing thank you notes has been at the very top, the only thing on the list, and I still didn’t do it.
Last week I admitted to myself that my son will probably need more surgery once his jaw grows to full size. And I thought, Oh my gosh, I had better write those thank you notes or we won’t get into NYU for the next round of surgery.
So tonight, I finally wrote them. There were a lot. Each note made me cry. I thought about how much people did for us. How kind they were. How fragile I was. How tiny my son was. Everything. Every sentence made me cry.
And I learned a bit about procrastination. I had been so angry at myself for waiting so long to write these thank you notes. But I do not procrastinate because I am lazy or unorganized. I am not those things. I procrastinated because I could not bring myself to think about the operation again. I was not emotionally capable of writing the notes until tonight. Sometimes procrastination is the best tool we have for taking care of ourselves.
Thirty is a magic number for the new generation — a time when people want their career path and their family life in place. This is a difficult convergence to pull off, but more and more people are aiming for it.
Jessica Marshall Forbes summarizes these feelings as she describes getting married: “We always knew we wanted to get married before we were thirty. When you’re younger, in college, thirty seems like a turning point. And as I’m nearing that age, the significance hasn’t changed. Thirty is when you’re really grown up. At thirty you should know what you’re doing.”
For both men and women this is a key age to have their career goals in place. Lia Macko is co-author of the book, Midlife Crisis at 30: How the Stakes Have Changed for a New Generation — And What to Do about It Macko writes, “It may be socially acceptable to spend time searching for a professional calling during your twenties, but after 30, that grace period ends fast. Adjectives begin to change — ‘aspiring’ actors/filmmakers/musicians/writers are recast as ‘wannabes’ or ‘dilettantes’.”
However women have a more loaded marker of age thirty: Their biological clock. “Women take into account their reproductive potential is diminishing,” says Jeffrey Arnett, professor at Clark University and author of Emerging Adulthood. “Women think if they marry at thirty they can have two years with their husband and have a kid and then wait to years and have another kid. But if this doesn’t happen then they worry about the impact on their reproductive life.”
The worries are well founded: The chance of birth complications skyrockets after the age of 35. It used to be fashionable to tell women, “Don’t worry about babies. You have time. Concentrate on your career.” But now that the statistics on late motherhood are clearer, fears have set in. For Forbes, the self-imposed deadline for having children has everything to do with medical risk. She says age is not a concern “as long as I’m not getting to the point where complications start.”
So today many women find themselves in a position where they are struggling to line up a grand convergence of career, marriage and motherhood within a couple of years of age thirty. Lia Macko says, “In the past, women had kids when they were lower in the masthead. Now women are making decisions about kids and earning potential and marriage all at the same time and this is specific to their generation.”
This convergence means that it’s the first time in history that a large proportion of women have a big career and small children, and it appears that the combination is almost impossible. For example, sixty percent of women with MBAs are working at home, and an epidemic number of women are leaving corporate life when their children come. Women approaching age thirty face these statistics.
How can women alleviate some of the pressures of turning thirty? For one thing, Macko advises that you “Tune out the cultural white noise” and figure out a plan that will meet your own needs, regardless of the expectations people place on you.
Starting your own business is a great way to ensure that you can control your time as your thirty-year-mark approaches. Elizabeth Cogswell Baskin, author of How to Run Your Business Like a Girl, says that most entrepreneurs she interviewed for her book, “tried to do kids and corporate life and they couldn’t.” But Baskin encourages entrepreneurship at a relatively young age. She says “younger women are smarter about these issues from the get go” and realize before trying that corporate life is not compatible with family life.
Linda Babcock, professor of economics at Carnegie-Mellon University and author of the book, Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide encourages women to manage the convergence of fertility and finances by negotiating up front with their partner. “Ask questions like who will find the nanny and who will change jobs. You might change your mind, but you will set the tone for both parties making an adjustment when the baby comes.” Managing the changes one faces at age thirty is much easier if both partners are committed to absorbing some of the shock.
For those of you who are not in a position of convergence – for example, fielding the annoying question: “So you’re already 30. Where is your husband?” – recognize that all women face crisis issues at 30, it’s just that some issues focus on finding a partner or career and some focus on coping with having found them.
And while everyone has a different opinion about how to make women’s decision points easier, there is unanimous clamor that women must talk. The women who are most successful at navigating these issues are those who help each other, and talk about it with their significant others and their community. Dialogue is the first step toward finding a solution that works: Talk to your friends, and even your enemies – the wider the discussion the better.
I decided to spend the lull at the end of December working on my time management skills. What has happened, though, is I have merely gained a deeper understanding of why my time management has fallen apart.
Here are three strategies that everyone should be doing that I am not:
1. Do the most important thing first.
I have interviewed at least ten productivity experts who have said that this is one of their essential pieces of advice. So I decided to start doing this. But for the past week I have followed through on this commitment less than half the time.
Here is the cause for my failure: Fear. The most important thing of the day always matters the most, or is the hardest for me to do. Otherwise, I would have done it earlier. I am thinking that if I tell you this, then I will see how obvious it is that I have to plow through the fear or I’ll get nothing done.
But here’s a secondary reason I am not doing my most important thing first: I am addicted to the immediate gratification of blog metrics. I love that I can watch my achievements hour by hour. Minute by minute if I am particularly dreading my to do list and the traffic is particularly interesting.
