set your priorities by design

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.” -  Viktor Frankl

The great and unfortunate reality of life is there are vastly more things expected of us, asked of us, and hoped for by us than we can possibly do with our limited time and resources. 

It is tempting to prioritize everything. But when we do this, we end up having no priorities. Instead, we find ourselves prioritizing whatever is in front of us.

This undisciplined approach leads to our priorities being set by default. The antidote, of course, is to set your priorities by design. 

Here are three steps (and the questions to ask) that can help you when you are trying to prioritize. They work when applied to your business, your career, or your family:

1. Realize I can’t do everything. (What’s Important to me?)
2. Focus on areas where I can do the most good. (Where will my effort be best spent?) 
3. List possible actions I can take that will make a difference. (What can I do?)

When we focus on just a few important things, our effort makes a bigger difference and is more meaningful. 

Greg McKeown

1 Minute Wednesday. October 5, 2022

the quest for meaningful work

The quest for meaningful work is a central and defining feature of organizational life. For decades, employees have reported that the meaningfulness of work - the perception that daily responsibilities have broader significance - is more important than any other occupational feature, including income, job security, and the opportunity for career advancement. When day-to-day activities are marked by a deep sense of significance, individuals are poised not only to thrive but to weather the most daunting elements of employment, including challenging tasks, low wages, and stigmatized work. Likewise, the absence of meaningfulness has powerful ramifications, as one of the primary reasons employees disengage from their work is because it lacks significance.

"I'm Not Mopping the Floors, I'm Putting a Man on the Moon": How NASA Leaders Enhanced the Meaningfulness of Work by Changing the Meaning of Work. by Andrew M. Carton. Administrative Science Quarterly. 2018. Vol. 63(2)323-369

stages of culture

Stages of culture: Suffer -> Survive -> Thrive

Marcella Bremer

Suffer, survive or thrive in organizational culture? - Leadership & Change Magazine
 

milestones can become millstones

One of the characteristics of modern life seems to be that we are moving at an ever-increasing rate, regardless of turbulence or obstacles. 

Let’s be honest; it’s rather easy to be busy. We all can think up a list of tasks that will overwhelm our schedules. Some might even think that their self-worth depends on the length of their to-do list. They flood the open spaces in their time with lists of meetings and minutia—even during times of stress and fatigue. Because they unnecessarily complicate their lives, they often feel increased frustration, diminished joy, and too little sense of meaning in their lives.

It is said that any virtue when taken to an extreme can become a vice. Overscheduling our days would certainly qualify for this. There comes a point where milestones can become millstones and ambitions, albatrosses around our necks.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf
"Of Things That Matter Most," General Conference October 2010

work-life balance

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.  -  L.P. Jacks

When people use the phrase "work-life balance," most of them imagine a seesaw or a scale. On one end is "work," and on the other end is "life." The two are linked in such a way that everything is a tradeoff. If work is up, life is down. If life is up, work is down.

More of one means less of the other.

This is insane.

"Work-life balance" implies that work is separate from living a life, or that it's something to be balanced against your life. That's strange, given that most people spend more time working every day than they do in any other activity. If all of those hours are not part of life, then something is deeply wrong.

Life and work are not two enemies battling for our limited attention. In fact, the opposite tends to be the case. When we have meaningful, fulfilling, purposeful work, it radiates through out lives. And when we have happy, secure, loving relationships, they, too, radiate through our lives. 

The balance we seek is not that of a seesaw, but of a symphony, Every element of a symphony has a role to play: sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, sometimes silent, sometimes solo. The balance we seek is not for every instrument to be played in moderation at every moment - that's just a long, boring honk - but for a complementary relationship where each instrument is played at the right pitch and the right intensity, with the right phrasing and the right tempo. 

At certain times, particular aspects of our lives come to the fore, while others fall into the background. As new harmonies emerge, we can create something beautiful.

"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven."

