From open office spaces to a focus on collaboration, there can also be a pendulum swing in organizations where sometimes things go too far.
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As I mentioned over the weekend, there are a number of studies exploring this topic of distraction including Udemy In Depth’s 2018 Workplace Distraction Survey. You can read it here. 
 
The report asserts that distractions have an impact on productivity. Some of the distractions noted in that study are talkative co-workers, email and others.
Many of the distractions I hear of in the work of my clients are:

• Unscheduled meetings
• Co-workers dropping by to chat
• Email
• Social media which takes you “down the rabbit hole”
• Materials and information which are not readily accessible and have not been stored in the locations you thought they would be in

What are you doing to minimize the distractions? What do you find distracting?

What conversations are important to have?

​Here are some other articles of interest:

Check out this article from Financial Times – “Digital Distractions are Making Us Dumb and Twitchy” which also includes some great tips from Professor Cal Newport.

Suresh Subamdam’s article on Is Your Work's Communication Channel Turning Your Team Into a Bunch of 'Slack'-ers?

Take a look at Digital Responsibility’s website and ideas on Digital Distraction.

Wishing you all the best,
​Jennifer

This week’s Effective Virtual Conversations tip gets us thinking about what often is the norm, not the outlier- when technology happens. In a virtual setting a core practice is to “always have a back up”. Technology will break down.
Having a back-up is important on many levels. It may include:

• Having another line/service in case your preferred service breaks down
• Communicating to the group what to do in the event of tech failure (i.e. should they try to call in again, and then switch to another platform OR should they look to email to find instructions)
• Having a list of all contacts for the call – this could include email addresses and phone numbers along with your class list
• Having a back-up computer/laptop in case your system goes down (or decides to update)
• Having a back up copy of your presentation loaded to the cloud and/or USB key
• Having a back up copy of your material (print)

 
Remaining calm and moving into contingency mode is key when facing a tech issue. Before anything happens work through your own list of what you will do and write it down. Have these items in a location which you will naturally “go to” in the event of a break-down.

What else is important for you to note around having a back up?
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With best wishes,
Jennifer

This week’s Weekly Journaling Prompt gets you to consider the question “The biggest distractions right now are…”

Udemy In Depth undertook a study entitled the 2018 Workplace Distraction Survey. You can read it here. 

Distractions abound in today’s world – from digital distractions to other. What distractions are you noticing?

Distractions can take their toll on many levels – on our focus, on our stress levels, or our ability to get things done we want. What is the impact of the distractions you are seeing?

Part of stress reduction and productivity is feeling in charge of, or being able to influence, our distractions. What steps can you take to reduce or minimize some of the distractions right now?

Enjoy your journaling,
Jennifer

It’s Friday and time for another FlashbackFriday. I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at April 5th, 2016 to see what I was writing about then.  In March and April of 2016, I was undertaking a series I called the A-Z of Virtual and Remote Team Leadership. On April 5th of 2016, we had arrived at M – which I earmarked as M for MAVERICK. What connotation does Maverick have in your organization today? Is it a good, or a bad thing? Regardless, here’s what I wrote, pointing to the Oxford Dictionary’s definition. How can a dash of “maverick” support innovation in your context right now?

Here’s the post – Teams365 #826:

Today we are at the M in the Virtual and Remote Leadership Series.  One of the most important characteristics I think virtual and remote team leaders can have is that of a maverick. The Oxford Dictionary defines maverick as:
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Maverick: An unorthodox or independent-minded person - Oxford Dictionary
As virtual team leaders our ability to be unorthodox with our thinking, solutions and approaches can be very important, especially if our organization is just starting to embrace virtual teams.

It is likely that developing out of the box solutions will be common place, as is supporting our team members to do similar types of thinking on their own.

As virtual and remote team leaders we are often having to innovate in new areas, and come up with practices and processes that have not existed before. Being a maverick means innovating, AND it also means being respectful in our disruption.

I always think of my last virtual team leadership role where I instituted an annual face-to-face two-day retreat for team members. When I started my role, I asked the office about how often the team got together. The team was based across ten countries, and prior to my start had never met physically in almost 30 years. The lost cost of sharing of experience across these countries, and innovation was apparent. Hobbling together funding from different sources the first year of my leadership, and a lot of flexibility and good will on the part of the team,  I was able to bring people together for three days. The output was immediately recognizable by not only my team but our superiors, and became an easy selling point for the following years' budgets.

Questions to consider:

• What does maverick mean to you? Your organization? Your context?
• What's important about being a maverick?
• What maverick role models do you have?
• What actions would be in service to the team? The organization?

Enjoy your week,
Jennifer

As we step into Quarter 2 it can be useful to do a bit of a review – on the individual level, and also with our teams.

For some individual reflection, take a look at the recent Quarterly Reflection Worksheet I created for the PlanDoTrack series of programming I offer around Planning, Productivity and Remote/Virtual Teams. Take a few minutes to complete that before you get too far into the month.
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At the same time, it can be useful to do a checkpoint around these items:

1. How are we going in our progress to our most important goals? Rate this on a 1-10 and get input across the team?  What will help you move the #s upward?
2. Have we had a recent feedback conversation “both ways” – between leader and team member? What’s going well? What’s not? Be sure to provide positive and constructive feedback.
3. What issues need to be addressed, or have the potential to derail us?
4. What team practices are working well? Consider meetings, social events, peer mentoring, 1-1 meetings etc.
5. What systems are helping with information flow and knowledge sharing?
6. Projects – Where are projects at? What is the status of communication? What project issues require attention? How are they doing according to the spotlight (Red, Yellow, Green)? –Check out this spotlight blog post for more!
7. Matrix relationships 
8. Reporting
9. Finances
10. Other Systems which need attention..

