Former Amazon VP, sharing High Performance and Career Growth insights. Outperform, out-compete, and still get time off for yourself.
High performers find ways to make daily habits out of hard things others put off. Today I share an advanced lesson in how to do this. Smokers know they "should" quit but most do not. Many struggle to eat right or exercise, though they "know better." At work, we all put off some tasks we know we should do. These are not knowledge problems (we know what we should do). They are process and habit problems. All these tasks (stopping smoking, working out, long term learning at work...) share the trait that they are important (they have high value) but not urgent (on any given day the consequences of putting them off to tomorrow are small). The result is, we often promise ourselves we will get to them while actually delaying them far too long for our own good. The most successful people find ways to routinely do more of the critical tasks that others avoid. Discipline is great and it can work very short term. But it is rarely a sustainable solution as it is too draining. A client of mine shared a good example of doing this that we can adapt and apply. He is a manager who need to learn a new technology. He put himself onto his Oncall Rotation as a forcing function. This approach leverages several key tricks: 1) It allocates scheduled time (when he is oncall) to the task he can otherwise put off 2) It removes his ability to easily delegate to others (because many issues come in at night or on the weekend, when the easy safety valve of pushing work to his team is not available) 3) It creates urgency in a task (learn the new technology) that is otherwise important but not urgent during the midweek work hours. 4) It creates social cover to push the daily barrage of "urgent" work aside. No one questions you skipping a meeting or delaying a report when you are "oncall for a customer outage." The trick here is to make a commitment you cannot escape ahead of time. --You make the commitment when you do not feel the price of following through --Then when you want out of the work later, it is too late and you have trapped yourself More examples: 1) I decided my top priority for the day during my commute, when I could not work on it or anything else. Then, when I got to work, knowing my top priority helped me resist less important work others were pushing me to do first. 2) I use a personal trainer. By paying someone and scheduling time, I then am unwilling to shirk my workout. Left to myself, I do not go to the gym 3) I wish I could use Duolingo to learn a language. Going to the country where I have to use the language to get by works far better. I am still not nearly as good as I wish I was at "doing what I should." I would like to get better at this and would ask you to comment with your examples of success, pitfalls, tips and tricks. I will turn it into a lecture and make a class out of my own learning and your comments so that we can all be more effective. Please share your secrets - how do you do unpleasant work you need to do?