I’m re-committing to Focus. I hope you’ll join me if you’re not already there.

You might be thinking I’m good at this given what I write and talk about, but (like many people) it’s a big challenge for me. (Can you imagine how difficult it’s going to be when our future generations get out here in the working world with us?)

My Distraction Diet Commitments…

Focus hours… Twice each work day, I will hold focus hours. From 9 am – 11 am and from 2 pm – 4 pm, I will become unavailable to anything but true emergencies. My phones will be off to anything inbound (no calls, no texts… airport mode on my cell). It’s only two 2-hour blocks of time where I’m unavailable to others. When I think I can’t do it and that people need to reach me because I’m so very important, I’ll remember that I’m not as important as I think I am.

Email… I will turn off email alerts and check it only twice a day (11:30 and 4:30). When I think that’s impossible because people need to reach me because I’m so very important, I’ll remember that I’m not as important as I think I am. (See below for letting people know how to get to you.)

Instant messaging… I will not do it. This would be like allowing someone to jump up on my desk anytime they want and interrupt my workflow (and I certainly don’t want to do that to anyone else). After all, I’m a grown-up.

Web… I will not use the web personally during my money hours (mine are between 8 am and 6 pm each work day with a break for lunch). When this gets tough because of my addiction to distraction, I’ll remind myself again that I’m a grown-up.

Phone… I will not give my attention to my iPhone when people I know are around me. If it vibrates (a ringtone? please) when I’m in a face-to-face conversation I will do my best to ignore it and give it attention when I’m alone. Fortunately, when I’m in an airport, I generally don’t know a lot of people so I can dig into my phone all I want there (although I might miss out on some of those serendipitous moments I’ve had in the past where I’ve met some very interesting people and learned new things… hmmmm).

Proximity… I will turn my desk facing away from my door.

Television… I will not channel surf. If I want to watch something, I will watch that thing and that’s it (and it will rarely, if ever, be something stupid). If I need downtime, I’ll read a book or something on the web (being careful here too, of course).

Commitment: When things get tough, I’ll remind myself that I want to succeed professionally, financially, and personally (better relationships, better knowledge). And, if I do these things, I’ll likely contribute more, make more useful things happen, earn more, and enjoy more as a result. (It’s a better bet.) When I make a mistake (break focus hours, check my email, look at the web, etc.), I’ll stop, re-commit, and remind myself I want to make good things happen (rather than living in a state of busy distraction).

These are for me and my workflow. If your work really requires more attention to email or a phone then adjust accordingly. As you make these commitments, be sure to let people know so they understand you’ll be responding to them, just at a different interval than you did before. Let them know that if they need you urgently, they should call you or visit you. If they don’t like that idea, remind them that you love them (only slight kidding here) and they’re important to you but you are trying to make good things happen and that requires hard work and focus (Cross The Line, right?). Maybe they’ll be inspired and join you in your distraction diet and we’ll all win.

Got another idea you’d like to share? I’d love to hear it. If I think it’s something everyone would benefit from, I’ll send it out in another email. Just email me at Sparker@GiveMore.com.

One last thing…

“Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’.”

C.S. Lewis (1942)
from The Screwtape Letters

Here’s Louis CK’s version (funny, huh?). Warning: he’s got a bit of trash mouth.

Hang in their until the end… hilarious. Speaks to the Smile side of Smile & Move (Being awake and approachable).

Connect with Sam (guy behind this stuff)…

Facebook | LinkedIn | Google+ | Twitter

Copyright © 2011 by Give More Media Inc. This was written by Sam Parker. If you’d like to tell people about it somewhere (e.g., blog, newsletter, Facebook, social media), please reference Sam Parker of GiveMore.com as the author and link directly to the article. Excerpts are great but please don’t publish the article in its entirety without advanced written permission (email Sam using the address at the bottom of this page).

If you’re slightly more daring, call 804-762-4500 ext. 303.

That’s it.

It seems to me that too many of us forget this too often… allowing ourselves to slip in and out of some state of ego-driven entitlement rather than obsessing over making good things happen for other people (so sad).

We need to get over ourselves and kick@ss for others. We do that and everything works.