Resilience: Hard-won Wisdom for Living a Better Life by Eric Greitens. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2015. p.257

the meaning of a sacrifice

Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how can I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering — to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

Viktor Frankl

Man's Search for Meaning. 1946.

a willing sacrifice or simply suffering

In 2009, two US professors set out to study zookeepers and aquarium workers in an effort to discover what kept them motivated at work.

The results pointed to an overwhelming similarity: The keepers gained a deep sense of meaning from their jobs. It didn’t matter that caring for animals was extremely badly paid and offered little career advancement, or that many of the actual tasks involved could be classified as “dirty work”—cleaning up feces, chopping vegetables, scrubbing floors. The zookeepers, most of whom were highly educated, felt that they were fulfilling a calling, and in doing so were extremely dedicated, often volunteering for months before even beginning to be paid, and rarely quitting....

The difference between finding a situation bearable—possibly, indeed, happy—and unbearable is about whether we experience ourselves as performing a willing sacrifice, or simply as suffering. When working hard tips over into working too hard, or with too little reward, sacrifice has slipped into suffering.... “Sacrifice might be hurtful and exhausting, but it is a conscious choice,” (Gianpiero Petriglieri, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD) writes. “Suffering is the result of feeling that we cannot slow down or else we will be shamed and lose control. Sacrifice makes us who we are. Suffering keeps us captive.”

The zookeepers in the 2009 research saw themselves as performing a willing sacrifice—of high pay, or status, or a warm office to work in rather than a pen. They experienced those things, but didn’t seem to resent their work, because they believed the tradeoff was worthwhile.

Cassie Werber

"The key to loving your job in the age of burnout." Quartz. April 7, 2019

set a vision and connect the dots

It's vital that once-in-a-career leaders set a compelling, inspiring vision that focuses employees and encourages the expenditure of their discretionary energy. It should be a vision grounded in strategic objectives and the values of the company.

When you set such a vision, employees show up with conviction and are passionate about building something together that makes a difference in something that matters. In the absence of a compelling vision, employees can flounder. Think about yourself and what it's like to work in a place that has no clear, inspiring vision--you feel rudderless.

It's just as important that the vision is then consistently communicated and that the leader helps each employee understand what their unique role is in delivering the vision.

Scott Mautz

"Developing These 5 Habits Will Make You a Once-in-a-Career Leader to Employees" by Scott Mautz. Inc. Jun 19, 2018.

create meaning

Understand that meaning is what motivates employees in a manner that sustains. Foster meaning through actions such as being clear on the organization's purpose, encouraging each employee to define the legacy they want to leave behind, and by granting large swaths of autonomy. You also create meaning for employees when you invest in their personal growth and development and help foster their sense of competence and self-esteem.  

You can help your employees become better versions of themselves and in so doing become a better version of yourself.

Scott Mautz

"Developing These 5 Habits Will Make You a Once-in-a-Career Leader to Employees" by Scott Mautz. Inc. Jun 19, 2018.

it's not really what we want

The most valuable thing is every moment you have with your relative, your spouse, your friend - that is the most valuable thing. It's what we really want. We all want it desperately and we don't know that sometimes when we're younger. We think we want more money. We think we want a bigger contract. We want a bigger car. We want to win whatever we win. It's not really what we want. Those are fun things along the way but we really just want love. 

Bob Hurley

"Bob Hurley, Hurley International Founder. #130" by Dr. Michael Gervais. Finding Mastery. July 19, 2018.

work that is straightforwardly useful

The television show “Deadliest Catch” depicts commercial crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. Another, “Dirty Jobs,” shows all kinds of grueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys for a living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. “Dilbert,” “The Office” and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs.

Is there a more “real” alternative (short of inseminating turkeys)?

