ITLP Tuesday Readings

"Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves -- to break our own records, to outstrip our yesterday by our today." ~ Stewart B. Johnson

Is your focus on what others do or don't do? How often do you focus on what you do, want to do, can do, should do, aspire to do?

Ask yourself, "Is there something that I can do to make things/me better?" If so, then plan and do it. If not, then let it go. How will you know what you're capable of if you don't take action to see? You might be surprised!!

Posted by Jim Hall at 11:24 AM | Permalink

Today's reading is "The Flight from Conversation" by Sherry Turkle. The article appeared in the April 21, 2012 edition of the New York Times. Professor Turkle is a psychologist and Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. She is the author of a number of books including "Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other." If you'd like to hear Professor Turkle speak on this subject, check out her TED talk.

Turkle begins: "We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And, yet we have sacrificed conversation for more communication." She continues, "We've become accustomed to a new way of being 'alone together'." Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be.

As opposed to human relationships which are rich and messy and demanding, texting and email and posting let up present the self we want to be. We can edit, we can retouch, we can delete. Just right. And, according to Turkle as we edit, retouch, and delete, we move from conversation to connection. We short-change ourselves, and overtime we stop caring and we forget that there is a difference.

"We expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationships. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put out attention wherever we want it to be; and that we never have to be alone.

Turkle is a partisan for conversation. To make room for conversation she urges that we all take some deliberate steps:

1. Create device free zones.

2. Demonstrate the value of conversation.

3. Talk to one another about what really matters.

4. Really listen to each other, even to the boring parts.

Turkle closes the piece: "So I say, look up, look at one another, and let's start the conversation."

And, I join her by encouraging you to have more real conversations this week. Instead of sending that email, get out of your office, walk down the hall, and have a conversation.

. . . . jim

Posted by Jim Hall at 10:20 AM | Permalink

Recently Daniel Markovitz wrote "To-Do Lists Don't Work" for the Harvard Business Review blogs. I found the posting to be a good discussion of why we all wrestle with making our to-do lists work and decided to share it as today's Tuesday Reading. Markovitz is president of TimeBack Management and the author of A Factory of One.

He argues that to-do lists inevitably set us up for failure and frustration for five reasons:

1. The Paradox of Choice. Our to-do lists typically have tens of entries - mine is around 20 that are written down but some of these have multiple entries of sub-tasks. Yet research has shown that we can only handle - i.e., the choice of what to do next - about seven options before we're overwhelmed. Markovitz says that looking at a 58-item to-do list will either paralyze you or send you into default mode: checking your email.

2. Heterogeneous complexity. When your list contains items that will take three minutes and those that are much longer, you invariably focus on the shorter items for the psychological payoff that you get when you finish a task.

3. Heterogeneous priority. When your list contains activities of varying priority, you take care of the "highs" and ignore the "lows" until they show up as "hight," often without you having adequate time to do the work.

4. Lack of context. To-do lists, with only three-five words for each item, make it difficult for you to determine the work required. For example, how long will it take you to do the task? With just the list you are always asking how long and how much time do I have available.

5. Lack of commitment devices. To-do lists don't prevent you from choosing the more pleasant tasks over the most important ones because they lack a commitment device that locks you into a course of action you might not make if you made the decision to work on that task at that moment.

Based on these observations, Markovitz argues that we should move from to-do lists to what he calls "living in your calendar." By this he means taking tasks as they arrive, estimating how long the task will take, what information you need, etc., and scheduling this work on your calendar with annotations as to the details of the work. As you do this, be sure to leave unscheduled time each day for the crises du jour.

The doing here is hard. You'll find that everything won't fit. But, it's reality. And it represents a truer picture of your availability to take on new tasks. Said differently, it will force you to say no, to decide what work will be delayed, etc. And, ultimately, that will be good for you as it will help you set better expectations about what you can accomplish in the time available.

So, do give yourself time to reflect on this approach to your to-do list and give it a try.

. . . . jim

Posted by Jim Hall at 11:51 AM | Permalink

Today's Reading, "Go to Lunch and Clean Out Your Inbox," was originally written as a weekly reflection by Stephen Kemp. Stephen is the Coordinator for Help Desk Services at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's College of Veterinary Medicine.