The people at Netflix get it. They call it being a "stunning colleague." (more on this below)

Don’t you love that… a stunning colleague? Aren’t stunning colleagues what we all want from the people we work with (and what we all want to be for others… yes, you do or you wouldn’t be here)?

We need to get tired of mediocrity and indifference and be positively surprising to our colleagues and customers/patients/ guests/ clients (and managers). We need to encourage each other more.

How?

Stop seeking the complex answer and embrace the simple one…

Handle what it is you’ve been given to do. Contribute your piece of the equation.

"You gotta take responsibility for the place you hold here." – Oprah Winfrey

If you lead a team of people and you’ve not read my expanded thoughts on this (no gomos, no d-grunts), they’re here.

Smile & Move.

Developing a team of people? Perhaps one of my books or messages might be a helpful tool. Visit http://www.GiveMore.com to see everything (SalesTough, Smile & Move, 212° the extra degree®, Cross The Line, etc.).

On Netflix…

These guys started the business is 1997. From October 2008 to May 2011, they enjoyed a stock ride of $18.95 to over $200 a share. In April 2011, they reported first quarter sales of $718.55 million and a net income of $60.23 million. Those stunning colleagues appear to be doing a solid job.

If you’re interested, they’ve got a fantastic slide presentation about their culture that reads like a book. Very inspiring. It can be found here… http://www.netflix.com/jobs (it’s the first one). I love it.

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Copyright © 2011 by Give More Media Inc. This was written by Sam Parker. If you’d like to tell people about it somewhere (e.g., blog, newsletter, Facebook, social media), please reference Sam Parker of GiveMore.com as the author and link directly to the article. Excerpts are great but please don’t publish the article in its entirety without advanced written permission (email Sam using the address at the bottom of this page).

If you’re slightly more daring, call 804-762-4500 ext. 303.

“Some people are,” I answered (without pointing out that we were too).

“I mean a lot of the people I know aren’t.”

I asked where that was and the person said it was at one of our local media companies here in Richmond.

“How’s the news being produced?” I asked.

“Well… Some people are working. I was really talking about the nonessentials.”

I hadn’t heard that phrase in a while. I remember hearing it on big snow days in the Washington D.C. area when I was growing up – an area that hosts a large number of government employees.

“You don’t wish you were nonessential… do you?” I asked.

essential (adjective): of the utmost importance
nonessential (adjective): not essential

We all have a choice.

Everyone can be essential. It’s a matter of becoming important to someone else (whether it’s behind the scenes or out in front). And that happens by making good things happen for someone else.

“You’re gonna have to serve somebody.”
–Bob Dylan (1941 – )
American music artist

Be essential… and encourage others to be the same.

Cross The Line.

We have no talks for teens scheduled at the moment.

How to help your team to keep from going through the motions
(15 minutes – free)

09.06.11

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Sometimes there’s limited space, so please check-in 10 minutes early on the day of the webinar. Please.

At the moment, we’re not archiving these. If you want to catch one but can’t make one, watch for an email notification in one of your newsletters from us or any updates via twitter. You can subscribe to our email newsletter here.

If you have an entertainment situation where you’d prefer not to avoid alcohol altogether, consider…

• Slowing your pace of drinking
• Alternating your drink with seltzer, club soda or water throughout the event
• Eating more food throughout the event
• Consuming drinks or beer with less alcohol
• All of the above

Alcohol quick facts

• Generally… one 12-ounce beer = one 5-ounce glass of wine = 1.5 ounces of liquor (80 proof)
• Wine usually has an alcohol content of 12 – 16%
• Beer in most cases, has an alcohol content of 3.2 – 7% (although can be higher)
• Mixed drinks can often contain more than 1.5 ounces of liquor depending on the “pour”
• As little as 1 – 2 drinks in one hour can impair an individual’s ability to drive and think clearly (depending on weight and alcohol content)
• Only time can sober up someone
• In all U.S. states, driving a car with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of .08 or more is illegal (.10 is the old limit)

Weekly, I’m amazed by technology and our ability to connect instantaneously wherever we are. But I wonder if that’s what’s really happening – the connecting.

There’s a wonderful (and frightening) book called The Screwtape Letters (C.S. Lewis). It’s a compilation of letters from one devil to another – a mentoring devil to a junior devil. It’s dizzying what it’ll do to your thinking because everything seems to be in reverse. If you want to push your brain, it’s worth your time.

