 By Flickr user madmolecule I have worked in a lot of different kinds of offices in my career, and I’ve been a cubicle drone as well as a manager. I’ve hired and fired, and received my fair share of reviews.
Today I’m going to talk about feedback — getting it and giving it.
There is a great deal of conventional wisdom out there about feedback. It’s good, you should seek it out, you should give it in positive and constructive ways, et cetera.
But here’s what I’ve learned. Few people really want feedback.
More often than not, when we seek out feedback, we are really hoping to get validation. “Atta boy, great job!” is what we hope to hear. And more often than not, that’s how it works out. If you really gave me your honest feedback on the job I did, it would be painful. So we find good things to say about one another.
But no one does a great job all the time. And, in any professional environment, there are screw-ups every day.
I was fortunate enough to work in one office where feedback was taken seriously. It was a tough place to work, but it was very good for me. I learned to give honest feedback — including things that needed to change. I also learned to get feedback without going to pieces.
But very, very few places really value honest feedback. You can tell because meetings end without anyone having taken accountability. Mediocre product goes out the door because no one wanted to speak up and say it was mediocre (or, just as often, a senior manager spent all night fixing it because it was too uncomfortable to bring to the attention of the people who ought to be making the changes).
In my professional, civic life, and personal lives, I have been getting a lot of feedback lately. Some of it has been critical, and to be honest I have reacted poorly at times. Part of me hates being told I screwed up. (Even people who really want feedback can find it hard to take.)
But, all in all, I value negative feedback and I go out of my way to get it. People don’t like to give it and sometimes you have to prod them.
Because I now work with a variety of clients and partners, I have to calibrate what kind of feedback I give, and what kind of feedback I can expect. Some folks really want to know — and can take it. Others really don’t want feedback and it is hurtful to give it — at least bluntly. There’s usually a way to get the message across, even diplomatically.
But, speaking for myself, if you’re too diplomatic with me I won’t hear whatever negative feedback you are trying to convey. I need it straight, no chaser.
Because of this approach to feedback, folks who know me and have worked with me know to trust me when I tell them I think they did a good job: I only say it if it is true. No one is helped by the little workplace lies that keep us all comfortable.
My latest piece is posted at Public Square Today, my blog at Washington Times Communities:
Wikipedia And What To Do About Growth
 "Typing Contest" by Flickr user topgold According to the Wall Street Journal, at least for those who pay to subscribe, the number of volunteer contributors to the massive Wikipedia has plummeted. 49,000 editors dropped out in Q1 2009, compared to just one tenth that in Q1 2008. . . .
[But] Wikipedia is [still] the fifth most popular web site in the world. It gets something like 325 million visitors per month. In the last twelve months, the traffic has grown 20%. It’s not about to collapse.
But it is changing. It is a different animal than it was when it was founded in 2001. It used to be freewheeling, dependent on consensus. Now it is dependent on hierarchy and swift corrections.
It’s become an institution. It now has institutional concerns (perpetual survival, reputation) that it did not used to have.
Many public leaders who establish initiatives find themselves facing the same inflection point.
Continue reading to see what to keep in mind when faced with such things!
 "Newspaper" by Flcikr user brad.rourke This morning, as I went outside to pick up the many newspapers to which I subscribe to home delivery (I’m old school that way), I saw an extra bundle in the middle of the driveway. It was a free print version of a new online newspaper, being helpfully delivered to my doorstep.
My immediate thoughts were very negative. More to recycle. More to pick up every morning. More to read.
But my main thought was: No one asked me if I want this, they just toss it my way for me to deal with. This is the anger that so many feel when confronted with intrusions in daily life, and why spam is so objectionable. No one asked me. The implicit statement by the organization doing the spamming is: “Our goals are more important than your convenience.”
In the commercial world, junk mail has long been despised for just this reason. But, as the imperative to communicate more effectively spreads throughout the nonprofit and public sectors, we get more and more such unwelcome messages.
I get emails that seem to be directly from the heads of small- and medium-sized community benefit organizations from which I had never heard before. I am suddenly on new lists. They all tell me to click here, or respond there, in order to unsubscribe, which is nice. But I don’t unsubscribe, as I sort-of know the people and don’t want to hurt feelings.
This has caused me to pay far, far less attention to my email inbox than I used to, because I cannot control what comes into it. That’s the “push” approach to social marketing.
Meanwhile, information streams over which I do have control, like Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feeds, have become my main source of information.
