Daily Creative with Todd Henry

The best way to ensure that your most important work gets done is to dedicate time to doing it.

See if this scenario sounds familiar: you sit down to do your work with your coffee, and fire up your laptop. First, you check your e-mail, looking for any potential fires that have cropped up overnight, spend about ten minutes addressing those urgent matters, then set about actually doing the work you need to get done for the day.

About five minutes later, someone pings you on email and asks for a few moments of your time to look at something over a video chat. You agree, and before you know it you have to run off to another video meeting with a colleague to talk about an important project. The same pattern repeats over and over throughout the day, and by the time you close down your laptop for the day, you realize that the big, important work you intended to tackle today has been pushed off until tomorrow, or worse, that you’ll have to do the work at home in order to meet your deadline.

In truth, you didn’t really do anything wrong. You were responsive, responsible, and present in everything you did. The problem is that while you were busy responding to all of the urgent stimuli in your environment, you were neglecting the less urgent, but much more important work that will add true, long-term value.

Whether you work in an office or on your own, it’s critical that you learn to build barriers around your time and dedicate focused efforts to your most important work. The best way I’ve discovered to do this is to establish chunks of time dedicated to specific tasks.

What are time chunks?

While I am a big fan of making lists for tasks (and am a big adherent to the GTD philosophy), I find that my calendar is often my friend when I’m trying to tackle large, complex projects. As such, whenever I have ongoing work that will require deep, focused effort I tend to block off time on my calendar to work on them.

How do you set them?

1. Look at your current projects, and choose one that will take a lot of deep, focused effort over a period of a few weeks or months.

2. Look at your calendar for a few open slots this week, and choose one that will give you plenty of time to focus on the project.

3. Block off the time on the calendar, with the title of the event being the project name or problem you’ll be working on. This is important, because without something on your calendar your time will always be negotiable.

4. Stick with the plan. Don’t fall prey to temptation at the last minute, or compromise in order to squeeze in a meeting. Sure, there will be exceptions, but in general try to treat this time chunk just like you would a meeting with someone you respect. (It is, after all, a meeting with yourself.)

5. Spend the last five minutes of your time chunk determining where you’ll go next with the project. Make sure that you have a clear starting point the next time you pick up your work, as that will make it much easier to gain traction and use your time wisely.

6. At the end of every time chunk, set your next one. Look for an opening in your calendar when you can continue your progress, while you have some momentum.

It may work best for you to have pre-established chunks of time on your calendar for specific tasks. (For example, I know that 6-7a each morning is my study time, that certain times are dedicated to developing content, and certain times are reserved for client calls. That prevents schedule whiplash from creeping into my weeks.)

Many of us lack the kind of latitude over our schedule that we’d like to have, but all of us have some discretion about how we spend our time. The best way to prevent distractions and make steady progress on your most important work is to dedicate...

Workloads and expectations are increasing. It’s not a cliché, it’s a fact. It’s the single biggest (confidential) complaint that I hear when spending time with companies. Before the COVID shutdown, I was speaking at a conference in Florida, and in the short Q&A at the end of my talk a man stood and said “We are doing more with less. We have fewer people than ever, but our project load continues to increase. However, the quality of our work is not allowed to suffer. What should I do?”

Great question. Tough question. The first thing to realize is that if this is how you feel, you’re not alone. At all. In fact, you’re the norm. Many recent studies have explored the increasing workload and simultaneously decreasing engagement of employees, and the trend is frightening. Creative pros have never been more busy, and simultaneously less engaged with their work. One study found that 75% of creatives believe they are not living up to their full creative potential. Some say the fastest growing contingency in the workplace is a group being dubbed “malicious cooperatives”. They do what they need to in order to keep their job, but they secretly harbor hope that their company will fail.

Huh?

So what are some practical ways to deal with the increasing workload expectations and decreasing resources?

