Corporate Idealist

photo credit: the_vampire_hanna

When we feel out of balance, it’s usually because we can’t keep things straight – our priorities, our calendar, our free time. So, what are we to do if we’re really trying our best to keep work and life balanced?

There’s no shortage of systems and methods out there for planning, prioritizing and predicting. Here’s a quick list (although admittedly not comprehensive) of some methods that may help:

• Getting Things Done – The gold standard in workflow and information management. Many folks swear by David Allen’s system.
• Old-fashioned pad and pen – Whether it’s a Moleskine or a steno pad, many people still like to write down what needs doing and scratch it off when it’s done.
• Day Grid Balancer – A simple checklist that allows for prioritization, this free download sample can help you set priorities.
• Assorted to do lists – Whether you use your inbox to manage tasks or an iPhone app that helps you remember what needs doing, handy add ons and services like Remember the Milk can keep things straight for you.

What do you use to keep things straight? In a world where so much needs doing and it can be so easy to get bogged down by both the mundane and the ultimate, share with us how you keep up with it all.

photo credit: dpadua

A few days ago, I was chatting with a friend over dinner about productivity methodologies. We talked about Getting Things Done, Franklin Covey, and a handful of other approaches and schools of thought. One that I mentioned, and which started an interesting side discussion, was a system called Life Balance.

For a while, I used the Life Balance software zealously, because it asks you to assess your “big rocks” type of life goals and focus areas, and then apply continuous balancing, as aided by the software, between the actions that help you progress in those areas. As someone who juggles quite a few avocations (blogging, obviously, and songwriting, just to name a few) in addition to my professional career and personal life, this made a lot of sense to me.

Unfortunately, as I told my friend, I found myself gaming the system. When the software dutifully reminded me that it had been three days since I last checked off “Spend time writing a song,” I knew I had other things I needed to get done first, and would raise the priority of other tasks to compete with songwriting, or whatever else was at the top of the list. My reaction to what the software showed me about my own prioritization and follow-through was that I was hopelessly out of balance and a victim of my own overcommitment.

And possibly that was true. But what my friend and I agreed was that priorities are often in flux, and being “out of balance” for a relatively short period of time to accomplish major goals can still be in balance, in the greater scheme of life goals. So when you’re, say, starting up a business and you regularly sacrifice evening and weekend leisure to ensure your new venture’s success, you could argue that what you’re really doing is prioritizing the leisure in your future ahead of the leisure in your present. And all in all, perhaps there’s still a kind of life balance in that.

(For the record, some time ago, I switched to using Remember the Milk for all my task organization, which with its highly customizable tagging and smart lists, allows me to be a little more fickle about the particular organization methodology I employ at any given time. I’m also a huge fan of Evernote for all my note taking and mental organization needs. Yes, I’m kind of a productivity tools geek.)

What time management approach do you use? How have you dealt with imbalances in your life? Tell us in the comments.

photo credit: Lanana

Do you ever look around and wonder when the work environment became so hostile to your value system? There are several ways to take back the wheel of your own ship, despite the choppy waters. One way is as simple as revisiting your college or university.

I spent this past weekend with six good friends from college. We started an annual summer reunion about five years ago, and each reconnection is richer and deeper than the last. Every annual weekend is now like a seminar in life as we share personal challenges, strategies and solutions.

Not everyone is still in touch with friends from school; myself, I went through several years of being disconnected and wondering if all of those memories were but a dream. But one way I found my way back was by going to campus, simply to walk the grounds and to put my heart and mind back in the place of my 20 year old self.

It was rather astonishing, the immediate immersion back into a way of thinking about the world that was more open, more full of possibility, more idealistic in the very best sense of the word.

I found that by allowing myself back into the place where my highest ideals were first established, I was instantly stronger and more directed in my own thinking about my work. I had a clarity and a commitment that the middle-aged adult world, despite its picking away, could not claim.

