Welcome to the second part of Making Work Effortless.
Now, the point of these two modules together is to help you take
your essential tasks and make them feel effortless.
Today, I want to talk about a big idea of
how sustainable excellence really
comes from working in a restful state.
Now, that may sound like a contradiction,
but that's because for most of us,
we feel that if it's our essential work,
it also has to be exhausting,
it has to be like all out.
But what if that's not the case?
What if the opposite were true?
As we reframe this in our own thinking,
we can find, for instance,
that research shows that leaders who master effortless execution,
constantly outperform those who rely
on willpower and grinding through the challenges.
So today, we're going to cover three practical frameworks to
really help you step into that effortless or restful state.
So I want to get into those three,
and as we go through those,
I want to make them as practical as possible for you.
So the first one is to create rituals through coupling.
So what's coupling?
We talked a bit about it last week,
that coupling is when we connect
something we love with something that's essential.
So we take an activity we love,
connect it to some essential activity that we do.
So when we do this,
when you couple your essential activities
with elements you actually enjoy,
you really transform necessary work into
experiences that actually energize you rather than deplete you.
Rather than feeling drained,
you end up with more energy after the event than before.
So the reason for this is that joy in us and
restfulness are two powerful work
modalities that take your work to the next level.
I think most people think of joy as a happiness that happens after a happy event.
But what if there can be a general joyful state and a general restful state?
This is what high-performance people learn.
So to do this, I want to give you two practical steps.
One, start a list,
call it a joy list and just start to observe the things you love to do.
So simple things like music or specific locations,
favorite beverages, textures, scents, whatever.
Things that just bring you joy,
that lift your mood throughout the day.
It's interesting how it can be the tiniest little things that do that for us.
So being aware and being intentional about a list is really helpful.
Just keep that on your phone or something,
make a joy list and just start to keep that together.
Then the next thing is to strategically
couple one of those joy items with one of your essential tasks.
So the second part called matching with
essential tasks is we want to find the most challenging one,
to go with the most joyful one.
So try to rank them in terms of,
well, yeah, this gives me joy.
But this first part,
sitting in my leather chair with a glass of wine,
and with my favorite music in the background,
now that's really high joy for me.
Okay, what essential task can I put to that?
So Cal Newport, when he wrote the book Deep Work,
actually shared about using that exact approach,
that at night after the kids had gone to bed,
I think he said it was 10 PM at night,
he would sit down in his leather chair with his glass of wine,
playing his favorite music,
he would then start writing articles.
Because that was essential to what he did.
And so as you think about that,
try to match the most essential tasks
with the ones that bring you the greatest joy.
Okay, the second framework, the second idea,
so that first idea, again, just to reiterate,
was create these rituals through coupling.
So again, a ritual consists of two pieces,
something that brings you joy
and something that's essential,
and we combine them to create a ritual.
So take something from your joy list,
something from your essential list,
connect them together, that creates a new ritual.
So start creating rituals that connect those two things
and try to match their intensity.
The second big thought here is to think about
working from rest, not towards exhaustion.
So we work from rest, not towards exhaustion.
You know, we have to reframe our minds
that if we're really taking our career seriously,
if we're really in on this,
then we will be all in, overbooked, overworked,
overscheduled, you know, at the point of exertion
or even overexertion.
But what if that's not actually the case?
Because that's not sustainable to you.
to the organization you serve. So sustainable high-performance leadership
means approaching these essential tasks with renewable energy rather than
depleting yourself through overexertion. So here are two ideas. One, establish
daily recovery boundaries. So what's a recovery boundary? Well a recovery
boundary is to not do more today that you cannot completely recover from
tomorrow. So don't do more today then you cannot completely recover from tomorrow.
So when we put these boundaries in place that sometimes means putting work off. It
sometimes means stopping early or maybe even you know taking a nap if it's
necessary. And you know we've we found out that you can actually build the
science shows that you can do micro recovery moments. You know in between
important tasks doing something for five or ten minutes that isn't you know
that's just a switch of just a micro recovery often helps with this recovery
process. So these are called recovery boundaries and we want to set recovery
boundaries for the day and then we also want to establish that these micro
recovery moments throughout the day. And as you're thinking about this it's also
important to start to recognize your own fatigue signals. Many of us have been
trained to ignore these fatigue signals. When you're feeling fatigued it's easy
just to ignore it and take it as a lack of self-discipline. I've just got to
drive through this. I've got it whenever you find yourself grinding through
something, forcing yourself through something, this is the opposite of what
we're trying to get to. So stop yourself. Hit the pause button. Think about what
you're doing and you know notice that real work works best when you're all in.
