The problem is that somewhere along the pursuit for 100% perfection, we face diminishing returns.  We wait to send an email until we get the wording right, and an opportunity passes us by.  While we’re stalling on completing a project to our own exacting standards, our boss or funder is wondering where it is.  And when we ask our staff member for the fourth revision on that fundraising letter, we can see their morale take a dive.

When I see perfectionism of any sort cropping up in myself or in a client, I’ve begun to ask:

For most of us, doing a 90% job is good enough – great, in fact.  (I admit for some , it may not be good enough — I have had surgeons as clients.  But for most 90% is just fine.)  Further, a conscientious perfectionist’s 90% may be 100% acceptable or even outstanding to her colleagues and supervisor.

Give it a try: let go of the 10% that exists between what you must do and how perfectly you imagine it can be done.  Then look around and see if the sky is falling.

Somebody must be working down there...

A busy work travel schedule can throw even the most balanced of us out of whack.  Forget jet-lag — just being away from the office, our families and our own beds can be seriously disorienting. And then when we return, we face an avalanche of work left behind.  Good news: you can take action to prevent travel hell before you even leave for the airport.

Here’s how you can set yourself up to take a more sane, less disruptive work trip:

1.  Schedule smartly
It can be tempting to book yourself solid while you’re on the road.  Don’t do this.  Leave yourself some breathing room to take care of business (answering emails, returning calls, etc.) back on the homefront during your away-workday.  A solid hour a day of attention devoted to your home-work will make life a lot easier when you return.

2.  Plan for recovery
Schedule your post-trip recovery time ahead of time.  Depending on the length of your trip and what happens at home while you’re gone, you’ll likely need some time to process all the new information you got while you were away and catch up on what you missed.  Block off between a couple hours a full day within the first couple days of your return.

3.  Manage expectations
Let key colleagues know you’ll be on the road and less available than usual.  Set your “out of office” message on email to say that you will return emails on the day AFTER you return to the office, not the day-of, to give yourself a little breathing room.

4.  Pack healthy snacks
Between the airport food court and the conference buffet, it can be hard to eat well on the road.  Play defense against Danishes by packing portable and healthy alternatives like instant oatmeal, almonds, dried fruit, and energy bars.

5.  Plan to maintain healthy rituals
If you exercise regularly at home, research the hotel’s gym situation (or load up some fitness podcasts) and bring your workout clothes so you can exercise while you’re away.  If you enjoy a cup of herbal tea before bed at home, make sure you bring your stash for your hotel room.

6.  Research the sights
Plan to allow yourself at least half a day to be a tourist, wherever you are.  After all, you haven’t really been to Georgia unless you’ve seen the world’s largest peanut, right?

7.  Get clear about why you’re traveling
Like, really clear.  Why are you taking this trip anyway?  And how will you know if you & your organization have gotten your money’s worth?  Before you go anywhere, make sure that you know the purpose, outcomes, and process of your trip.  Let this guide your decisions about how you focus your time and attention while you’re gone.

What do you do to make travel less of an ordeal?  Share your tips in the comments.

Today I’ve been revisiting some of my favorite perspectives on the concept of purpose.  I am particularly moved by these words by choreographer Martha Graham:

Reflecting upon these words, what resonates?

• What is the unique energy or action you will contribute to the world?
• How can you more fully express it in the year to come?
• How have you blocked its expression in the past?
• How will you remove these blocks this year?
• What’s the possibility you create when you “keep the channel open”?

Happy New Year.

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Photo credit: loop_oh on Flickr.

In 9 frenetic minutes, this The Academy Award-nominated short tells the story of the everyman who juggles work and family, bounds between sickness and health, and wrestles with desire and obligation.  All the while, clocks tick and a relentless staccato beat marks the passage of time.  Our protagonist is constantly on the run, but never seems to get anywhere.

I couldn’t help but think of this as a slightly kooky window into the work that I do with busy professionals who are trying to lead, love and live the best they can with the time they are given.  There is something timeless about this struggle.

