18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done (3 page)

But how many of us work nonstop, day after day, without a break? It might feel like we’re making progress, but that schedule will lead to injury for sure.

And when we do take the time to rest, we discover all sorts of things that help us perform better when we’re working. Inevitably my best ideas come to me when I get away from my computer and go for a walk or run or simply engage in a casual conversation with a friend.

So one of the upsides to rest days is that they give you time to think. But there’s also a downside, and it’s serious enough that I believe it’s the unconscious reason many of us resist taking them:
They give you time to think
.

My friend Hillary Small broke her foot and was confined to bed rest for several weeks. “The cast gave me a time-out card, which I never would have taken on my own,” she told me, “and when I did slow down, I felt a deep
sadness. I had nothing to distract me from the feeling that I had been living a life in which
my
needs were never a priority.”

So it was hard for her. But it also gave her renewed energy to focus on her priorities. When we rest, we emerge stronger. There’s a method of long-distance running that’s becoming popular called the Run-Walk method; every few minutes of running is followed by a minute of walking. What’s interesting is that people aren’t just using this method to train, they’re using it to race. And what’s even more interesting is that they’re beating their old run-the-entire-distance times.

Because slowing down, even for a few minutes here and there and even in the middle of a race, enables you to run faster and with better form. And, as a side benefit reported by Run-Walkers, it’s a lot more fun.

Life, too, is a lot more fun when it’s interspersed with some resting. A short walk in the middle of your race. A pause. A breath. A moment to take stock. To realign your form. Your focus. Your purpose.

I’m not talking about a stop as much as a ritual of self-imposed brief and strategic interruptions. A series of pauses to ask yourself a few important questions, to listen to the answers that arise, and to open yourself to making some changes—maybe big ones, maybe small ones—that will help you run strongly. That will ensure you’re running the right race. And running it the right way. That will position you to win.

Faster, better, more fun? The only downside being time
to think? You don’t have to believe in God to realize that slowing down is a good idea. But you do have to be religious about it.

A
t the very end of ski season, with the sun shining and little buds emerging from tree branches, I got frostbite while skiing. Not just a little frostbite; several of my toes were snow white. Thankfully I didn’t lose any, but it took ten minutes in a hot shower for them to slowly and painfully return to their normal color.

Here’s what’s crazy: I ski all the time in the winter without getting frostbite, usually in temperatures well below freezing. So what happened?

Well, it turns out, it’s precisely
because
it was spring that I got frostbite.

You see, in the winter, when it’s cold, I wear a down jacket and several layers of thermal underwear. Most important, I use foot warmers—thin chemical packets that slide into my ski boots and emit heat for six hours. I need them because I have exceedingly wide feet and my boots
are tight, which constricts my blood flow and makes me susceptible to frostbite when it’s cold.

This time, since it was the very last ski weekend of spring, I wore a light jacket and didn’t use my foot warmers.

Only the weather was below freezing. Twenty degrees to be exact.

Did I look at the temperature before I went out? Of course I did. I knew it was cold. My feet even started to hurt an hour into skiing, but I just kept on going. I simply ignored the data. Why? Because it was spring! I expected warmer weather. My past experience told me that this time of year was sunny and hot. Every other year at this time I skied in a T-shirt. And the previous weekend it was sixty degrees and I
did
ski in a T-shirt.

All of which overwhelmed the reality that, actually, it was cold enough to turn my toes white.

This was a good reminder of how easy it is to mistake our expectation for reality, the past for the present, and our desires for fact. And how painful it can be when we do.

There’s a psychological term for this:
confirmation bias
. We look for the data, behaviors, and evidence that show us that things are the way we believe they should be. In other words, we look to confirm that we’re right.

In the early 1990s, while working for a medium-size consulting firm, I went to Columbia University’s executive MBA program. Two years after graduating, I was still working for the same firm, and I was ready for some new challenges. I had a number of new skills—skills the firm had, in part, paid for me to acquire—and I wanted to use them.

But the firm didn’t see the new me. They saw the old me, the one they had hired and trained four years earlier. And so they continued to give me the same work and use me in the same ways they had before I earned my MBA.

Then a headhunter called and, since she hadn’t known me before, she saw me as I was, not as she thought I should be. Within a few months, I’d left the firm and joined one that wanted to leverage my new skills.

Our inability—or unwillingness—to see things as they are is the cause of many personal, professional, and organizational failures. The world changes and yet we expect it to be the way we think it should be and so we don’t take action.

I confront this challenge in my coaching all the time. The most challenging aspect of any coaching assignment isn’t helping someone change—that’s comparatively easy. The hard part is getting the people around the person to change their perception of him. Because once we form an opinion, we resist changing it.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, having built its two-hundred-year franchise selling massive books, was blindsided by digital media and probably will never recover. Kodak had been so successful selling film since 1888 that it couldn’t imagine how quickly and completely it could be made irrelevant by new digital competitors.

Why do we fall into the trap of being fooled by expectations?

Practice.

Usually our expectations are right. In the spring, it’s
warmer. People don’t usually change drastically. And a two-hundred-year-old franchise is, well, two hundred years old. That’s pretty solid.

Which makes us feel good. Safe. Right.

