How are you managing the ‘blend’

Our work can often blend a little too much into home life in these times of remote working and working from home. 

Some people call it ‘living where you work’ or ‘working where you live’ !

Here are 4 things to try to keep a harder line between them : 

1. Establish a work area
2. Change your clothes 
3. Create a fake commute
4. Use a different page for work/home apps

Read more in this article from psychotherapist Amy Morin in Business Insider.

Face to face ➡️ Online How did you change

As many face to face workshops and meetings shifted online over the past year, it’s curious to look back: What did you change? 

If you’d planned an agenda, how did things need to adapt? 
Did you change the duration? 
Or the time between breaks, or length or number of breaks? 

Did you change what was planned?
What about group activities and collaboration? 

Did you accelerate and make things faster? Or did you need more time, multiple meetings instead of one? 

Many meetings and workshops that went online, only changed mode: sadly, they remained as disengaing and unproductive as ever!

But now as more hybrid arrangements begin - some people are online, some people are mobile or onsite - we need to consider, adapt and change things again. 

How did you first adapt meetings and workshops that moved online? 

Hard work is too hard on us

Burnout, overwork and the drive to ‘do more’ can be a never ending and dangerous loop. 

There are clever and ingenious solutions - or hacks - available to us, if only we’d take them up. 

A hack is a smart short cut, a streamlined process or focused advice to make things easier. 

So, if you knew of a better and easier way, would you take it? 

Some people like to see others do it first ... to see if ‘it works’. 

That’s what the diffusion of innovation curve is all about. There are always some trailblazers and early adopters who take a risk and trust their ability to cope with the new. 

And then come the early and late majority ... once the idea has been ‘proven’. By that time though, the trailblazers are often on to something newer, and easier. 

There’s another hack someone has uncovered or discovered!

Rather than waiting until more people have tried it and your risk is lower, jump in a little earlier. 

Play on the easier side of the curve for awhile.

You can wait to see how something turns out for others ... or run your own experiment, play your own game and live your own experience. 

It could be easier at the other end of the curve. 

Trying out some better ways of working

Today I’m working with an organisation introducing them to some new and better ways of working. 

Work changes all the time. 

But sometimes we’re locked into the way we’ve always done things. 

Hey, how much did we have to change in 2020 when we were forced to work remotely - if we weren’t already! 

What if we kept that pace of change going and tried doing other things differently? 

As Steve Denning in ‘The Age of Agile’ explains, new and agile ways are a vast global movement that have been changing the world of work. 

And these ways are moving beyond software and technology where they became known, finding keen supporters in other fields like health, government, education, marketing and finance. 

Most of all, I think today’s workshop will focus on how it starts with the individual. 

Adopting a flexible, adaptive and agile mindset is where it can begin. Yet it’s also about trying things in different ways, and seeing how mindsets shift... as a result of that experience. 

Who might benefit from you working in new and better ways? 

Lured by the new

Are you a ‘bright shiny object’ kind of person? Do you chase after those fun and bright new things? 

Or are you more persistent and resourceful, making do and working with what you’ve got on hand? 

We can be so tempted to get the new, see it and try it, buy it and use it, that perhaps we may not really need it at all. 

We can have the old sitting here, still useful... but you know, it’s OLD. We may be bored with it, have heard it or used it before and feel like its time has passed. 

The new and the old. 

It’s why words come in and out of favour; how colours and styles have their time; and how hairstyles can give us a laugh decades later!

We can turn over a new leaf and teach old dogs new tricks. 

Consider what’s new and what’s old for you and what it means. 

We can always take a new perspective of something ... even if it’s, you know, old. 

Some of the old can be worth looking at anew.