I have a feeling I need to change the way I’m thinking about this problem. Dan Markus, one of the guys who told me how important it is to do the hardest thing first, gave me a suggestion: Treat yourself like you’d treat a kid. No dessert until you eat your dinner. No television until you clean your room. No blog metrics until you write your column.
2. Keep your email organized.
I know you’re supposed to use folders, and Merlin Mann can talk forever about how it’s important to keep your in box empty. So I have a filing system that empties my in box, but it involves arcane routines of renaming files that I transfer to folders I forget about.
So when I was buying the Lifehacker book I noticed that the book people most often bought with it was Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook. So in a vote of confidence for the Lifehacker community, I bought the Outlook book, too.
Some people learn visually. I do not. And to me, the hundreds of screen shots in this book look like one of those puzzles where you try to find what has changed from one picture to the next. Besides that, just renaming one Task category took five pages. (Not that I got to the end, but I did skip ahead to take see where the end would be.)
I decided that my problem is not my task list so I stopped trying to adjust it. And according to the book, having a few more folders for moving mail quickly out of my in box will help. What a relief. Because I really like writing my to do list by hand.
3. Stick to a schedule.
If you don’t have a plan for how you’re going to meet your goals, then you probably won’t meet them. This advice is about to do lists, but also about schedules. You need to control your time so that you are spending it in a way that reflects your values.
I used to be really good at this. One of my strengths, for example, is that I block out 1pm to 8pm for my kids, and I can count on one hand the times I have made an exception to this rule in order to get more work done. But my schedule took a turn for the worst when I started blogging.
I told myself I need to remake my schedule where I block out time to blog each day. (Full disclosure: My posts take me more than three hours each. When I was first investigating blogging I interviewed Dervala Hanley, who is known for lovely writing. She told me she spent two hours on each post and I thought she was crazy to spend that much time on a blog. But now, look who’s crazy.)
Mysteriously, I figured out Outlook’s calendar without reading a book. So I started a calendar in Outlook. I scheduled every minute so I wouldn’t have time to sneak in visits to other bloggers’ metrics. I built in time for all the stuff I am not making time for lately — like getting my columns in before the deadline and spending enough time at the gym to feel like I’m actually doing something there.
My days were looking really good until I saw that I need three days every day to get my stuff done. Then it became clear why I am not sticking to a schedule: I’m not willing to give stuff up. (My husband says, “Give up the blog. That thing is like an online lottery ticket.” This comment, of course, is true. I will ignore it, but its a word of caution for anyone who is thinking of blogging.)
Parkinson’s Law says that our tasks expand to fit the amount of time we allot. (Thanks, Andy) This rings true to me because if I didn’t have kids I would swear that I had to work in the afternoons in order to survive. So I decided that I am not going to cut things out, I’m going to do things faster.
But to be honest, this has not been a rip-roaring success so far. For example, I told myself that I could only spend an hour on my post today. I went to Jason Warner’s blog, Meritocracy, and started thinking about his great statement of purpose that he posted this week. It is full of ideas about where we are with recruiting and what the workplace should provide people, and how we should treat each other. It’s an important post that would take me at least three hours to blog about. So I skipped it.
But believe me, this post that I wrote was no quickie, either.
The need to have regular human moments at work is similar to the need to stand up and stretch on an airplane: Your well-being depends on it. On top of that, a workday with regular face-to-face contact is more energizing than a day full of contacts exclusively via computer and phone.
So get out from behind your computer and have a “human moment” — a term coined by Harvard lecturer Edward M. Hallowell. He defines the human moment as “an authentic psychological encounter that can happen only when two people share the same physical space.”
The human moment is a quality of interaction you don’t get from computers, or even the phone. “In order to really converse with someone, you have to keep reading them– when they look at you, when they smile, when they turn away,” says Jayme Lewin Rich, an occupational therapist who specializes in treating sensory integration dysfunction. In front of a live person our brains read slews of visual cues every second, and we don’t get that opportunity otherwise.
Often the computer encourages superficial attention to streams of data, but talking face-to-face demands focused emotional and intellectual involvement. (This is why, for example, many people with autism love the computer and have little interest in faces.) Visual data about a person is fundamentally different for a brain to process than computer-screen data.
In the article, The Human Moment at Work (subscription) Hallowell presents a wide body of research to show that face-to-face interaction is essential for keeping our brains sharp. For example, deaths are three times higher for socially isolated people than for those with strong connections to others. And researchers at McGill University found that it takes less than a day of no normal contact with the outside world for an adult to start hallucinating.
Even when it’s not such drastic circumstances, talking to a live person can give us a surge of energy in the middle of the workday. “In-person contact stimulates an emotional reaction,” says Lawrence Honig, a neurologist at Columbia University. Bonding hormones are higher when people are face-to-face. And some scientists think that face-to-face contact stimulates the attention and pleasure neurotransmitter dopamine, and serotonin, a neurotransmitter that reduces fear and worry.
This explains why working at the computer or talking on the phone for a long time is as exhausting as staring at the TV. The brain starts to crave rest from input overload and fuel from human contact.
So when you’re feeling tired at work, try creating a human moment for an energy boost. It doesn’t have to be earth-shattering and intimate. It can be short and professional. You just need to be paying attention.