For your amusement, and without further adieu, I give you Jim Henson’s 1965 Time Piece:

(Note:  I would rate this film about a PG-13 for some tame-ish burlesque dancing… so keep that in mind if you are watching this in a shared office space.)

Can’t see the video above?  Watch it here.

Some of my metadata from my writing on 750words.com

One of my personal goals for this fall is to take more time for regular writing and reflection.  To get back in the groove, I’ve turned to some of my favorite free online writing tools.  Each of them make getting the words out fun, simple, and relatively painless.

Write long:  750 words.com
On the face of it, this site is simple: log in daily, start writing, and don’t stop until the auto word-counter tells you you’ve hit 750 words (approximately 3 pages longhand).  Once you’ve accumulate several days worth of input, the site’s algorithms kick in and you can take advantage some very cool bells and whistles.  Based on your writing, the site offers you data on everything from your typing speed to your mood and mindset; you can even earn badges for consecutive days of writing.

Write quick: ohlife.com
Ohlife is founded on the simple premise that keeping a journal doesn’t have to be a time-consuming endeavor.  Once you sign up on the site, you will receive an email each day that asks you simply, “How’d your day go?”  Reply to that email with whatever you want to write about your day, and the site will archive your responses (which you can access on the site at any time).  Collectively, your answers to this one question constitute a record of your days.

Write deep: doyou10q.com
10Q is an annual online reflection event that takes place during the 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — but you don’t have to be Jewish to participate or to benefit.  Sign up and starting on September 28th, you will be sent one question a day to answer about your life, looking back and looking ahead.  (Sample question: “Think about a major milestone that happened with your family this past year. How has this affected you?”) Your answers are “sealed in the vault” at the end of the 10 days and – here’s where it really gets cool – only become available to you one year later (time capsule-style).  I’m going into my 3rd year of doing 10Q and can’t wait to look back on my answers from 2010 and 2009.

BONUS – Write old school: (Non-virtual) Journal
Online tools are great, but sometimes I just want to put pen to paper.  My go-to sources for journals are Moleskine (when I’m feeling spendy) and Muji (where my favorite journal costs $1.50).  Nothing beats a good old-fashioned blank page.

What are your favorite tools or prompts for writing and reflection?

Three years ago at the Selah Leadership Program, I was introduced to a planning tool that I’ve used every single day since.  This magic tool?  POP.

The POP Model was developed by organizational consultants Leslie Sholl Jaffe and Randall J. Alford.  POP stands for Purpose, Outcomes, and Process, and it’s a simple and effective tool for keeping yourself and others focused aligned in almost any context.

Purpose answers the question, why is this important?  

Outcomes answers the question, what do we most need to accomplish?

and Process answers the question, how will we accomplish the outcomes?

It is easy to see why these three little questions have so much resonance.

• Purpose fuzzy?  You are likely to find yourself spinning your wheels, lost and not sure how you got where you are.
• Outcomes unclear?  Team members may be working toward different goals, reducing the group’s overall impact.
• Process ignored?  You’ll find yourself in the middle of a dead-end meeting, wondering why there is so much talk and so little progress toward what you really need to be getting done.

POP In Action

To use the model, articulate the Purpose of what you are taking on, your desired Outcomes, and the Process for how you will get to the outcomes.  In some contexts it is beneficial to use POP on your own, and in others it can be a powerful tool for aligning a group.  POP can be the basis for a 5-minute back-of-the-envelope exercise, or an all-day, organization-wide planning endeavor.

Say you have an upcoming meeting with your staff to plan your big 2012 fundraising event.  Before the meeting, you might sit down and take 5-10 minutes to sketch out a POP for yourself:

• Purpose: The purpose of this meeting is to kick-off planning for the 2012 fundraising event.
• Outcomes: We need to leave this meeting with:
• Clarity around who will spearhead each major piece of work.
• A decision on if we will hire a marketing consultant or handle that in-house.
• An understanding on the part of the Development team of the Board’s expectations for how much $$$ this event will bring in.
• Process:  In order to get to these outcomes:
• I need to think about who I believe should take on each major piece of work, before the meeting.
• I should look at that research we did two years ago about marketing consultants so I can go into the day with a ballpark figure of how much it would cost to outsource.
• I sh0uld also have a conversation with my Development Director to make sure he understands the Board’s target for this event — that way he can help me get his team on board during the meeting.
• Finally, I need to design an agenda for this meeting that will produce the outcomes I want — so that we don’t get lost in the weeds.