The Pull World
That is the new, “Pull World.” There is a new best practice being developed before our eyes when it comes to social marketing. As is often the case, the nonprofit or community benefit sector is a bit behind the curve. It seems like they are all suddenly discovering targeted email newsletters, just as their utility is flying out the window.
What works in the Pull World? Useful sharing. This is what can drive effective social marketing in a world where mindshare is moving from passive receptacles (reading my Inbox) to active engagement (who am I following, what feeds am I reading). When organizations share usefully with me, I go ahead and pass those messages on to my own network.
The Pull World requires discipline from any organization. It’s not easy to move from a Push mentality to a Pull mentality. It’s even harder when you factor in the organizational needs that must be met – even in the public benefit sector, organizations are not in business just to share and make people feel good, they need to survive and thrive. That means, in many cases, that their marketing messages must get out there.
It is a fine line to walk between letting people know what we are up to, and just plain vanilla PR that will be ignored. There’s no magic bullet, and different organizations are answering this question in different ways:
- Some organizations designate a few people to be their public face and unleash them to share however they choose.
- Some organizations try to create an engaging mix of equal parts organizational PR, sharing of others’ work, and just useful information regardless of source.
- Some organizations try to create communities where users create and share material that has to do with the organization.
Since there is not a consensus set of best practices yet, many organizations are trying all of these and more tactics all at once. For someone looking for The Answer, it may be dispiriting to learn that there isn’t one. But that’s just how things go at the beginning of adoption curves.
For now, most of these strategies are playing out in social media, but as the novelty of Twitter and Facebook wears off and they become unremarkable platforms, I believe these overall approaches may migrate across platforms.
The Push-Pull World
Eventually we may get to a Push-Pull world, where organizations will put out messages for people to pull down on the various sharing platforms, and will also have a set of close-in friends who have given permission to be pushed to. A great deal of an organization’s attention will be directed toward moving people from the Pull category to the Push category.
Thinking about that helpful newspaper in my driveway, it’s an attempt to create a Push relationship. But because it starts with Push, it is inherently intrusive. It’s essentially a strategy that goes like this: “We will push something into your life (a newspaper) and if you don’t complain we will keep pushing it. Our revenue model (display advertising) depends in part on the numbers of such packages we are pushing. We hope that eventually you will act in some way on something that is contained in one of our pushed messages, which will allow us to point to impact as well as reach.”
I wonder if strategies like that one will survive. They’re expensive, both in wasted material (newsprint), wasted energy, and wasted goodwill. On the other hand, maybe enough people respond, and they push enough numbers, to make it worthwhile.
But I think things are changing and someday soon we will chuckle at some of what we take for granted nowadays. The same way we chuckle at press releases sent by postal mail.
When will we get there? I don’t know. What will that look like? I don’t know that either. Some of today’s experiments will pan out, others won’t.
Now, I have one last admission to make. I do have an email list to which I send every week or two. I think that everyone on it wants to be there. But just in case, please let me know if you ever get an email you don’t want from me. It won’t hurt my feelings.
Meantime, I am going to spend a little more time on my sharing usefully.
I’ve had more than my fair share of occasions to hire someone. I’ve done it on my own, and in teams of people. I’ve been the one making the decision, and I’ve been in an advisory capacity.
 "failure" by Flickr user tinou bao There’s a question I always ask, but that I myself have never been asked. Indeed, when I ask it, most colleagues seem to respond somewhere between rolling there eyes and looking at me in shock. But I think it’s one of the most important questions you can ask.
It’s this: “Tell me about a time that you, personally, failed.”
What I am listening for is the quality of being able to admit that I failed. In my experience, this is an incredibly rare quality. It is the building block for the kind of humility I want my colleagues to exhibit and that I want the initiatives I lead to exhibit.
I am looking for someone who actually has an answer to the question.
In fact, so few people actually answer the question as posed, that I have had to rethink my approach. I used to see the question as fundamental and not being able to answer it was a serious downcheck. Now I’ve flipped it around — not having a good answer is neutral, while having a decent answer (or any answer) is a big-time plus.
Failures Are Not Mistakes
Note that the question does not ask about a project that failed. That would elicit interesting information and reveal something important about how a candidate goes about understanding and organizing their work.
The question also does not ask about a “mistake.” We all make mistakes and they can be big and small. I am looking for a mistake that rises to the level that the person individually would call a failure. It may not have momentous consequences, but it needs to have significance.