Know when to celebrate. It’s hard to be thrilled at the completion of a project when the very next instant your manager unloads a new pile of expectations on you. When super busy, celebration is often the first thing to go because it seems so… unnecessary. But it’s not! It’s crucial to have milestones that you can point to both for your own sense of accomplishment and for the sake of your team’s sense of progress. It also helps keep your work and your days from blending together into one long, run-on sentence.

Tip: Establish when you will celebrate the work that you’ve accomplished, and stick to your plan.

Know where you’ll begin. When dealing with creative work – turning your thoughts into value – it’s sometimes difficult to find the edges. It’s hard to know exactly when something is good enough, because there’s always room for improvement. Similarly, it’s challenging to get started on your work, because you’re often making it up as you go along. Thus, I’d encourage you (and your team) to always end your work each day with a clear understanding of where you’ll pick it up the next. That way you have a natural point of traction to help you get started.

Tip: Choose at the end of each work day where and how you’ll begin the work tomorrow.

Don’t be afraid to talk about the pressure. No one likes to be seen as a whiner, so sometimes these unseen (but strongly felt) pressures can stay locked up inside because we don’t want to burden others. However, simply creating an environment of permission to talk about the pressure can help mitigate it. No, the work isn’t going to go away, but if everyone (including your manager) is looped in on the team dynamic then it can sometimes help provide context for how to overcome it.

Tip: Have frequent conversations about how you feel about the work and the pressure, and be brutally honest.

The workload isn’t going away. This isn’t just a temporary artifact of a struggling economy, it’s mass-scale experimentation with a new way to do business remotely in the connected economy. To thrive moving forward, you and I need to develop some tools to deal with the pressure.

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Have you ever walked into a company’s headquarters and passed an enormous marble wall engraved with the company’s values? There it is, in all its permanence and glory, greeting employees each day and reminding them: “THIS IS WHO WE ARE!”

Except, it’s not always. It’s who they were, once. Most people walk right past that wall without even paying it a moment of notice. They’re numb to it, and it doesn’t really hold any sway over their everyday behavior. Your culture isn’t defined by a set of tenets or a plaque on the wall. It’s defined by what you do.

If you say that you value boldness but always make the most comfortable decision, then people will cease to be bold.

If you say that you value customer service, but you are always snickering and telling stories about how annoying your customers are, then you will train your culture to devalue its customers.

If you say that you value truth telling, but you get defensive every time someone attempts to offer a piece of constructive feedback, you will cultivate a reactive, closed-minded culture.

This kind of hypocrisy is demoralizing. However, with clear ground rules and a stable culture around your team, people know they have the support they need to take risks. Your team’s experience of you is its experience of the company. Period. Full stop. When cultural expectations aren’t well defined, people tend to be very conservative out of a fear of getting it wrong.

Dee Hock, founder and former CEO of Visa, once said, “Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.” However, you cannot impose a culture on a team. Great cultures are grown from the ground up. A culture mandated from on high will fit like a suit that’s three sizes too large, never quite cut to size.

Because cultures are grown, you must treat yours like a garden. Just like a good gardener, you aggressively fertilize the aspects of your team’s culture that you want in abundance and diligently prune the things you want to get rid of. This requires constant attention on your part, because if you allow a few errant behaviors to slide, you will eventually find your entire garden choked with weeds.

Prune the “Ghost Rules”

Ella was a successful manager at a very large company. I was challenging her to think in a new way about a tricky problem she was attempting to solve, but when I offered my thought, she quickly responded, “Nope—that won’t work here.”

I paused, a little stunned at her abruptness, and asked, “Why not?”

She looked at me as if collecting her thoughts, and after a few moments she replied, “Hmm. Good question.” After further dissection, we realized that Ella’s response had been hardwired into her by a previous manager, who often had strong, fear-based opinions about new ideas. “That won’t work here” was a common reaction to many of Ella’s fresh thoughts, and over time she began to adopt these opinions as hard fact.

“Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.” – Dee Hock

What Ella had come up against are what I call ghost rules, or invisible limitations that people or teams place upon themselves for no good reason. Sometimes these rules become baked-in organizational assumptions about what is and isn’t possible, and the net result is that the team artificially limits the places it looks for ideas or value.