POP is a powerful tool to use in meetings. The meeting facilitator can either lead the group in collaboratively defining the meeting’s Purpose, Outcomes and Process in real-time, or can bring a pre-defined POP to a meeting and solicit group-buy in.  A meeting where the whole team knows the POP — why we are there, what we are trying to get to, and how we will get there — is a meeting worth everyone’s time.

POP can be used at the beginning of projects — Why are we taking on this project? What do we want to accomplish by doing it? How will we accomplish that?  And, it can be a test of alignment, mid-project, when things seem to be drifting off course — Why were we doing this project again?  What were we trying to accomplish?  How can we get back on track?

For me, the power of POP is in slowing down and thinking about what I really want to get out of the effort I am putting into a meeting, a project, or a partnership.  In a group context, going through the POP process can reveal hidden assumptions, biases and leaps in logic that would otherwise derail the group down the line.

How To Purge With Ease
by Liz Dahmen of Make Space  

When deadlines are looming — when funder reports are due (or maybe were due a week ago), when you need to submit that important journal article — how do you carve the time out of your already busy week to produce great work?

It’s not like you can make the everyday emails, meetings, and work tasks stop while you work on this one really important thing.   You have to fit it in somehow.  Here’s how.

Step 1: Identify The Conditions You Need to Do Your Best Work
When, and under what conditions, do you get your best work done?  If trying to squeeze in a big writing project at the end of a busy day clearly won’t work for you, what would work?  Some things to consider:

• Time: Do you do your best work early in the morning, or  do you kick into high gear after everyone else has gone to sleep?
• Place:   Can you do focused work at your desk, or do you need a change of scenery?  Consider taking a chunk of time out of the office if your everyday setting is too distracting.
• Duration: At a certain point, you will face diminishing returns.  A 90 minute sprint of focused work (at your most productive time and place) may produce better results than a 4 hour marathon.

Step 2: Book It
Once you know when and where you can get your best work done, schedule it.  Put it in your calendar in no ambiguous terms: “8 – 11 AM, report writing at public library.”  This now represents a commitment to yourself.

Step 3: Do Everything You Can to Protect Your Focused Time
This is the most important step — because if you do the first two steps and then let the time disappear, you’re back to square one.

What is this magic meeting?

It’s the morning meeting with yourself, and it may be the most important meeting of your day.

The morning meeting with yourself can be short - 10 to 20 minutes.  It should be the first thing you do when you start your work day.  Here’s your agenda:

1. Assemble Your Tools:  Start with a blank piece of paper, your calendar, your task management system (to-do lists), and your browser open (but don’t go into your email yet).  Take a deep breath.
2. Eyeball Your Calendar:  What’s on your schedule today?  Is there anything you need to do to prepare for today’s appointments that you haven’t done yet?  If so, make a note of it on your paper.  Now glance at the next two days on your calendar.  Anything coming down the pike that you need to prepare for?  If so, make a note of what you need to do, or block off time on your calendar to prepare.
3. Review Your Tasks:  Look over your task lists (if you practice Getting Things Done, this would be your Next Actions and your Waiting Fors) .  What absolutely must get done today?  Make a note of it.  What should get done today?  Make a note of these things too.  If you have open blocks of time, what will you work on?
4. Scan Email and Voicemail:  Do a quick once-over of your email for “hot” items and listen to your voicemail.  Take note of anything that changes your plans for the day (a cancelled lunch or an emergency conference call) or that contains an action that absolutely must be done today. Note these.  Do not answer emails or return phone calls at this point (you’re in a meeting, remember?).
5. Start Your Day:  Take a deep breath and think about the day ahead of you.  Review your cheat sheet of must-do’s once more, noting anything you neglected to capture in the steps above.  Take another deep breath, and get to work!