This question is all about mindset.
I prefer to work with people who can admit they were wrong, because it makes it easier for me to admit when I am wrong. It’s so easy to see admission of failure as a sign of weakness. It’s what we’re taught from the beginning, especially when it comes to the workplace.
But people who behave that way are a drag. When they do fail, by not being able to own up to it, they create churn, resentment, and inefficiencies. Plus they seem to have bad karma that can just be a bummer to be around.
The Humility Of Organizations
But humility is an increasingly critical skill for organizations and their leaders to have, too. The last decade has seen the empowerment of the individual in ways no one could have imagined. As organizations make missteps in this environment, they will have to apologize. For an object lesson, look at the difference between Domino’s Pizza (who addressed a problem head-on, with sincere remorse) and United Airlines (who stonewalled and tried a token donation to a nonprofit).
In this environment, to pretend that one is always right is no longer just ludicrous. It is a recipe for — well, for failure.
Everyone fails. I want the organizations, initiatives, and people I work with to be able to own up. This is the kind of weakness that makes everyone stronger.
Last night, on vacation with extended family, a few of us stayed up late playing Risk. As players of this game know, these episodes can go on for hours and hours. We laughed harder than I had laughed in a long time.
 "Board Game Meetup #1 @ Firenze" by Flickr user katsuma As I went to bed (of course the game is not finished, it is likely to last for another day at least), I remarked to myself on what a good time we had talking. It’s not often people spend such extended time together in conversation. It seemed to me that one of the functions of board games and card games is to create a diversion for people, so that when conversation ebbs we can focus on something else. Then, renewed, we can focus again on the conversation. Without this alternative focus, the conversation might burn out.
The game also provides a constant stream of fodder for conversation, adding in new minor events on which to comment.
It felt good and this morning I am thankful for the role board games play in our lives. It makes me wonder how we can translate that second focus into other things too — it’s helpful to be able to take a break within the intensity of conversation, to be able to keep it rolling. For instance, in a very intense project, how could we use an alternate focus to create the opportunity for a little rest, to help maintain intensity?
 "Tortoise and the hare" by Flickr user Bad Rabbit, Inc. The White House has announced that it will divulge details shortly about how it will wind down the seemingly successful Cash for Clunkers program. As of July, car dealers nationwide had done $1.8 billion in deals under the program, and are on track to exhaust the $3 billion available for the program. The initiative has been held up as an unmitigated success, burning through its initial capital quickly and needing more because it’s just so popular.
But there are cracks showing. Car dealers are complaining about slow reimbursements from the government. In some states, half of the car dealers have ceased offering Clunker deals because they can’t afford to wait for the funds anymore. Automobile manufacturer financing arms have stepped in to offer short term loans to dealers who are in trouble.
These difficulties show what can happen when two cultures that operate at fundamentally different paces have to work together. These are the same kinds of problems that can get in the way when any two organizations hook up as partners.
On the one hand, you’ve got the car dealer world, where things operate on a monthly basis but where deals need to get sewn up within days. Dealers operate on very slim margins and need to stay afloat from month to month. They’ve got payroll and debts to service.
On the other hand, you’ve got government, which has to make sure it does the right things and doesn’t make rash actions that can’t be undone. Government has to take the long view. It also is hard to get it moving. There aren’t many (any) mechanisms to get money flowing into the commercial sector easily or quickly.
These are two worlds that just operate on a fundamentally different pace. Each one must see the other as behaving unreasonably.
Sometimes, when organizations are planning to work together, they come from worlds that operate at different paces. For instance, foundations and service organizations have wildly different time horizons. This isn’t something that can just be papered over, but there may be some ways to plan ahead and mitigate troubles:
- Be honest about comparing your timelines. Often, organizations will like to say they are “responsive” when their default rhythms are 60 or 90 days and more. Other organizations operate to the rhythms of their semiannual board meetings. Still others look at the end of each week as a make-or-break deadline. Compare these — honestly.
- Recognize there may be pace-related problems. Once you see the different paces involved, you can see if there may be problems. If you recognize this ahead of time, it will be easier to handle them with equanimity. That way if trouble brews it won’t be seen immediately as failure.
- Acknowledge the need to change course if need be. There may need to be creative solutions to problems that crop up (for instance, short term loans from auto financing arms). There needs to be room to make these happen.