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

Matthew B. Crawford

"The Case for Working With Your Hands," New York Times Magazine. May 24, 2009. p.36

crucibles of leadership

[O]ne of the most reliable indicators and predictors of true leadership is an individual’s ability to find meaning in negative events and to learn from even the most trying circumstances. Put another way, the skills required to conquer adversity and emerge stronger and more committed than ever are the same ones that make for extraordinary leaders…. 

We came to call the experiences that shape leaders “crucibles,” after the vessels medieval alchemists used in their attempts to turn base metals into gold. For the leaders we interviewed, the crucible experience was a trial and a test, a point of deep self-reflection that forced them to question who they were and what mattered to them. It required them to examine their values, question their assumptions, hone their judgment. And, invariably, they emerged from the crucible stronger and more sure of themselves and their purpose—changed in some fundamental way….

So, what allow[s]… people to not only cope with these difficult situations but also learn from them? We believe that great leaders possess four essential skills, and, we were surprised to learn, these happen to be the same skills that allow a person to find meaning in what could be a debilitating experience. First is the ability to engage others in shared meaning…. Second is a distinctive and compelling voice…. Third is a sense of integrity (including a strong set of values). 

But by far the most critical skill of the four is what we call “adaptive capacity.” This is, in essence, applied creativity—an almost magical ability to transcend adversity, with all its attendant stresses, and to emerge stronger than before. It’s composed of two primary qualities: the ability to grasp context, and hardiness. The ability to grasp context implies an ability to weigh a welter of factors, ranging from how very different groups of people will interpret a gesture to being able to put a situation in perspective. Without this, leaders are utterly lost, because they cannot connect with their constituents….

It is the combination of hardiness and ability to grasp context that, above all, allows a person to not only survive an ordeal, but to learn from it, and to emerge stronger, more engaged, and more committed than ever. These attributes allow leaders to grow from their crucibles, instead of being destroyed by them—to find opportunity where others might find only despair. This is the stuff of true leadership.

Warren Bennis and Robert J. Thomas

"Crucibles of Leadership" Harvard Business Review. September 2002

cultivate resilience

According to experts, the following 11 activities help cultivate resilience:

1. Having a core set of beliefs that nothing can shake.
2. Finding meaning in whatever stressful or traumatic thing that has happened.
3. Maintaining a positive outlook.
4. Taking cues from someone else who is especially resilient.
5. Not running away from things that scare you: Face them.
6. Reaching out for support when things go haywire.
7. Learning new things as often as you can.
8. Having an exercise regimen you’ll stick to.
9. Not beating yourself up or dwelling on the past.
10. Recognizing what makes you uniquely strong—and owning it.
11. Practicing mindfulness.

Mindfulness deserves a special mention. In a study, Marines who underwent an eight-week course in mindfulness showed great gains in resilience. No only did their heart rate and breathing rate show less reactivity when faced with a stressful situation, their brains changed too: They showed lower activation in the region of the brain associated with emotional reactions. By the end of training, their brains looked more resilient.


Samantha Boardman M.D.
"Bounce Back: 11 Ways to be More Resilient: Data-driven insights to help deal with stress." Psychology Today. 8/14/2015

good leaders motivate

Good leaders motivate people in a variety of ways. First, they always articulate the organization's vision in a manner that stresses the values of the audience they are addressing. This makes the work important to those individuals. Leaders also regularly involve people in deciding how to achieve the organization's vision (or the part most relevant to a particular individual). This gives people a sense of control. Another important motivational technique is to support employee efforts to realize the vision by providing coaching, feedback, and role modeling, thereby helping people grow professionally and enhancing their self-esteem. Finally, good leaders recognize and reward success, which not only gives people a sense of accomplishment but also makes them feel like they belong to an organization that cares about them. When all this is done, the work itself becomes intrinsically motivating.

John P. Kotter

"What Leaders Really Do.” Harvard Business Review. 1990.

a hedge against emptiness

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter. 

Tim Kreider

"The ‘Busy’ Trap." The New York Times. June 30, 2012.