Every semester I perform employee reviews for my student workers; this is an opportunity for me to give my students feedback on how they have been doing over the past semester and how they can improve, as well as a chance for them to give me feedback on my performance and that of the Vet Med Help Desk in general. This semester my most senior student is graduating, so his evaluation questions were geared more toward an exit interview. One of the questions that I asked was the following: "What advice would you give me as the Help Desk supervisor?" The answer the student gave me actually caught me quite off guard:

"Go to lunch every day. It seems like you always have so much to do and you're on the verge of letting it run you over and then you suddenly stop and say, 'Alright, I'm going to lunch.' I think it keeps you sane. I've seen people who just work non-stop, and it's not good. So keep going to lunch."

We live in a world where now it is basically expected that we are working 24/7, and that when someone else has a problem we will give up our lives so that they can keep on going. While sometimes we can't avoid working long hours, we need to be able to stop what we're doing and take a break outside the office to reset ourselves each day- and that break shouldn't be whenever quitting time finally rolls around. Whether it's an hour long lunch in the park or a 20-minute break to go get a coffee, we need time away from the job during the working day to receive a pause from the bombardment of help requests and let our brains recover. The work will be there when you get back, but if your brain goes on strike it could spell disaster (not to mention that the howl of wind through a now-empty skull will severely annoy your co-workers).

Along similar lines, our work is filled with tasks that never get completed- or tasks that take so long to complete that we feel like we're not making any progress. Whenever we start to feel overwhelmed and like we're going nowhere, we should take some time to do a trivial task that is easy and has a clear end point. Last week I cleaned out my email inbox of all the messages that I had been meaning to delete for months but got too busy or distracted to do earlier. Once done, I had a huge sense of accomplishment and felt oddly refreshed and ready to get back to normal work. Maybe for you it's cleaning off your desk, organizing some files, or just watering your office plants. Whatever it is, it should be something both easy (low brain power) and measurable (sense of completion). You won't even feel guilty about doing this over something "more important" because it's something that you've been meaning to do anyway!

So, for all of our collective sanity, I challenge you to regularly do some form of the following to reset and refresh yourself:

• Go to lunch
• Clean out your inbox

All very good advice for everyone of us. Have a great week. . . . jim

Posted by Jim Hall at 12:35 PM | Permalink

"If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn't need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around." ~ Jim Rohn

Are you honest with people, in a helpful way, when they are not up to speed or doing the wrong thing? Do you know what helps/hinders each individual and what their interests and skills are?

Are you using your people for their strengths or focusing on weaknesses? Are you helping others to succeed? Their success is your success.

Posted by Jim Hall at 3:20 PM | Permalink

Today's Reading, Christensen on disruptive innovation in higher education, comes to us from the Changing Higher Education blog. (Clayton Christensen coined the term "disruptive innovation" in 2003, having used "disruptive technology" earlier for the same concept.)

This blog post draws from a well-written white paper - Disrupting College (PDF) - that describes the challenges facing higher education today, outlines the concepts of disruptive innovation, and applies these concepts to higher education. Two major points are made:

1. For more than 50 years, higher education in the United States has focused on expanding access. The focus now needs to be on how to make a quality post-secondary education affordable.

2. Disruptive innovation is occurring now in the form of on-line, for-profit higher education organizations.

My challenge to you this week is to learn more about these issues. Toay's reading is a good place to start. Then, if you want to gain a better understanding of disruptive watch this short video: Disruptive innovation explained. In it, Professor Christensen describes the field he invented. The story, at the end of the video, where he describes explaining the concept to Andy Grove of Intel is particularly instructive. It really makes the point of how this change occurs.

To explore this area further, download Disrupting College and find some time for reading. And to go even further, read "Conversation Spotlights Disruptive Innovation in Higher Education", a column by Michael Horn in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

I think that investing some time on this subject is a very good, strategic investment. By understanding this concept and higher education's challenges, you'll be better equipped to see and act on what's ahead.

Have a great week. . . . jim

Posted by Jim Hall at 12:31 PM | Permalink

"Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself." ~ James Stephens

Are you comfortable expressing your opinion with different types of people? Do you say what you mean, what you think people want to hear, or just don't say?

Do you want to be known for who you are or who you think you should be? Who makes that determination? What does authentic mean to you?

Posted by Jim Hall at 12:07 PM | Permalink