- Create a no-hard-feelings exit path. Sometimes it just doesn’t work for organizations with different paces to work together. That doesn’t mean it’s anyone’s fault that the plan failed — it’s just the way things are. If there’s an easy way for organizations to get out of the deal without engendering ill will, maybe they can come back around later.
What is your experience when organizations with different paces collide?
 Sea Of Cars. Our shift over for the day. For the past few days I have been helping in a small way on a large crowd control effort. My son’s Boy Scout troop parks cars at the local county fair every summer. The boys plan and execute it each year. This is a huge undertaking, as tens of thousands attend the fair. It’s one of the largest in the area. The temperatures out on the fairgrounds can easily reach 95 and above.
The task involves getting cars into the fairgrounds, up to the people who take payment for parking, and then onto the parking lot and directed to the right space. It is a constantly fluid situation and the leader in charge (one of the older boys) has to make decisions about where to direct manpower, how best to fill in parking rows, and how to handle unforeseen situations.
Everyone in the whole troop, boys and adults, pitches in. I was just one of many.
The adults’ roles are few. We drive a golf cart around to the boys at various stations, making sure they have water. We jump in where necessary to help if there are backups (this is amusingly called being a part of a “Fast Action Response Team”). And we flag the cars at the main gate as they enter the fairgrounds, and then at a key turn from the parking payment area into the actual parking lots. These are seen as “unsafe” for the boys because we are actually in (or almost in) traffic.
The Challenges Of Crowds
I mostly worked the main gate, flagging cars in from the road into the fairgrounds. People came in from two directions, and I had to get them to line up into the leftmost two lanes in a three lane road (we kept the right lane free for emergency vehicles).
There were some fundamental issues that made this difficult:
- Not only are there a lot of people, but each one has his or her own goal: They want to get into the fair and don’t want to wait.
- While we did our best to make it easy, people were disoriented: They were being asked to follow signs, flags, and hand-waves in ways they are not used to.
- Each carload of people is being asked to relinquish control: We tell them where to park; they don’t get to pick their spot.
- There are many possibilities for special circumstances that can disrupt flow: There were more kinds of unique situations that came up than anyone could have prepared for, as everyone is different.
I came away from this experience with a deep appreciation for the role of tradition and institutional knowledge. This troop has been doing this for decades, and there is a vast amount of lore that is passed on from generation to generation. Many of the things that did not make initial sense to me but that were done “because we have always done them this way” turned out to be exactly right.
The Difficulty Of Simplicity
I also came away from this experience with a deep appreciation for the difficulty of simplicity. We tried our hardest to make it dead simple for people. In fact, I think it was about as simple as it could possibly be. Enter, follow the flags, park your car.
For many drivers, this was a challenge. Some weren’t paying attention, others wanted to maximize their personal convenience and find the “best” spot, some did not realize it would cost money to pay to park, some had kids yelling in the car about visiting the midway, some were not used to seeing young boys waving flags and telling them where to go, some just were confused.
Many drivers did things that disrupted flow. Some stopped, or tried to park on their own, or just went into the wrong lane. Some wanted special consideration, and not unreasonably so. As workers, it was frustrating because it seemed simple — because we knew the system. Follow it, and all will be well.
But, to the drivers, it was all new. And we were asking them to give up control. “Trust us, follow our lead, we’ll get you parked.” This turned out to be terribly difficult for many people. (As it would be for anyone, I imagine.)
Management Lesson From The Scouts
If you look at the four bullets above that made this overall task difficult, you can see that they can apply to lots of different situations, even ones where there are not crushing volumes of people. Web sites, meetings, publications, strategic plans, organizational change efforts — lots of things.
And the main wrinkle here is this: Even things that look simple, from the inside, may still be quite complex when viewed from the outside. And in the doing, there are always unforeseen special circumstances.
I am going to try to keep this in mind the next time I design a training session, write a report, or develop some new system. No matter how simple I think it is, it can probably be simpler. But then, when I have made it as simple as possible, it may not be that easy. And I will always try to have a way to handle special circumstances.
I am very thankful for this small lesson, taught me by an incredibly dedicated and helpful Boy Scout troop.
 Playing Restaurant When I was about eleven, I learned how to make my favorite cheese sandwich: white bread, mayonnaise, American cheese. Yes, I grew up in the midwest. Shortly after I learned this special skill, I developed a fun game to pass the time: I would play “restaurant.”