When you are feeling separated from your highest ideals, try this — even if it’s been decades, find a way to touch your college community. I think you’ll find it’s not so hard to embrace again your own belief in the best of who you and others can be.

photo credit: tm_lv

My dad worked 38 years with the same employer. I know there were times he thought about going elsewhere, but since he didn’t have a college degree, he always felt limited by what he thought wouldn’t be available to him.

I, on the other hand, have held a lot of jobs, and most of them were for less than a full year. Some were even 6 months or less. (A few have even been 3 or 4 weeks, but those were generally contracts or really bad fits.) In the earlier years of my professional life, my dad regarded my “job-hopping” with some anxiety and counseled me to stick it out longer with each employer. After a while, though, he began to recognize that I was doing good work and not leaving my employers in a lurch,  that I had a different role in most of these companies than the one he had with his, and that I was more comfortable with change than most people seem to be.

I bring this up to ask this question: do you know what your role is at your workplace? Are you a long-term fit, or are you there to fulfill a more short-term mission?

It’s an important question to ask yourself occasionally, as it may change from time to time. Company cultures do evolve as their leadership and the markets they serve evolve. Subtle changes in management two or three levels up can have ripple effects on your surroundings. And what might have started out seeming like a perfect long-term fit can, over time, become ill-suited to your goals and ideals.

In much of the marketplace, moving from job to job after a year or more is rarely considered suspect anymore. Under a year in each job, though, and you’re at risk of being labeled a “job-hopper.” If you don’t think that’s a weird bias for corporate America to have, ask yourself this: do we have even a quasi-derogative term in corporate parlance for someone who stays in an ill-fitting work environment far longer than they should? Why not?

It’s certainly true that hiring employees can be an expensive process, and training them even more costly. Some estimates put the cost at 1.5x to 3x the cost of the employee’s salary. So when employees leave after only a short tenure, it can adversely affect a company’s bottom line. But employees who make themselves too comfortable after years of service, consider themselves too senior to downsize, and become locked into an outdated view of “the way things are done” come with a cost as well. (It’s a cost that’s more difficult to quantify, and more difficult to find studies about, but the discussion is out there.)

Recently, I’ve had a series of phone interviews as a job candidate. I hadn’t been pursuing a new job (I’d already started a company of my own doing web marketing strategy and services) but I was gladly entertaining the conversations because it’s a company I really respect and, truly, you just never know. But I was struck by the fact that every interviewer asked me about why I had a history of “job hopping.”

As I explained to the folks I was interviewing with, my role in most of my previous jobs was, whether explicitly or implicitly, that of a change agent. And a change agent, by nature, doesn’t generally hold a long-term role inside a company. And in most cases, by the time I left each company, even after some of the shortest tenures, I felt that I had achieved what I was there to do. (By the way, as a side interviewing tip: the tie-in with the job I was interviewing for was that it was a consultant position, and my frequent role as change agent makes pretty good sense in that context. I wasn’t lying or rationalizing at all, but having a way to align your story with the story of the job you’re interviewing for really helps overcome anti-job-hopper biases.)

Could I have articulated at the outset of each of those jobs what I was there to do? Probably not. But that doesn’t change the fact that those companies and I each met at times when we needed each other. And I have, as a result, developed a skill for sizing up a company’s situation and helping it improve.

We each have a purpose in our professional lives, and our roles at work should reflect that, even if it becomes inconvenient to explain to future employers. As Penelope Trunk pointed out when she wrote about job hopping a few years ago:

A resume is not a laundry list of job and duties. It’s a document about a story. Your resume needs to show the story of a person who contributes in large ways wherever you go.

No one chooses at the outset to take on a role as a mindless cog in a machine, yet some of the compromises we are asked to make in the name of seniority require selectively ignoring parts of our life goals or ideals. We all owe it to ourselves to perform periodic checks of how well our roles suit us, and answer ourselves honestly.

What are your thoughts on knowing your role within your company? Thoughts on job-hopping or on seniority? Leave them in the comments.