Government Executive - Authors - Joseph Millord

The Unexpected Connection Between Procrastinating and Being Productive

Joseph Millord, Elite Daily — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 09:00:00 -0400

Time management, self-discipline and diligence: These are the virtues to aspire to when it comes to all things work. As for procrastination? Well, that is undoubtedly bad. There’s certainly no debate to be had over that.

Or so you might think.

“I eschewed all of the conventional wisdom on how to stop stalling and start doing. I backburnered all manner of things until after the last possible second. I lost focus (sporadically) and stared off into space, I stepped completely away from the office (not just at lunch), I read, I made personal telephone calls, I tweeted, I tumbld, I even found out which House of Cards character I am,” wrote Fast Company ‘s Lydia Dishman.

Dishman, a reporter who has contributed to the likes of CBS MoneyWatch and The New York Times, was prompted to start a one-week procrastination experiment after a Fast Company colleague wrote about the subject just a few weeks ago. In her piece, “6 Reasons to Embrace Procrastination,” Stephanie Vozza said “structured procrastinators get more done.”

As Dishman put Vozza’s thesis to the test last week, she arrived at her own conclusion: “After 40 hours of a regular work week I made two startling discoveries: 1) I actually get more work done after I stall. 2) Putting things off is harder than I thought.”

Though they go against conventional wisdom, and pretty much everything we’re taught, Dishman’s findings are not all that foreign.

As she notes, there have been a number of people who have come out of the school of contrarianism to try to reverse the bad reputation that procrastination has had for so long. Procrastinating isn’t the end-all-be-all type of catastrophe for your work that it seems.

The key, as is the case with most things, is doing it smarter. Dishman discovered this with most of her routines during the day. The first habit she experimented with was emailing, as she tried an alternative to the pick-up-the-phone-first-thing-in-the-morning policy she usually employed.

“I put off even glancing at the phone until after I’d washed up, dressed and had breakfast,” the Fast Company reporter wrote. “A much calmer entry into the day translated to tackling email more deliberately later. Putting off the task helped me get to zero unread messages in a more concentrated period of time without distractions.”

Though the advancement of smartphones has made email practically ubiquitous -- which essentially makes you available at any time of the day and gives people good reason to expect an answer now, now, NOW -- and often requires us to stop what we’re doing to send a reply, Dishman found joy in the wait. Taking care of herself first, with a peace of mind and the task of responding to a long list of inquiries not a priority, led to an apparent breakthrough. Dishman went into her designated time to take care of messages in a less frantic manner and, presumably, less begrudgingly.

The idea of not entertaining any task until the mind is at ease is an interesting one, indeed, but it doesn’t concern the most chronic form of procrastination. When it comes to procrastinating, the most common issue is likely to be the phenomenon of your mind wandering off into la-la land unexpectedly. Even this, however, can prove helpful.

“Each of these little pauses reset my thinking in short order, making it easier to take on the next task and work to completion,” Dishman said. “It’s also a great stress buster.”

Overall, a common theme emerged from the writer’s experiment: Each time she returned to productivity from an unashamed period of procrastination, Dishman found herself refreshed, inspired and ready, sometimes with new insight gained through deep thought.

Some might argue, though, that the problem isn’t procrastination, per se; it’s not having the freedom to procrastinate “effectively.” After all, Dishman had the luxury of openly embracing procrastination (during what she regarded as an “average” work week) as part of an exercise that was technically done for the purpose of an article, and thus for work. That embrace might be harder to accomplish with bosses barking for results every hour or a professor’s hard deadline looming -- factors which can lead to a lot of pressure.

Most pressure, though, always seems to be self-imposed. That’s a personal opinion, albeit things simply never turn out to be as bad as they seem during our most stressful times.

Furthermore, working in response, this type of stress usually involves trying to engage in hectic, hastened, head-banging-against-the-wall type of work, which seldom ends up resulting in the best product, anyway. Yes, that’s also a personal opinion, but this isn’t: For those who are able to shake off the pressure, embrace a sense of ease and learn to procrastinate effectively, a boom in creativity, amongst other benefits, is likely to be experienced.