More precisely, I would play short order cook. I would pretend I was a cook at a diner, with lots of orders coming in. Only thing was, everyone ordered the one thing I could make — an American cheese sandwich. So I would make sandwich after sandwich, as fast as I could, pretending I was a cook deep in the weeds during a big rush.
I got to thinking about this the other day as I reflected on my own career arc, current strategy, and future plans. I wondered, “Am I playing ‘restaurant?’”
Treading Water
A lot of my friends are solopreneurs — lone people plying their trade on a project-by-project basis. I have been working independently since 2003, and proudly so. But sometimes, I see other friends who are happily ensconced in organizations, managing, meeting, memo-ing. Then I look at my own workstyle, in which I write from about 6:30 am until 10:30 am, have a stretch of less productive time, and then come back hard from about 2:00 pm on. Sometimes I go deep into the night.
The things that rarely occupy this time are the things that routinely occupy my office-working friends’ lives. I have few meetings, the phone rarely rings (almost everything is email, txt, Twitter, and IM). There is zero office politics. The way things are right now, I can get a ton of stuff done. It leaves room for lots of possibilities.
But, sometimes, I worry. Should I be doing more? Am I just going through the motions of “working?” Am I treading water? Am I pretending?
I think these kinds of questions are ones that other solopreneurs also face. Twitter has given many of us a window into some water cooler cultures that we are not part of. I see lots of my friends “going into meetings,” or “having conversation with the boss,” and “talking to HR.” If I don’t do these things, am I just, in the end, making a bunch of cheese sandwiches and pretending I am the real deal?
Having Direction
I think the key lies in whether I have a direction or not. What’s my path? Having few in-the-flesh coworkers means I can get a lot of strategizing done. It also means I can succumb to one of two temptations. I can not write down any of my plans, in which case they are just dreams. Or, I can spend so much time on my planning, developing fancy slide decks for no one but myself, that I can fool myslef into thinking I am already GE. There’s a happy medium to be struck.
But I need to have plans, a direction. And they need to be written down. Otherwise it’s just cheese sandwiches.
Sometimes this planning can raise self doubts about how far I have come, or not come, but that’s OK. As solopreneurs, we are still writing the rules and for now — we are where we are.
Maybe you can tell I’ve been thinking about my own direction these days. There are some exciting things in store. But I always need to remind myself to keep it real. Don’t pretend I’m bigger than I am.
Nor should I pretend I’m smaller than I am: Maybe, I will look down and notice that those aren’t cheese sandiwches I’m making, but whole meals. A sub. A steak. Mashed potatoes.
Maybe I’ve been feeding people all along.
 "If you fail to receive . . . " At the drive through I saw this sign that struck me as amusing and I just had to snap a picture. It said:
If you fail to receive a receipt with your order please notify manager before leaving window for a refund of price paid.
After I finished chuckling, I felt compassionate. This is the restaurant’s attempt to generate trust with its customers. You can imagine the conversation: “We should make sure that people know they’re not getting ripped off, you know, like Joe Pesci complains about in Lethal Weapon. Otherwise we’re going to ” And so a sign is born. You’ve seen this sign, or others like it, everywhere there’s a drive through window.
Heart in right place, but implemented poorly, because the organization is thinking of itself first. It’s thinking, “How do we make sure people don’t get mad at us?” instead of, “How do make sure our customers feel served?” Even in this one sign, it’s evident:
- The language is lawyerese instead of plain English. I am “receiving” and have to “notify” instead of “getting” and “telling.”
- The promise is filled with restrictions and limitations. I only get a refund if I don’t get a receipt (not if I am overcharged, or they heard and gave me the wrong thing), and I if I drive away the deal is off.
- Even the sentence structure implies that if there’s a problem it’s on my end, not theirs. I am “failing to receive.” But the real problem is that the restaurant “failed to give” me a receipt.
It’s a little thing, but it illustrates a problem that almost every organization has: a me-first mindset. It’s incredibly hard to break out of that.
It’s can be particularly vexing among nonprofits. Many foundations and other funders are under the gun and need to be able to show that their investments are having an impact in terms of improving people’s lives. You would think that grantees would be excited about this, as they are all about improving people’s lives, too.
But instead, there’s ongoing controversy. While some higher performing organizations have embraced the idea of actually measuring (and acting on) how well they are doing their job, many other organizations sullenly go through the motions of creating half-hearted metrics and easily-reached targets that they can pass on to their patrons — all the while thinking to themselves, “Our work is too important to let numbers stand in the way. We know we work hard and we know our supporters like us. That is enough.”