Meaning that you are restful and there's a boundary. You're in your zone. So this
whole idea now some research shows that you might even need to take a 20 minute
nap if you've actually got to the point of fatigue. And a 20 minute nap you know
is I know not always acceptable in most organizations. If you work from home
that's obviously easier. When I was running my software company it was very
regular for me almost every day to lock my door. I had a sofa in my office and I'd
go lie down and for 20 minutes I just take a power nap. And I learned to do
them. In fact I learned to do them in five to ten minutes and I was amazed how
refreshed I felt. And a lot of people say well if I did that I'll be groggy. You
may be doing them too long. So power naps are just going down for an instant and
coming straight back up. It's amazing how refreshing that actually is. So we
don't we have to learn. So you need to stop pushing through a mode where you're
in diminished capacity. So restore it first then carry on. And the third idea
around the third sub point around this is so part of this working from rest not
towards exhaustion is that we must develop a sustainable weekly rhythm. So
in the same way we set daily boundaries we're now also setting weekly
boundaries. So you don't want to do more this week that you cannot fully recover
from next week. It's such a powerful idea because and Greg McKeon in his book
Effortless really gets into the nuts and bolts of this. So if you want to know
more that's a great resource to look into. So what we do is we alternate
high-energy essential work with low demand activities. You know I think a lot
of times people give their best time to their worst work. We've talked about this
before. You know getting up first thing you do is email. But if first thing in
the morning is your low period in your day then doing email is a great idea. If
it's your high performance time if it's a high intensity time for you do not be
doing low intensity work. So it's just this level of intentionality and being
clearly observant and giving yourself permission to take cognitive control.
Take control over these daily and weekly rhythms for yourself. Because we know
already that leaders who work from this restful mode rather than towards
exhaustion make better decisions. They inspire confidence in others. They
certainly can sustain their excellence for long periods of time without burnout.
This is such a powerful thing and you may be looking at this and say well
these feel like tweaks. Actually as I think as you get into it you'll find out
it's a lot more than tweaks. It stops us hitting those fatigue moments where we're
just exhausted, tired and just grind through. So no more grinding through. Take
active steps even if it means delaying what you have to do for 20 minutes. Take
a power nap, reset and go and do really powerful work. Okay so we've talked about
Two key ideas. The first was how do we create rituals through coupling? The second was practice
working from rest, not towards exhaustion. And thirdly, we eliminate complexity by starting
simple. A lot of stress comes when we are trying to tackle a project that seems complex.
We touched on some of this when we were doing Thin Slicing on innovation. But under this
section I want to talk this more down to your everyday work, not necessarily new and
innovative things that you are doing. What I found is sometimes a project feels large.
And when it feels large, here is a secret. Ask yourself, what is the minimum event? What's
the smallest baby step I can take? So your first baby step, some people call it the first
obvious action, whatever you want to call that. The first baby step. What's the simplest
step I can take first? And start that. And then you introduce a second idea. Do 10 minute
microburst. Now these two are incredibly powerful for getting yourself into a project you are
avoiding because of its complexity. And the way to do that is, what's my small baby step?
I think we used the analogy before that if I have to reorganize my garage, or I have
to build new shelves and organize all my books, and I have to go and buy new shelves
or build them or something I was going to do in my home, the first step wouldn't be
to draw up a plan. The first step would be to go and get the measuring tape and measure
the wall. How big is the space? And then stay doing this for 10 minutes. What happens after
10 minutes is you create an automatic momentum that builds naturally and you'll find yourself
moving into the harder and harder parts. It'll feel effortless. And with a little bit of
practice you can really master this idea. And so what happens is you don't get intimidated
by large obstacles or complexity because you're immediately looking for what's the first
baby step? Start that microburst for 10 minutes and I'm out the other end. So that's what
I wanted to share with you today. As you're making your essential work feel effortless,
it comes down to these three things. Once again, create rituals through coupling. Remember
ritual has something from your joy list connecting to something on your essential task list.
And then work from rest, not towards exhaustion. Setting daily boundaries and weekly boundaries
And when you hit fatigue moments, take 20 minutes, take a power nap, recover and go
at it again. And thirdly, eliminate complexity by starting simple. That simply means what's
the first baby step, the first obvious thing you need to do? Do it for 10 minutes in a
microburst and that will create the momentum to get you through that bigger project. Well
I hope you find these really practical and enjoy making them part of your normal working
memory. Enjoy!