Posts Tagged ‘work’
Carpe Diem or Slow Down and Smell The Roses?
I think Alan Watts might have decried Carpe Diem. Seize the day! He would have teased us for being in hurry and not savoring the moment.
Living in The Now is So Very Hard to Do
Living in the now, living mindfully, is very hard for Western-reared people. Though we are here, now, we constantly worry about what happened last year, last month, last week, yesterday. And when we are not occupying ourselves with our past, we worry about the future. I must do this. I must prevent that! We have no time left for now.
We are also pretty suspicious about living now. It seems self-indulgent to just stop and enjoy my coffee. I rather suspect that we in the West interpret being mindful to living what Seligman pleasurably, as opposed to living with engagement and meaning. We are obsessed with children eating marshmallows, or not, as the case may be. The reality is that we are obsessed with marshmallows!
We Desperately Want to Live in The Now
Alan Watts’ philosophy challenges us because it is alien to us. But we seek it. The idea of picking three tasks to do a day in an agile sprint or a personal kanban is a bid, I think, to justify our deep need to pay attention to what we are doing.
3 Videos on Alan Watts Speaking about Play & Work
I was brought up within a Western frame of thinking so I will stop here and embed the videos. Each is about 10 minutes long, so maybe budget 40 minutes. Know that you are a child of this age and that you will find it hard to block 40 minutes and to sit still that long. Make some coffee, find a comfortable chair, put a pen and pad next to you for the extraneous thoughts that will pop into your mind, and take the opportunity to relax ~ to deeply relax in the company of a man who knew how to enjoy life.
Hat-tip: These videos were posted on YouTube by Broodbox
#1 my career is a journey to find my people
A good performer jumps on stage, looks out at the audience, and thinks, “Here I am!”
A great performer jumps on stage, looks out at the audience, and thinks, “There you are!”
Steve Rapson from Art of the Solo Performer
contributed by DW from Connecticut, USA
and for #2 thru #1001 visit Music Thoughts
I know my institutions and can read their behavior
Many years ago, I friend of mine was negotiating his salary with his employer. To aid his efforts, he paid a friend who was an employment agent to advertise a job just like his and to offer a wonderful package.
My students at the time were all excited. The advertisement vindicated their choice of major. Yes, if they worked hard, they could follow an institutional path and be rich!!
Not even knowing my friend’s devious scheme (I found out later), I dismissed the advertisement with a contemptuous, “It’s a scam”.
See, I knew three things that my students didn’t know:
- The prevailing salary rates, not just in my profession, but in sister professions of accounting, marketing, etc. I knew what the market thought was reasonable.
- Business conditions and the amount of gross profit available for institutional careers (you know the one’s guaranteed by the taxpayer no matter how much you mess up)
- That people run institutions lie.
Before I worked as a work & organizational psychologist, I too thought institutions were honorable
I remember the first time I fell for an institutional scam. It was a painful experience and it took me years to get over it.
We trust institutions
When we are young, we believe that institutional leaders are honorable. Institutional leaders go to great lengths to make us believe that because that is their job. After all an institution is only an institution if it is stable and trusted. So they will tell you anything to have you believe they have done their job.
But we should remember that to check whether they are trustworthy
And that is why we must not trust them. We must ask for evidence. Hard, cold evidence. What are the career paths in the organization? Where are the statistics? What are the future scenarios for the organization? Can you look at them?
An institutional leader cannot use his own spin as evidence
Lord Mandelson is doing the right thing by making universities show students the destinations of graduates An institutional leader cannot hold up his own spin as evidence that he has succeeded in making order and stability for us. He was to show us the evidence.
In the days of the internet, data on the institution’s performance should be freely available
And I am afraid that if that in the days of the internet that if that evidence is not freely available on the internet in slurpable form – meaning that you can download the input data, not the processed data – then they obviously have something to hide.
Harsh words, I know
But remember my friend, and remember how my students were taken in.
Ask questions and the first question is ~ what happens when I ask?
First sign of scoundrels running the organization
If they don’t want to answer, or if they set up a meeting where we are doing all the answering and our questions come after they have made up their minds, then they are frauds. Then they are frauds and and we have found them out.
Disappointing, of course. Doubly disappointing. Trebly disappointing.
- We don’t get what we want.
- Institutions by definition should be honorable. So we don’t get what we want AND we know we have frauds in our midst.
- Institutions are usually paid for by the taxpayer. We don’t get what we want, we know you are trying to cheat us AND we are paying for you.
My priorities when you use public money to cheat me
Hmmph. Well for now, my priority must be to get what I need and want. Then I will participate to clear out the rotten institutions. Then I will think about recovering my money from you.
Is that the right order?
For the young & inexperienced
And if you are young and inexperienced, stop trusting institutions who don’t trust you with hard, cold data. Spin that they have done their job of making a safe, orderly environment for you is not evidence. Ask for the evidence. If they don’t have it, act accordingly ~ warily ~ get what you need and in due course, expose their shenanigans.
Day Two at Xoozya
I strolled into Xoozya on my second day planning to spend the whole morning quietly in my office exploring the communication system and making the list of skills I thought I should maintain and those I thought I should learn in the near to medium future.