In order for your team to feel freedom to do its best work, regularly prune ghost rules from your life and your team’s culture. Following are a few examples of ghost rules I frequently see.

What Will and Won’t Work? A manager from a large company once told me that...

Robert Glazer is the author of the best-selling book Elevate and the new book Friday Forward, and is also the founder and CEO of Acceleration Partners. He believes that there are four fundamental capacities that everyone must develop in order to thrive in work and life:

Spiritual Capacity: This is your connection to a core set of values, guiding principles, and deep sense of self. Without it, you are a rudderless ship drifting with the tide.

Intellectual Capacity: This is your capacity to use your mind to solve problems, remain resilient, and spot opportunities.

Physical Capacity: This is how you develop your body and care for your physical self so that you are able to perform at your peak at all times.

Emotional Capacity: This is how you engage with the world around you, with your peers, and with those you care about.

In this interview, Robert shares some practical tips for developing each of these four capacities, some watch points for when you are in danger of failing to mind them, and some practices to help you sustain performance.

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“I have a certain set of skills,” Liam Neeson’s character threatens over the phone in the action movie Taken. OK, though those particular skills are slightly different than the ones offered up in Josh Kaufman’s bestseller The Personal MBA, those who develop mastery of these business fundamentals can operate with the same level of confidence.

Anyone who wants to succeed in the marketplace needs a grasp of the basics of doing business. Knowledge gaps can be costly, and even small business owners or solopreneurs who grasp the fundamentals will have a huge advantage over their competitors.

In this interview, Josh shares insights he’s discovered in the ten years since the book’s publication, and how we can each deal with the uncertainty that this current environment offers.

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My new book releases October 6th. Below, learn how to get the full MCODE assessment when you pre-order the book.

There are things we experience our entire life, but never really have words to describe. For example, there are probably certain easy tasks that you simply can’t seem to get motivated to do, but others – that are much more difficult and less attractive – you are willing to tackle at a moment’s notice. Similarly, there are probably certain people in your life or on your team that you simply can’t seem to get along with, while other relationships just “click”.

I’ve come to learn that many of these unseen, yet routinely experienced dynamics are due to how you and everyone around you are uniquely motivated. About four years ago, my friend Rod asked me to take a motivation assessment he’d been working on. I was not excited. I’ve seen plenty of assessments, and frankly, most of them were not very useful to me. However, Rod promised me this would be different. And, in short, he was right. I was blown away.

The assessment that Rod and an entire ream of researchers had developed was founded upon over 50 years of research and over a million achievement stories. They had discovered that there are twenty-seven unique themes of motivation, and that depending on a person’s top handful of themes, certain work or relationships might bring them to life or make them wish they were dead. It was through this assessment that I discovered that my top motivaitonal themes are:

1. Make An Impact
2. Meet The Challenge
3. Influence Behavior

So, when I can’t see the impact of my work, or when I don’t have a discrete and pressing challenge to tackle, or when I can’t see the direct influence of my work on the thoughts and behavior of others, I disengage. However, when these three things are present, I completely come alive and do some of my best work.

Because of this knowledge, I’ve been able to resolve recurring conflict in relationships, re-structure some of my tasks so they are more engaging, and change the way I think about outcomes so that they are more aligned with what naturally drives me. In short, it’s been life-changing.

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One key element of any healthy culture is that people understand how to give effective feedback to one another. Because creative work can feel a bit subjective, feedback can be a difficult thing to navigate, so many people default to being overly prescriptive or controlling. However, while specific, tactical feedback might achieve short-term results, it often creates bigger problems over the long-term. Instead, we need to learn how to offer feedback in a way that helps the team (or our clients) think in new and better ways about the work.

On this episode, we share three core principles for offering better feedback:

Honor the process

The end result of a project is just the final piece of a very long process. When you offer suggestions without first understanding how someone arrived at that result, you are negating their entire process, and the decision-making that went into it. You have to allow them the opportunity to share not only the end result of their thinking, but their thought process itself.