What this attitude fails to take into account is that “hard work” can sometimes be misplaced and that good feedback from friends ought to be taken with a grain of salt.
A better attitude, one that is as accessible to the local Burger-Thru as it is to the neighborhood food pantry, is: “How can we make sure that the life of everyone we touch is improved?”
A question like that will generate different signs — and different metrics.
A recent article by essayist and venture capitalist Paul Graham has gained a lot of notice, and not just because Graham is a partner in startup boot-camp Y-Combinator. Graham’s piece describes what looks to be a fundamental difference in the work rhythms of two different sorts of people: managers and makers.
Here’s how he puts it:
There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour. . . .
But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
This is one reason that “makers” dislike meetings so much: one meeting doesn’t just take an hour out of their day. It ruins a whole half-day.
It’s a really great essay, and very helpful. Judging by the Twitter buzz it got, this piece struck a nerve. And no wonder: it combines three very powerful things — hatred of meetings, dislike of bosses, and a positive self-image as a “maker” of things.
 "Blindfolded Typing Competition" by Flickr user Foxtongue Who doesn’t want to see themselves as a “maker,” put upon by distractions and needless interruptions from idiotic “managers?” I work on my own and I feel that way all the time! When I am heavy into a writing project, the half-day schedule is exactly right. I can “do” something in the morning, and something in the afternoon. Plunk a meeting into the middle of one of those chunks of time and it’s blown.
But there are a few holes here.
To be fair, Graham did not write his piece to dump on managers. He’s a manager too! He was trying to explain one point of friction, when scheduling rhythms collide. He also does not claim that he’s written the be-all and end-all of workplace tools. So I’m not criticizing him.
But there are a couple of points that I think we need to think about:
- Managers hate meetings just as much as anyone else; and
- Even for “makers” the average duration of any given task is far shorter than the time allotted for it.
We’re not going to get rid of meetings, and we’re not realistically going to be able to schedule them all for the end of the day. We live in a world where distraction is the norm. This affects both managers and makers — and while we can minimize it, we can’t force it away.
So I think the key is to control how we respond to distractions. Especially, as individual workers we need to get a handle on our ability to get into and then get out of tasks. Sometimes we have the luxury of unplugging for a day to work on something. Mostly, we don’t and we have to answer that phone, have that conversation, run that errand even though we’re coding a new app or writing that new report.
So we need to get a handle on how we respond to interruptions and distractions. We need to handle our transitions.
This is especially true of makers, but it’s also true of managers — they get interrupted too.
Here’s some things I have learned in trying to handle interruptions. They aren’t the best techniques, or the only ones, and some of them may not work for you. Not only that — some of them don’t even work for me all the time! I am always trying to improve. But at least they’re a start.
- Quicken my rhythm. Rather than fret about “my afternoon getting blown,” I try to work in smaller chunks of time so that I can more easily respond to things that come up. Sometimes I’ll even start a timer and say “I am giving this task thirty minutes only.” You’d be surprised how much you can write in thirty minutes.
- Multitask on purpose. Rather than unplug when I need to concentrate, I will sometimes try to just let my Twitter, Facebook, and email streams continue to flow, responding here and there as necessary and as the spirit moves me. I have a fairly large stream, too, and it can work. The benefit of this is that I don’t dread opening up Gmail when I’m done writing. I can use these interactions as mini-breaks too.
- Tier my work. Sometimes, I really do have to unplug in order to concentrate. But over time I have figured out when those times are. Just because I am “writing” does not mean I need to unplug. Some writing can be done while still plugged in. Research, boilerplate creation, some editing — that can be done without solitude. Writing new pieces, or taking care with first drafts — sure, I unplug.
- Make an appointment. If I really must buckle down and get something done, I’ll often put that work on my calendar. That can help me make sure it happens, and it can also give me a way to handle my next point:
- Quicken meeting tempo. I have written before about shortening the default meeting time. Sometimes I meet with people whose default meeting duration is far longer than mine, though. One way around that is to announce at the beginning of the meeting how long I have and when I have to go.
- Prepare to re-enter. If I have to stop working on something, I try to make sure I have written down what I need to do to get back into it. That way when the distraction is over, I can get started on my task more quickly.
What tips and tricks do you have to manage distractions in the distracted workplace?
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In 2007, I founded Rockville Central (about Rockville, MD) and comanaged it until we ceased publishing in October 2011.
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