But sometimes we’re wrong. Perhaps at one time we were right, and then things changed. But now, maybe, we’re wrong and we don’t like to admit that. We don’t even see it. Because we’re too busy looking for evidence to confirm our previous ideas.

Unfortunately, while confirmation bias makes us
feel
better, it makes us
behave
worse. So employees leave. Businesses falter. And I get frostbite.

How do we avoid falling into the trap of being fooled by expectations?

Practice.

Instead of looking for how things are the same, we can look for how they are different. Instead of seeking evidence to confirm our perspectives, we can seek to shake them up. Instead of wanting to be right, we can want to be wrong.

Of course, this takes a tremendous amount of confidence. Let’s face it, we’d all prefer to be right rather than wrong.

But here’s the irony: The more you look to be wrong, the more likely you’ll end up right.

So next time you look at an employee, ask yourself:
What’s changed?
Instead of focusing on what she’s doing wrong, try looking for something new she does right that you never noticed before. Same thing for any relationship you’re in.

And as you look at your industry, ask yourself how it’s changed and why that might mean your business strategy is off. Ask others to argue against you. Then listen instead of arguing.

Same goes for how you spend your time. Resist the temptation to accept the time-starved predicament you might be in. Do you
really
need to do everything you think you need to do?

Here’s another great question to ask:
What do I not want to see?

And next time you go outside, no matter the time of year, stick your hand out the window first and feel the temperature.

Because until you test your assumptions, you don’t know for sure whether they’re right. But once you question an assumption, once you open up to the possibility that things might not be the way they’ve always seemed, you need to be mentally prepared to be, well, wrong. Which is often a good thing. Because if you
are
wrong, it means there is a whole new set of possibilities open to you that you probably hadn’t considered before.

O
ne evening, a woman working for France Telecom sent an email to her father. Then she walked over to the window on the fourth floor of her office building, opened it, stepped through, and jumped to her death.

The email read: “I have decided to kill myself tonight… I can’t take the new reorganization.”

If this were an aberration, one depressed woman’s inability to handle change, we could dismiss it. But so far, dozens of France Telecom employees have killed themselves. And many more than that have tried. One man stabbed himself in the middle of a meeting.

When confronted with this high rate of suicides, management at France Telecom claimed that, because of the company’s size, the number wasn’t that surprising. But there is something unusual happening, and not just at France Telecom. According to America’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, work-related suicides increased 28 percent between 2007 and 2008.

It’s tempting to blame the companies. A good article in
The Economist
pointed to a variety of things—the drive for measurement and maximizing productivity, recession-driven layoffs, poor management communication—that contribute to a disheartening, depressing work environment. The article concludes that “companies need to do more than pay lip service to the human side of management.” I agree. Certainly there are things leaders can and must do to handle employees with more care, compassion, and respect.

But the problem is deeper and more complicated than a callous management team that cares about nothing except profits.

The problem is also in us.

It’s in how we see and define ourselves. It’s in our identities.

The first question we ask when we meet people is inevitably, “What do you do?” We have become our work, our professions. Connected 24/7 via BlackBerry, obsessively checking email and voice mails, we have left no space for other parts of ourselves.

If we spend all our time working, traveling to work, planning to work, thinking about work, or communicating about work, then we will see ourselves as workers and nothing more. As long as work is going well, we can survive that way.

But when we lose our jobs or our jobs are threatened, then our very existence is put into question. “Establishing your identity through work alone can restrict your sense of
self, and make you vulnerable to depression, loss of self-worth, and loss of purpose when the work is threatened,” Dr. Paul Rosenfield, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, told me in a recent conversation.

Who am I if you take away my work? That’s a question to which we’d better have a solid answer. And yet many of us don’t. Fortunately, once we realize this we can do something about it.

We can diversify.

I don’t mean diversifying your money, though that’s a good idea, too. I mean diversifying your self. So that when one identity fails, the other ones keep you vibrant. If you lose your job but you identify passionately as a mother or a father, you’ll be fine. If you have a strong religious identity or view yourself as an artist, you’ll be fine. If you see yourself as an athlete, or even simply as a good, loyal friend, you’ll be fine.

According to Dr. Rosenfield, this is an issue of mental health, even for the mentally ill. “People with mental illness often feel their identity is reduced to being mentally ill. Part of their recovery involves reclaiming other parts of their identity—being a friend, a volunteer, an artist, a dog lover, a student, a worker. It takes an active and bold effort to broaden and overcome the diminished sense of identity that results from dealing with mental illness, hospitalizations, medications, and one’s doctors saying, ‘You need to accept being mentally ill,’ without also saying, ‘But I believe you are more than your illness and you still have potential to do so many things in the world.’ ”

Here’s the thing, though: It’s not enough to see yourself in a certain way; you need to act on it. Build it into your year. Your day. It won’t help if you identify as a father but rarely spend time with your children. Or if religion is a big part of your identity and yet you rarely engage in religious activities.

One obstacle is money. For many people, an obsession with work is really about having enough money to support themselves or their families. How can we work less and still survive?

Perhaps it’s the only way to not only survive but thrive. Stepping away from your work might just be the key to increasing your productivity.

And having multiple identities will help you perform better in each one. Because you learn things as an athlete or a parent or a poet that will make you a better employee or leader or friend. So the more you invest yourself in multiple identities, the less likely it is that you’ll lose any one of them.