Ask better questions

Instead of being prescriptive, ask questions that help the other person articulate why they made the decisions they did. Also, ask questions that help them think about other pathways they could have taken, and where those pathways may have led. “Why did you choose to…” or “How did you arrive at…” are wonderful conversation starters to get them talking about the why behind what you are seeing or experiencing.

Invite them to re-direct

Once you’ve had a thorough conversation about the process, begin asking them questions that nudge them in what you think might be a more helpful direction. For example, “what if instead of doing X, you chose Y? How might that change your process?” or “Can you think of a way that we could…?” These are open-ended questions that value the other person and also invite them into the process of re-directing the work in a meaningful way.

Yes, we’re all pros and we need to be able to deal with difficult feedback. And, it doesn’t serve anyone when we are overly-prescriptive and lack empathy in how we interact with the work of others. Be a pro, and be intentional about giving feedback that helps them think not only about what to do, but why they should do it that way.

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As a leader, your voice speaks much louder than your actual words. Your voice isn’t just what you say, it’s how your team hears you, and the collective tone your actions and communication take. Does your voice represent you and your message as well as it could?

Over time, the best leaders are able to make their ideas and influence resonate far outside their own ambits. Here are six ways to get your voice to carry throughout your entire organization.

BE AUTHENTIC Yes, it’s an overused word, but I think that’s because our idea of what’s “authentic” is too narrow. It’s not just about transparency or vulnerability, it’s also about letting the people you lead see what you truly care about. Resonant leaders are genuinely invested in their work, and it shows. It’s easy for team members to see that they truly have “skin in the game” and care not only about short-term results, but also about long-term impact. As Tim Schigel, cofounder of the social sharing platform ShareThis, told me, “Authenticity doesn’t have to amplify.” When you’re truly invested in your message, you don’t have to shout. It’s apparent to others, and it lends credibility to your leadership.

To begin cultivating authenticity, ask yourself, “Can the people on my team see what I stand for, or do they have to guess?”

BE UNIQUE Authenticity alone isn’t sufficient. Resonant leaders have the courage to make clear decisions, even in the face of uncertainty. The word “decide” comes from the Latin word that means “to cut off.” You’re choosing to cut off other options and commit to one direction, even when you’re uncertain. However, many leaders prefer to keep their options open for as long as possible out of fear of getting it wrong and failing. But you have to be willing to commit to a path by following your intuition and making bold, unique decisions with the best information you have available. This isn’t a license to be foolish or rash, but a recognition that every needlessly delayed decision has a trickle-down effect on your team’s focus and productivity. You need to stand apart from those seeking safety over impact.

To begin cultivating uniqueness, ask, “Where am I being ambiguous about a decision, and how might it be affecting my team?”

BE PRECISE When faced with a difficult choice, some leaders go into “protect mode” rather than being precise with their language. In order to make your ideas resonate, you can’t leave room for misinterpretation about where you stand on an issue or what you expect from team members. Be like a laser, not a lighthouse. A lighthouse tells ships where not to go, but provides no navigational guidance beyond helping them avoid danger areas. A laser, on the other hand, is precise, cutting, and directional. Your team needs to know what you expect of them, even when they don’t like it. Precise leaders can be polarizing, but in the end they make everyone’s job easier to navigate.

To begin cultivating precision, ask, “Where are my instructions vague, and where am I being defensive rather than forthright with my ideas?”

BE CONSISTENT Your voice won’t resonate if it isn’t consistent. Again, this sounds obvious on the surface, but meeting day-to-day challenges can make it difficult. If your work lacks a strong through-line, it can become easy to treat projects as one-off events rather than as a part of a bigger strategy. If you regularly send dissonant messages, it might be difficult for team members to anticipate how you’ll respond in a given situation. And that in turn can lead to paralysis. There should be consistency in the choices you make and a consonance to the way you communicate them.

To cultivate consonance, ask, “Where am I being inconsistent, and how can I give my decision-making and communication more uniformity?”

BE EMPATHETIC How deeply do you connect with your team? Is your leadership