Today’s Tuesday Reading, Slow Down, is an essay by Jason Murray, Network Architect at the Washington University in St. Louis. [He may be reached at jemurray@wustl.edu.]
His essay first appeared as a program reflection earlier this year.
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." — Ferris Bueller
I don’t know of anyone who hasn’t had some difficulty successfully meeting some, or even most, of his or her goals. Perhaps it is a large, long project and although you were enthusiastic about the project at the beginning, by the mid-point, it seems dull and boring. Or, perhaps it is a simple task you need to complete, but it’s boring or time consuming and you keep ignoring it.
Stop it! It simply isn't good for you.
In last week’s Tuesday Reading, Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity, Shane Anderson, talked about his multitasking in meetings in order to meet deadlines and complete his work. He discovered, when he stopped multitasking, that there was a lot of important content in the meetings that he simply was unaware of because at that moment his brain was otherwise engaged.
Today’s Tuesday Reading, Busyness as a Proxy for Productivity, is an essay by Shane Anderson, Director, Solution Architecture in the Business Solutions Group at Yale Information Services. The essay first appeared as a program reflection earlier this year.
Before I began the MOR Leaders Program, I was struggling to get important work done. I was going from meeting to meeting with no transition time. I was chronically late to meetings. I was “multi-tasking” in meetings to meet deadlines and complete my work. I was stressed and people knew it.
Most of us firmly believe that there is a linear relationship between the hours we work and the productive results that we generate, at least to the point of sheer physical exhaustion. Research has begun to show, however, that it’s more complicated than that. That, in fact, the stressors that keep us from focusing and generating results, kick in much earlier.
I have it, and so do many of you to a more or lesser degree.
Attention Deficit Trait (ADT) is a term used to describe the effects of a persistent state of information overload that can be generated in our digital world. Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell first used this term in his 2005 Harvard Business Review essay, Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform.
Over that past two years, the Tuesday Reading has focused twice on difficult conversations, both with others, Managing Difficult Conversations, and in the form of self-talk, Neuroscience – Managing Self-Talk.
Practice is a word that is frequently used in leadership development. For example, we can use practice to indicate engagement in a profession – I have a practice in engineering; or to indicate development of a skill – I habitually practice my listening skills; or to signify continual development of a skill – I practice the piano for four hours each day so that I can continue to hone my skills for performing as a concert pianist.
There is lots of advice available on running meetings (for our purpose an intentional gathering of two or more people), two examples of which are the MOR Meeting Jogger and the essay “How to Run a Meeting Like Google,” listed among the references below. However, I’ve found little organized thought about the steps that a leader needs to take after the meeting is over.
Today’s essay provides some advice on this issue. But first, a review on “how to run a meeting:”
Before the meeting:
Today’s Tuesday Reading is Nancy Koehn’s Whiteboard Session, The Ingredients of Great Leadership (a 4 minute video). Professor Koehn, a historian, is the James E.
