Article Purpose and Impact

Developing Purpose and Impact at Work

SOME LESSONS I’VE LEARNT – RAIN KHOO

A Rhythm of Life

Kandinsky is an artist heavily influenced by Classical and Jazz music and sought to transliterate that into his art. His work is an allegory of the complexity of the rhythms and tensions of the different strands in our life, which comes together to form a composition. Just as everyone is different, each of us has an optimum rhythm to balance ourselves in order to work to our unique purpose and impact.

In this 3-part series, I cover tools for 3 areas of Awareness, Energies and Time – which forms my framework for purposeful and impactful working. Each article uses the 2 lenses of SELF (namely, our body and spirit), and OTHERS ( the people around us and our interactions with them). We begin with self and other awareness, which brings around intentionality and removes the noise in your life. Layer that on with Energy which determines the quality of your journey. Lastly comes tools for Time Management which helps you refine how you use the minutes and hours in your day.

Wassily Kandinsky: Composition VIII

A. Awareness

It’s easier to do a sprint for short-term goals. But to be able to manage your time for longer-term objectives requires self-awareness. Here are some areas to work on, assuming you already are aware of your areas of interests for work:

Purpose: What is your larger purpose(s) and causes you feel drawn to? What are the big questions you want to find out? What kind of experiences will help you be in a place where you are more likely to find answers, and which intersect with your interests?
Plans: When you’re planning your next big steps – it’s always good to have a Plan B/C/D so that if Plan A fails, you have a back up for psychological safety. A plan E could be falling back temporarily on friends and relatives. A backup plan can be simple as a sentence.
Tracking: Take regular timeouts each year to see if you’re tracking against your middle and long-term plans.
Goals: Whether it is a job or short-term project, it’s good to set goals on what you want to achieve or learn, and remember to review them!
Varied Experiences: Part of life is getting to know yourself – we don’t always know (how to articulate) what makes us happy or gives us self-satisfaction, but there are some basic principles for self-satisfaction – being able to perform a skill after learning and using it over time; being able to see creative output. So when in doubt, mix in some new experiences based on the science of what makes people happy.
Spiritual Practice: Aside from having hobbies, try to adopt practices that will give you a deep empathy with yourself, and with others. Spend time to process significant past events in your life that are unresolved. Examples of practices:
To increase awareness of self: Mindfulness or related exercises and disciplines, body scan meditations, journaling.
To increase awareness of others: Prayer, volunteering, active listening, observing on conversing without judgement of others.
Senses: How you process sensory input for work (knowledge and information) may differ from others. Spend time absorbing the same information through different means, and for some people it may be a mixture of senses (eg seeing the text whilst listening to it).You could also take this sensory test to understand your senses better and prevent yourself from overloading them https://affectautism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Sensory-Problems-Assessment-Questionnaire-2010.pdf
Learning: When you are in a steep learning curve, you would need to optimise your input intake in terms of medium, environment, energy and period (for focus). Apply the laws of memory writing (repeating the material at least once within a couple of days) and memory consolidation (get enough quality sleep).
Boundaries: Prepare ahead methods to set healthy boundaries before they get intruded on. This could be ways for yourself to stop when needed, or a script for response when dealing with others. No method is perfect from the start – test and improve.
Flow: The all-elusive flow state! Do your own review of the times you have done the best work, and analyse what are the factors contributing to it. Then seek out opportunities where you can recreate it at the next level.
Being able to let go: Things won’t go as planned. The lessons you want to learn may not be the lessons you are meant to learn. Embrace change and grow skills that will help you thrive in every situation.

B. Energies

Here is a list of different questions that might be helpful for you to go through. Think of them as vectors to help you be aware of how to manage your energies on for both a daily, and long term basis:

What kind of physical environment do I work well in? Think of places, quality of space or vibe, sound and people.
Do I need different physical environments for different types of work?
Am I aware of the different energies and focus for different kinds of work speed/rhythm?
Are there certain types of energies I “naturally” have more of?
Do I know how to transit from one type of work to another? Are there things I can do to switch gears more easily?
Do I focus best in the morning, afternoon or night?
Do I know how to power through healthily through a sprint so that I don’t burn out? Eg setting daily targets, planning out the work ahead to make sure it is feasible, time boxing, buffering, mid-point checks
What can I do to focus better when I hit a snag? For example, can I switch tasks, self-talk to challenge myself or have a change environment etc.
Do I know how to use food / nutrition to manage my energies throughout the day?
Am I aware of how much energy I have left and how that is affecting my focus?
What are my body’s warning signs before I hit the limit?
What kind of people do I like to work with? Am I working with enough of them?
Do I have skills to distance myself from comments that upset me or break my concentration?
Do I have skills to positively manage people I dislike?
Do I know how much physical exercise I need to keep my metabolic rate up? In both Cardiovascular and Strength exercises.
Am I using the different energies that exercises bring, into my cognition or focus?
When hit by a curved ball in a meeting, do I know or have tools to recover quickly? For example, deep breathing or counting to 10, just to name a couple.
When faced with overwhelming emotions do I have tools to process them and still keep productive? Here are some tools to help:
1. Containerizing the event but promising yourself you will process it
2. Centering exercises
3. Mindfulness exercises
4. Am I able to name / dissect the emotions I am going through?
5. Am I spending time to understand the source of these emotions?
6. Am I able to then construct a new narrative or habit to address the root problem?
Do I have an emotional support system and safe spaces?
When faced with overwhelming challenges do I have tools to overcome them?
1. Breaking things down into small manageable chunks
2. Planning a timeline
3. Talking and negotiating a new timeline
4. Getting backup support
Can I sense when my spirit is empty and need more spiritual exercise time? Am I planning in Happy time not just with myself, but also with others? For this – each person will know their right balance.
Do I know how to recharge my different energies?
Am I aware, down to a 5 minute time frame, of how much down time I need between specific short-term activities?

C. Time

There are many books out there on time management, but the principles are really quite simple. You don’t need to spend hours reading books to learn these. These are practical tips for time management – practice to find out what works for you!

Calendaring: Having a single point of reference for all of your calendaring – I recommend Google Calendar, as it can pull in information from different google accounts.
To-Do list: For those who still favour the physical to-do list, or get a kick out of striking out items on a to-do list like me, I still use a written list from time to time when I really need to get stuff done.
Bucketing the to-do list- There are 4 buckets of work, and I tend to use Stickies/Mac to track them:
1. Today’s to-do list
2. Immediate – Next up list of things once you have completed (a)
3. Others – Pending another person’s reply, but requiring follow-up or tracking so that no ball is dropped
4. Back-burner – Other important things you need to get to in the longer term
Prioritisation: Have 15 minutes weekly to reprioritise your above items.
Daily: Start with a quick win, as that will get your momentum and happy endorphins going. Schedule your work so that your larger work needing focus is matched to your energies of the day
Distraction: You know what distracts you – it could just be that little tab that goes to YouTube, or having your phone faced up at your table. Remove your temptations and take control of your attention.
Scheduling: For managers or people who are juggling many balls – I would suggest to have a weekly schedule of work, with regular scheduled check-ins on longer-term items such as goals or staff progression.
Reminders: When waiting on someone else, ensure that the other person knows when to get back to you and also that you have a reminder in your trust calender to follow-up with them.
Time-boxing: For folks who find tracking short-term tasks really hard, time-boxing is a great way to optimise your time, so you know when you are over-investing. Some people even use an alarm to time-box. This is also useful for a sprint activity so that you cover everything without going too deep.
Managing Changes: Often, we can only control ourselves and not our environment. Ensure you have enough flex in your scheduling and know what is negotiable or not.
Project Management: More complex longer term projects may be added by the use of a gantt chart, with linked dependencies for tasks. There are some free tools online you can use for this.
Feedback: For relationships that matter, make time to talk things through if your behaviour is impacting the relationship. Get feedback from loved ones. It’s not what you perceive the relationship to be, but how you make them feel that matters.
Setting Boundaries: Always ensure that your fundamentals of sleep, food, exercises are met. If not on a daily basis, don’t let any of these burn with neglect for too long.
Time Audit: This is only for people who love to quantify matters. If you have the buckets in relative % of what is important to you, as well as the metrics of what progress, happiness or success looks like, overlay the two to see if you’re spending time and energy in the right proportions. Remember that there will always be conflict of short and long term goals – we all want to spend 100% of our time playing, but we need to be practical. It’s not just practicality, but by the intentional learning of specific skills, that you can help others or contribute to society as well.