Crisis is the patron of procrastination
On my door was a yellow sticky, “Help, we have a proposal due today and we may not get it in on time. Could you help out? We need help proofing. Mary, @maryjane”. I unlocked my door and dumped my keys and bag in the bottom filing cabinet drawer, powered up my desktop, and searched for @maryjane. Games designer putting in a proposal to use games as a research tool. West block. I picked up the phone and said I would be right over. Nothing like an emergency to aid a little procrastination.
Flu – how clean is this desk?
I grabbed a pack of tissues and wipes – this is the year of the great flu epidemic and office desks are notoriously unhygenic – locked the door behind me, and headed out to the west block in search of @maryjane and her team. 7 grueling hours later, we’ve converted the files into pdf and sent them off.
Work-bingeing
Where did Day Two go? Tired and no further forward. That’s a terrible feeling isn’t it, and the fatigue after a work-binge is awful. We want to work but can’t think straight. For that matter, we can barely remember what we were doing before.
7x as productive
We don’t often apply ‘industrial management’ ideas to creativity but “Boise” has done. He studied the productivity of academics. People who work little and often are 7x more productive than people who binge-work. Binge work is disruptive. We ‘come down’ emotionally and physically, feel terrible and need time to recover. We also have to spend time picking up the threads of what we are doing.
Little-and-often
Little and often is the golden rule. Write every day. Work on your main project every day. Gather a few resources for the next project. Spit and polish and go home!
Go home!
Oh, I am so irritated. I’ve been doing tax returns all day. They have to be one of the most irritating things in life, and not because someone is taking money off us. They are irritating because they are convoluted, fiddly, and complicated.
There are plenty of other complicated things in life too. Airports with signs that send you anywhere except where you want to go. Bosses who change their minds quicker than change their socks. And road signs! Zemanta, the Firefox Addon which searches the web while you write your blog, found this humbdinger of signage from Toronto, dubbed ‘The Audacity of Nope‘.
The opposite of complicated is complex
Instead of the stop-start sensation we get when details are allowed to disrupt the flow of the whole, complexity is when the parts come together to make something bigger themselves – like the mexican wave in a home crowd.
Is eliminating complicatedness and creating complexity the essence of professional life?
Do architects create buildings where we flow, never having to stop and scratch our heads, or to backtrack?
Do brilliant writers grab attention our attention in the first line and take us with them into a world where we follow the story without distraction from out of place detail?
Do leaders describe our group accomplishment, and draw us into a collective adventure, to play our part without constant prodding and cajoling?
How do you create complexity in your work?
In what ways do you help us experience the whole where parts fit in without discord?
- What is the ‘whole’ thing that you make? If you can’t name it, can you visualize it, or hear it?
- What are the essential parts of the whole, and the linkages between the parts that are essential to form the whole?
- What are the signs that you look out for that the whole is ‘forming’, or ‘not forming’, as it should?
- What are the extra bits of help that from time-to-time you add for the whole to come to fruition?
I’m interested in the complexity you manage, and the beautiful and satisfying experiences you add to the world.
Come with me
Share your experiences with us?
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- Gadling Take Five: Oct. 17–Oct. 23 (gadling.com)
How do you explain the simultaneity principle of positive psychology?
Last week, I gave a talk on positive psychology to psychology students at the University of Buckingham. I structured the talk around the five principles of appreciative inquiry which I used to explore positive psychology and the poetry of David Whyte some months ago.
As I linked each principle to what we might do in our lives, when we coach others, and when we design organizations, I felt a little inadequate on the simultaneity principle.
How can we simply explain ideas of emergence and exploring one’s relationship with the world to beginners in our field?
Is curiosity the quality we are hoping to create in our approach to life? Is curiosity a virtue to be engendered in organizations as part of job design? Read the rest of this entry »
Happy Britain, but not at work?
Posted April 28, 2008
on:- Image via Wikipedia
Yesterday, The Independent published its counter to the Rich List: the Happy List.
Did I miss the happy workplaces? Are work and happiness antithetical?
I am dreaming of a sandwich where the filling appreciates the bread and the bread celebrates the filling.
David Whyte on YouTube
Posted April 26, 2008
on:Hat-tip: Sally. Thank you.
UPDATE: David Whyte is a English poet who now resides in Washington, USA. Marine biologist, NGO worker and poet, David Whyte is a resource for anyone who is interested the meaning of work in our time. He writes on our lost sense of meaning and how to recover it by reaching out to all that is around us.
His books and CD’s are available on Amazon.
This link is to one of his rare appearances on YouTube.
3 fresh ideas in management
Posted April 12, 2008
on:1 Flow
I love flow. I know some people who think it is great to be in flow, or in the zone, for half-an-hour a day. I am a flow junkie. I go for all 24 hours counting a good sleep as good flow.
2 Crossing the Rubicon
But there is something I love more.
That is the rush when you have a crystal clear idea that you know will work and that is, in that instant, so obvious.
What is the name for that?
I know Peter Gollwitzer, the psychologist calls it “crossing the rubicon” – moving from wish to intent.
3 Corporate anthropology
This corporate anthropologist, studies the use of mobile phones by poor people and travels around the world studying the way phones are used.
My questions to you?
Why don’t we study flow a lot more than we do?
Why don’t we study people at work they way this guy studies phones?
Why aren’t we interested in why and when work is blissful and fun?
Why are aren’t we interested in making jobs as enjoyable as Nokia tries to make its phones?
I could do spend all day trying to make work fun and never get tired of it!! Could you? Do you?
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