Tuesday, November 19, 2019
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
How to Prioritize Your Workload When Everything’s a “Priority”
How to Prioritize Your Workload When Everything’s a “Priority”
These approaches are better for your productivity and your well-being.
Courtesy of TanyaJoy / Getty Images
If looking at your to-do list is making your head spin, you’re in good company. “Companies are trying to make do with less, so there is more work to do than there is time to do it,” Julie Morgenstern, the author of Never Check E-Mail in the Morning, told the Harvard Business Review. Employees today wear many hats, and whether you work in a corporate setting or a startup, it can seem like every project is labeled high-priority.
So how are we to prioritize when everything is a priority? Use these three strategies to help you figure out where to start, when to pivot, and how to stay nimble in the midst of frequent shifts in direction.
Start the day by listing your priorities
Just as Marie Kondo has her clients to empty their closets and lay their entire wardrobe out in plain sight, in the morning, write down your priorities for the day. Deciding what’s important and what’s not is key to reducing stress and improving productivity. Use this fresh vantage point to center yourself before diving in.
Toggle between energizing and draining tasks
We all have aspects of our jobs we find stimulating — and on the flipside, ones that feel draining. It’s not hard to stay focused on work we genuinely enjoy, but work we find draining depletes our attention and emotional energy reserves.
One helpful method for distinguishing between the two is the Eisenhower Matrix. Named after former President Eisenhower, its four categories of task organization involve two emotionally distinct labels: urgent and important.
- Urgent/Important: Stimulating, short turnaround. These are aspects of your job you look forward to most and can focus on easily.
- Urgent/Not Important: Draining, short turnaround. Emails, requests, processes that are timely but don’t really move the needle on the wider project.
- Important/Not Urgent: Stimulating, longer term projects that are valuable for your career growth and personal development. Spend a little time on these daily or weekly to refocus your attention and recharge your emotional reserves.
- Not Important/Not Urgent: Draining tasks that need to get done eventually, but you never seem in the mood to get them out of the way. Fun fact: 30 percent of emails you receive on the average workday falls into this category, according to a 2017 survey from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.
Sorting your deliverables by “urgency” and “importance” tunes you into your own emotional resources, which can help you keep tabs on your output before you reach the point of exhaustion, or worse, burnout.
Identify one low-priority activity — and stop doing it
Eliminating a single item from your to-do list, or delegating it to a colleague for whom the activity makes much more sense, can help your to-do list feel a whole lot lighter — and perhaps even spark joy! Pick something that’s superfluous, redundant, or no longer necessary. Then scratch it off your list for good, or bring it to your manager’s attention as an opportunity to improve operational efficiency.
Stay up to date or catch-up on all our podcasts with Arianna Huffington here.
Friday, January 25, 2019
Why B Students Make the Best Leaders
Why B Students Make the Best Leaders
We live in a world where nearly every parent encourages their children to get good grades in school. Not only that, there might even be the expectation that their child get all A's--a perfect 4.0 grade point average--for their entire academic life. Anything less would be considered a disappointment (you know who you are, parents).
The belief, of course, is that unless a child performs well in school, they won't experience the same success in life as those children who get all A's.
Don't get me wrong: I am all for kids excelling in school. I've even encouraged my own kids to earn more A's on their report cards. But let's be clear: The ability to get A's in school demonstrates a highly refined ability to get A's in school and not success in business or leadership.
But, as a B student in college myself, there's a dirty little secret that a lot of parents, teachers, and students might want to know: A students don't grow up to lead companies. Matter of fact, they rarely go on to lead anything. It's the B students who actually make the best leaders.
Consider the study that West Point conducted on its graduates to see how their grades correlated with the kind of military career they enjoyed.
What the school found was that when it came to its graduates who eventually became general officers in the U.S. Army--people who lead thousands of people and manage budgets in the billions of dollars--a disproportionately high number of them were B students.
The point is that leading organizations rarely has anything to do with pure intellect alone. While A students can make great individual contributors, maybe as scientists, engineers, or professors, they may not have developed the same interpersonal skills that B students have.
When I was studying engineering as an undergrad, for example, I was never the smartest person in any of my classes. But, unlike my genius classmates who went on to much more distinguished academic careers, I learned what it took to lead and inspire people instead.
We all have friends who are super smart--but who almost might be too smart, which can make them hard to relate to. B students, however, have learned to flourish by using a combination of good-enough mental horsepower with a kind of emotional intelligence that gives them the ability to relate to and motivate people.
Not to overlook C students, but they tend to be wild cards. I remember a joke someone told me about a wealthy philanthropist who visits his alma mater. As he talks to a dean at the school, he shares this advice: Take care of your A students, because they'll become your professors. Also, take care of your B students, because they'll become your steady alumni donors. But really take care of your C students, because they're the ones who will most likely build a new library in their name because they're the entrepreneurial mavericks who will go on to start successful companies. The record $31 million donation to the University of Maryland by Oculus VR co-founder and UMD dropout Brendan Iribe demonstrates this nicely.
The point is that in today's education system, which treats learning like a post-industrial-age production line, it can be easy to fall prey to the idea that your child or student needs to get perfect report cards to find a successful career.
The truth is that there are skills that are far more important to success than grades, such as, as I've written before, learning to work and play well with others.
So when a student brings home a B on his or her report card, don't freak out. You might even consider celebrating the fact that you might have a future leader on your hands. And, kids, this article doesn't get you out of doing your homework. So get back to work!
Elon Musk to the Young and Ambitious: Skills Matter More Than Degrees
If you come from a certain high-achieving background, getting the right degree from the right school can seem like the most important thing in the world. Everything you do from, basically, nursery school onward, is directed at receiving that all important fat envelope from the university of your dreams.
But super-entrepreneur Elon Musk has a message for both degree-obsessed young people and companies desperate to hire them: chill out already.
When asked in a 2014 interview about what university degrees he looks for on a resume, Musk explained that though credentials can be a nice signal of someone's abilities, they are absolutely not a prerequisite for achieving incredible things (or getting hired by Musk).
More evidence we're way too obsessed with degrees.
Given, as Musk points out, that some of the best-known names in tech -- from Bill Gates to Larry Ellison to Steve Jobs -- failed to graduate, the fact that greatness and gold-plated degrees don't always go together seems hard to argue with.
And that's not only true when you're talking about revolutionary geniuses. One recent analysis of job postings found that, to save themselves the hassle of sifting through more resumes, companies are increasingly demanding degrees for positions whose current occupants perform perfectly well without them. This degree inflation means companies end up paying 30 percent more for talent than they need to.
How to thrive without a degree.
The takeaway for hiring managers is pretty simple: yes, using degrees as shorthand for ability is a time saver, but it's also costly. You'll end up paying more for your people than you need to and also miss out on some exceptional talent.
But as AngelList noted when it recently flagged the Musk video in its weekly newsletter, Musk's dismissive attitude toward academic accolades should also serve as a reminder to young people that, if you put all your energy into grades and diplomas, you're almost certainly not focusing enough on what really matters -- skills, and the ability to continue updating them throughout your career.
Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList, offered three pieces of advice to those starting out in the newsletter:
- What to study and how to study it are more important than where to study it and for how long.
- The best teachers are on the internet. The best books are on the internet. The best peers are on the internet.
- The tools for learning are abundant. It's the desire to learn that's scarce.
So stop missing the forest for the trees. Yes, degrees are very nice to have, but that expensive piece of paper isn't the be all and end all. The real prize in life isn't the letters after your name, it's the ability to accomplish awesome things. School isn't required for that. Passion is.
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