So… What if it were true? If there was an evil force in the world, what would be its primary work?

It would attack love, wouldn’t it? And love is care. And wouldn’t one of the most evil ways to do that be to help us slip into a twilight state of sleep and indifference but at the same time make us feel as though we’re active and connecting with one another?

“Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’.”

C.S. Lewis (1942 – can you believe that?)
from The Screwtape Letters

Okay, my band of evilness, here’s an idea…

Let’s make it so easy for people to connect that they focus on the quantity of connections rather than the quality of those connections… Devolve the meaning of friend. Devolution. Mmmmm.

Let’s give them some tools that allow them to find each other wherever they may be and let’s encourage them to be obsessed with those tools. So efficient. Wait… And then maybe they can keep track of those friends… In front of each other… Yes, a contest of sorts. So proud.

Let’s help them push human interaction to their fingers rather than their faces… Oh, so nice… Quicker less thoughtful communication eroding their ability to communicate at all, perhaps? Could it be that they may even shy away from talking completely?

Yes quicker, less thoughtful, less meaningful.

All along, they’ll feel like they’re making more connections but in reality, they’ll be growing apart… Becoming less able to connect in reality. Conversations will become acronyms. Discussions will become monologues and homologues. Listening, reflection, and thought… Pffft. Rush. Rush. Rush.

Oh… To have them care more about telling their story than living their story… How wonderfully terrible that would be.

Let’s be careful.

(love your people)

__________

Copyright © 2010 by Give More Media Inc. This was written by Sam Parker. If you’d like to tell people about it somewhere (e.g., blog, newsletter, Facebook, social media), please reference Sam Parker of GiveMore.com as the author and link directly to the article. Excerpts are great but please don’t publish the article in its entirety without advanced written permission (email Sam using the address at the bottom of this page).

Love Your People® is a registered trademark held by Give More Media Inc.

The rules…

Check and handle email upon arrival then check and handle email at lunch. Check and handle email after 4 pm. At home, check it all you’d like (but hopefully that won’t be more than once a day).

Here’s what we’ve learned so far (we’ve been doing it at GiveMore since 11.2010)…

• We recognized our addiction to checking email (and cheated ourselves occasionally).
• We identified how it became a default task (automatically checking it when returning from a discussion, meeting, trip to the bathroom, etc.).
• We saw how we sometimes used it to hide out from our more important work (“If I’m addressing email, I’m doing something. It may not be important in the long term but at least I’m of use at this moment.” – Do you see the problem with this thinking?).
• We learned that our email can wait* and that as the day comes to an end, we’re more productive and happier. (Although the first few days were very uncomfortable and had us oddly distracted by our lack of distraction.)

It’s cwazy**…

Why is it that we would allow ourselves to be distracted from what we rationally know to be our more important work that gets us closer to our goal of making good things happen?

Our next step here… Drop the morning check and look at it only twice a day. A few people have already passed out by thinking about it.

“The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed. Or that lovely poem that didn’t get written because someone knocked on the door.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968)
American civil rights leader
Nobel Peace Prize recipient

* Our customer service people check email hourly in order to be sure we’re addressing customer needs quickly. We don’t believe we’ve lost any sales and we’ve had no negative feedback on our response times.

** And if we still have your attention… This spelling of the word indicates a deeper level of crazy – so cwazy that we’d spell it cwazy. You think that’s crazy?

How?

This assumes you’ve already bought into the value of focusing on what’s most important to you and your people. (If you’ve not, please allow me to encourage you with my distraction diet. The link is at the end so you can focus.)

Start by…

1. Turning off email alerts – audible and visual – for each time an email arrives
2. Turning off automatic send and receives
3. Setting up your email client to open to a page other than your inbox (e.g., in Outlook you can go to the “Outlook Today” page)

Checking email..

1. Open email
2. Hit send and receive
3. Address what must be addressed
4. Move or delete emails as appropriate
5. Hit send
6. Minimize or close email until next check

If you need to communicate or delegate something by email before your next check, this is where you can get tripped up.

