Short term, long term
Future Work/Life is a weekly newsletter that casts a positive eye to the future. I bring you interesting stories and articles, analyse industry trends and offer tips on designing a better work/life. If you enjoy reading it, please SUBSCRIBE HERE, and share it!
We all increasingly recognise the blurred boundaries between our work and personal lives. One of the positives to come out of the enforced shift to remote work is that we appear to have bid farewell to the historical attitude that when going to work, you should 'leave your personal issues at the door'.
Firstly, there is currently no office door at which to leave your issues. Secondly, an understanding of individual circumstances and our experiences at home is not only the right, empathic response, it can also have an overwhelmingly positive influence on our work - and vice-versa.
Over the next few weeks, I'm going to highlight a few principles that we apply every day in business, and that can serve as a useful touchpoint for parents - particularly as we navigate our way through uncertain times and plan for the future.
This week and next, I'll discuss the importance of vision and values to strategy, before explaining in future editions how planning and communication play a critical role in making that strategy a success.
I heard an interesting observation from Daisy Wademan Dowling the other day. Her research identified a common trait among people who she deemed 'happy and fulfilled'. They invariably have, she explained, the ability to think very short term and very long term at the same time.
In the current context, most organisations have made numerous short-term decisions to ensure their stability in the face of unprecedented challenges to their finances, logistics and operations (e.g. the mass movement towards a distributed workforce).
None of these essential but short-term decisions should, however, detract companies from being clear about their long-term vision and distract them from communicating this to their staff and clients.
As entrepreneur and writer Nancy Duarte puts it:
"A strong and consistent company vision helps your team members feel like they're building something great and heading toward their purpose. If you've been good at establishing a vision and think it will stay the same on the other side of this crisis, make sure to remind people of the longer journey. Hopefully, you are still leading them to the same place, but you are also navigating the adversity of an unexpected detour."
We understand this logic implicitly in business but don't necessarily apply it to our personal lives.
Why shouldn't we explicitly define our goals in life and articulate the core beliefs to which we'll stick to help us achieve them - in other words, our vision and values?
If one of the attributes of fulfilment is thinking very short term and very long term, it makes sense to create this sense of clarity in our relationships with friends and family, as well as in our careers.
The alternative, of course, is to either get stuck in the no-mans-land of the medium-term or, worse still, have no strategy at all.
Cue, waking up in the middle of the night over-thinking whether we can deliver on the commitments we have at work and do a half-decent job of raising children.
You might have guessed that I've been that person in the past. Experiences like that are one of the reasons I spend thinking about how to design my work-life. I understand that to achieve my ambitions while remaining happy and motivated, I can't just drift through life without a plan.
It is a realisation that many parents encounter, however, as Wademan Dowling outlined in her article, A Working Parent's Survival Guide:
"As a professional, you probably have incentives to focus on the intermediate-term: You're rewarded for completing that six-month project, meeting your annual revenue targets, and delivering a compelling three-year strategy plan. But as a working mother or father, that time horizon is emotionally treacherous; it's where much of the working-parent downside sits and where the potential sense of loss looms largest. If you're just back from parental leave, for example, sitting miserably at your desk and missing the baby, it can be crushing to think forward six months or a year."
Here's how the short-term"Think very-short term and very long term—at the same time. Yes, you do miss the baby terribly right now, but you'll be home to see her in a few hours—and years from now you know you'll have provided her with a superb example of tenacity, career commitment, and hard work. In other words, acknowledge the reality and depth of your current feelings, identify a point of imminent relief, and then project far forward, to ultimate, positive outcomes." and long-term view can help in this situation.
I now deal with the short-term part by setting myself three or four goals for the day each morning. They range from specific work-related tasks (like, "write a newsletter"), to personal reminders to be physically and psychologically present ("make sure you stop work and enjoy dinner time with Carly and the kids"). I find this helps give me a positive and realistic outlook for the day ahead and what I want to achieve. To that end, I don't make the objectives too tricky.
How can we take these lessons to create an ongoing, effective strategy?
The first step is to imagine your ideal future.
In 15-20 years, say, what do you do when you wake up in the morning? Get out of bed and exercise? Meditate for half an hour? (Metaphorically) read the paper cover-to-cover? Roll over, snooze the alarm and go back to sleep? Open the doors out onto the garden and jump in the pool for a swim?
What are you doing day-to-day? Are you still doing the job you love today? Are you spending your morning on a hobby and then working in a variety of advisory roles every afternoon? Are you volunteering? Have you finally taken that yoga teaching course?
And how does the end of your day look? Are you congregating for a family meal? Do you work on a series of passion projects? Do you dial into conference calls for the international business that you own? Are you sitting quietly with a book?
It's easy to get stuck in the moment without taking the opportunity to step back and get some perspective. Visualising the future can be a useful and positive reminder of why we're doing 'this' now (whatever 'this' is).
Next week, I'll discuss the importance of identifying the values that you aspire to embody in your life and career. I'll also cover how that influences the way you parent and introduce the benefits of going through this process with your partner.
In the meantime, have a nice weekend and, as ever, thanks for all your feedback.
Cheers,
Ollie
Any Other Business:
After the initial, unbridled optimism for an office-free future, people are beginning to recognise that the last four months don't necessarily represent the best test of a change in working culture. Here are a few articles that address the subject from different angles.
Hybrid Remote Work Offers the Worst of Both Worlds by Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder and CEO of GitLab - Post-pandemic, many companies plan to let employees work from home and a main office. But trying to do both ensures neither experience is good.
End of the office: the quiet, grinding loneliness of working from home by Simon Usborne in the Guardian. Before Covid-19, many of us thought remote working sounded blissful. Now, employees across the world long for chats by the coffee machine and the whirr of printers.
‘Death of the office’ exaggerated despite homeworking boom by Javier Espinoza in the FT. AI-driven tech is accelerating the shift but cannot yet replicate creative meetings.
In other AI related news, Research is proving that leadership stereotypes are too stubborn to be eliminated by AI by Julie Manning Magid in Fast Company. As the executive and academic director of a leadership centre, her research indicates that relying on data analytics to eliminate human bias in choosing leaders won’t help.
Here's a smart visual summary from Adam Grant on how to balance freedom of thought and freedom to criticise.
And finally, Podcast Note's pick of insightful quotes from Naval Ravikant from Tim Ferris' podcast in 2015.