“If you go back through history of human culture and take away every invention that was made by someone who was supposed to be doing something else, I’m willing to bet there wouldn’t be a lot left,” said John Perry, author of The Art of Procrastination told Vozza.

This writer is willing to bet the same.

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Being A Better Leader: The Difference Between Reliability And Trust

Joseph Millord, Elite Daily — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 17:23:00 -0400

It’d be convenient to think that the world is a straightforward place, especially for those of us who are either in or aspire to be in positions of power in any capacity.

Whether we’re talking about a federal managers or entrepreneurs gathering a team for their next startup, we might like to think that what goes into success comes down to two things: finding people who produce good work and, as the authority, making sure things stay that way.

Author Simon Sinek, however, begs to differ. In a TED talk on leadership, he provides a compelling argument that trust is not only the lifeblood of success, but that being a leader goes well beyond simply fulfilling the expectations of a leader.

“Make no mistake of it,” Sinek says. “Trust is a feeling, a distinctly human experience. Simply doing everything that you promised you’re going to does not mean that people will trust you, it just means that you’re reliable. And we all have friends who are total screw ups and yet we still trust them. Trust comes from a sense of common values and belief.”

Sinek is the writer behind the book “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Action.” He is also a motivational speaker who has given many popular speeches on the subject of leadership, including this separate TED talk on the art of inspiring people to action.

Production and results are indications of the progression of any organization, no doubt, but Sinek says that focus should also be afforded to something less tangible, but perhaps much greater. He says it is trust that has the ability to inspire, push and motivate people to not simply succeed, but to act in ways that typically lead to revolutionary success.

“The reason trust is important is because when we’re surrounded by people who believe what we believe, we’re more confident to take risks,” the New Jersey native said. “We’re more confident to experiment, which requires failure by the way, we’re more confident to go off and explore knowing that there is someone from within our community, someone who believes what we believe, someone we trust and who trusts us who will watch our back, help us when we fall over and watch our stuff and look after our children while we’re gone.”

This is no groundbreaking discovery, and neither is his advice that has been re-popularized by the news. Simon Sinek did indeed speak these words over two years ago, but in a world that is seeing tech startups spring up literally everyday, with equally interesting stories and ambitions, it might be important to revisit the foundations that the legends of the industry embodied.

Steve Jobs, who left Apple and had to come back, Howard Schultz, who left Starbucks and had to come back, and Michael Dell, who left Dell and had to come back, were all businessmen who were not only good at what they did but, as Sinek reminds us, but also fueled their companies to the top by promoting visions that they got everyone at their companies to believe in — the significance of this ethic and their influence underlined by the fact that all of their companiesneeded them to return.

It’s one thing to be a consistently fantastic entrepreneur, but it’s a completely different thing to harness the power of trust. Trust is the idea that, lest we forget, is so strong that it influences people’s decision making in such big ways, like parents placing their kids in the hands of familiar teens rather than anonymous seasoned professionals.

“Think about that for a second,” Sinek says. “We’d rather trust our children, our most valuable possession on the planet, with somebody from within our community, with no experience over somebody with vast amounts of experience but we have no idea where they’re from or what they believe. Then why do we do it differently at work?”

The suggestion that Sinek makes is simple. If anyone aims to replicate the revolutionary success or, at the very least, the effectiveness of the greatest leaders of our time, he or she must accept that it’s important to consider the questions that those legends considered themselves.

“Why are we so preoccupied with someone’s resume, and where they’ve worked and what they’ve done for our competition?” Sinek asks. “And yet we never think to consider what they believe where they’re from. How can we trust them, how can they trust us?”

None of this goes to say that experience doesn’t matter but, after considering Sinek’s words, a better understanding of what it takes to succeed might follow and that understanding might align with something like this: once we marry a search for the right people (skilled people, good people) fueled by the the goal of finding common ground, motivation and beliefs between us, we will understand what great leadership is because it’s important to remember…

“Leadership tells us why we’re here in the first place, it reminds us why we came here. Authority tells us what to do or what goal to achieve.”

Image via Nicoleta Raftu/Shutterstock.com

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