If your email program allows it, open 5 – 10 blank emails during one of your email checks. When you need to type an email do it and hit send (sending it to your outbox). If you feel it really needs to be sent immediately, go in and hit send and receive and minimize the window quickly without giving attention to your inbox (we said it’d be tough).

Now, if you want that email addressed immediately, call the person who’s also trying to focus with you and let them know you’ve sent them an email that needs their attention now. (Of course, then they’ll need to be disciplined and focused in giving only your email attention when they hit send and receive.)

“Then why not just tell them over the phone instead of adding the email step?”

Good point. Perhaps you should have. It may have saved you the time of writing the email and been quicker for all involved (better chance to fully communicate through a real-life discussion rather than having something misinterpreted, which of course can happen in a discussion too). At the same time, maybe having to call and interrupt someone might keep you from doing it because you’re more apt to be giving care and attention to their time.

The big picture goal here really has nothing to do with email. It’s all about minimizing distraction, focusing, and helping all of us get closer to our goal of making good things happen (which is what you want).

Expect and enjoy more from your work. Make a decision to hold yourself to a standard that’s not standard at all.

Cross The Line.

More on this from Sam: My Distraction Diet

Connect with Sam (guy behind this stuff)…

Facebook | LinkedIn | Google+ | Twitter

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Copyright © 2010 by Give More Media Inc. This was written by Sam Parker. If you’d like to tell people about it somewhere (e.g., blog, newsletter, Facebook, social media), please reference Sam Parker of GiveMore.com as the author and link directly to the article. Excerpts are great but please don’t publish the article in its entirety without advanced written permission (email Sam using the address at the bottom of this page).

then from another…

and then from another…

What would the pictures of your work look like?

(Don’t be a Gomo. Make good things happen for other people.)

__________

Copyright © 2010 by Give More Media Inc. This was written by Sam Parker. If you’d like to tell people about it somewhere (e.g., blog, newsletter, Facebook, social media), please reference Sam Parker of GiveMore.com as the author and link directly to the article. Excerpts are great but please don’t publish the article in its entirety without advanced written permission (email Sam using the address at the bottom of this page).

One of the big reasons we’re here is to make good things happen for other people.

It’s simple but for some strange reason, it’s not always easy.

Over the last decade, the Gallup organization has conducted surveys to determine how into our work we are (as you likely know, it’s referred to as ‘employee engagement’). The averages over the decade…

• 29 out of 100 of us are engaged (smovers)
• 54 of 100 are not engaged (gomos)
• 17 of 100 are actively disengaged (d-grunts)

This last group actually ‘works’ to make things worse. Can you imagine how horrible it must be for someone to feel compelled to invest their limited time and energy in tearing things and people down?

Most of us (if not all of us) have been Gomos and D-grunts at times but true D-grunts and Gomos stay there (complaining, watching the clock, entitled, not making good things happen for other people).

Here’s my proposal…

As Smovers and 212ers (aware and responsible), let’s be sure we do our best to lead by example. If we slip, let’s remember we’re obligated to bounce back (Smovish principle #9).

Then, let’s all commit to encouraging someone who’s on the fence between Smoving and being a Gomo (and remind them it’s much more fun on this side). Maybe, if we each have a small success, the example will awaken and encourage even the D-grunts to reconsider their ways. How amazing would that be?

How do you save a Gomo or D-grunt? I believe it begins by loving our people which as you might guess, isn’t all hugs, kisses, and rainbows. It’s about sweeping away the eggshells (theirs and ours) and going for truth.

For those who’ve not read my essay, Love Your People, you can find it here (a 5-minute read at most). We’ve published it in a cool little booklet format with questions and thoughts that can help you get closer to loving your people more consistently (kind of a work/play book).

My presentation of Cross the Line might also be a helpful tool for encouraging someone. You can watch that here.

Gallup’s “State of the American Workplace” can be found here.

No Gomos Printable

No D-Grunts Printable

Get a No Gomos wristband here

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Copyright © 2010 by Give More Media Inc. This was written by Sam Parker. If you’d like to tell people about it somewhere (e.g., blog, newsletter, Facebook, social media), please reference Sam Parker of GiveMore.com as the author and link directly to the article. Excerpts are great but please don’t publish the article in its entirety without advanced written permission (email Sam using the address at the bottom of this page).