And ANYTHING ELSE?

Best wishes,
​Jennifer

Tip #13 – Get the important stuff out of the way

“A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence.”
— Jim Watkins
 
It is likely that even with the best planning, finding time to execute and get things done can be a challenge. Today’s business context of ongoing change and disruption, means that things can change on a regular basis, requiring ongoing learning and iteration.

Against this backdrop, it can also be important to focus in on items that are moving you, and the business, forward.
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With this in mind, what are the windows you have available (or can create) to get the important things out of the way? This might mean starting your day early, or working late into the night, to focus on projects that require quiet work spaces.

Activity

• Review your monthly or quarterly goals.
• Review your Top 3 or 5 Goals.
• What activities are not getting completed in a regular way?
• What needs to be focused on more?
• When will you schedule this in? For example, is this the first thing you want to do every day? Is it worth arriving at work 30 minutes earlier to make sure it gets completed? Could certain activities be delegated to someone else?
• Break larger tasks down to smaller chunks if you have not done so already. Consider what smaller milestones exist and put these in your schedule.
• What are the regular action steps you will undertake to make it happen? Work backwards noting additional mini-milestones.

Conversation Sparkers

• What are the most important tasks that are going to move your work or business forward?
• When are you scheduling in these?
• What habits are going to help you get the most important things done?

Best,
​Jennifer

We are moving onto productivity tips #8.

“One look at an email can rob you of 15 minutes of focus. One call on your cell phone, one tweet, one instant message can destroy your schedule, forcing you to move meetings, or blow off really important things, like love, and friendship.” -  Jacqueline Leo

The Front Blog has some provocative figures about 2018 email  - They write that in the amount of time we spend checking email in a year, someone could climb Everest twice!  Check out these statistics here!
Taming the inbox is an important part of efficiency in today’s work environment. Email is an essential communication vehicle, but it can disrupt our attention. Becoming more selective and more disciplined with email can go a long way in business success, especially in terms of getting more significant work completed (i.e. projects, new initiatives).
Consider these questions:

• How many emails do you get a day?
• How efficient are you at replying (i.e. how much time does it take to reply)?
• How does email disrupt your focus?

Several pointers around email management include:

• Notice where your email comes from. What emails do you receive? Are there any you want to unsubscribe from?
• Dedicate time to cull your email OR simply archive older ones.
• Consider what filters could support your focus and less time spent on email.
• Streamline. Can any things be batched (i.e. daily summary instead of regular alerts)?
• Turn it off for periods of the day. The disruption an email ping can make could significantly dilute your focus. Would it be useful to establish “check points” during the day?

Activity:

• Review the emails that you have received over the last two weeks. 
• What do you notice?
• How many of them are still outstanding?
• How many are no longer applicable and could be culled by unsubscribing?
• How many could be funneled to their own form?

Conversation Sparkers:

• What’s one tweak you could make to your inbox?
• When are you going to dedicate time for email review?

Enjoy!
​Jennifer

As we start creeping to the close of the year, pressure ramps up to “Get it done!”. There may not seem to be enough hours in the day, or even the rest of the year, to get EVERY. THING. DONE!

Today’s post gets you thinking about a number of “year-end productivity hacks” which bring us back to some of the tried and true prioritization tools:

#1 – Understanding your Pareto Ratio – The 80/20 rule asserts that we get 80% of our results from 20% of our efforts. While it may not be truly 80% it can be very useful to think about the areas that provide the most impact in your work, and the results you are aiming towards.
It can be very useful to understand where we get our impact, particularly at crunch time, so that we know what to say yes to, and what we want to say no to.
 
#2 – Going back to Covey’s Urgent/Important Framework – I have written about how a five day training around Steven Covey’s work as a younger manager more than 15 years ago, still influences my thinking about time management. If you haven’t read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, do it now! With the volume of distractions at a peak (from social media, to tech, to diffuse focus):

• What’s really important to be focusing on now?
• What’s important in the mid-term so that you are setting yourself up for success in the new year?
• What are distractions and time wasters?
  

#3 – What can you delegate and defer?
Delegation continues to be a stretch area for most professionals today. Many times we feel we can’t delegate or we have no one to delegate to? What are the tasks that only you can do? What are the tasks that could be chunked down/broken down, so others might be able to complete?
For more on delegation – check out this LinkedIn article “Your Key To Success: Effective Delegation” I wrote on delegation.

#4 – What is absolutely essential?
Sometimes we really need to get ruthless with  our time, asking “what’s absolutely essential?”. As we get into crunch time, what are the things we need to move to the finish line this year, no matter what? What are the elements that can carry over? What elements need to be put on hold?
 
For more on these prioritization tools, take a look at what I wrote in Teams365 #951 on prioritization.

This week our journaling prompt focuses on the question “The fear that’s holding me back….”
Think about this year. What’s one thing you have not done this year. Why? Why not? What’s held you back from doing this. Make a list of the things that got in the way of doing that one item. Was it fear or some other emotion?
Today’s context and ongoing change leads to a lot of different emotions for our team member. For some it may be fear, for others, it may be feelings of overwhelm, incompetence, or lack of control.
As you journal this week, notice what emotions get activated for you….

Enjoy your reflections!
​Jennifer

Today's Team Building Tip #161 gets you to consider the question "What does disruption mean for the team". In today's business context disruption is everywhere - from digital disruption, to disruption due to changes in industries, to global disruption due to natural disasters.

How is disruption impacting the team?
What strategies has the team been successful with using to navigate the disruption?
What are the changes to working, and results, disruption has had?
What's important for the team to focus on as a result?

Have a great Thursday,
Jennifer