All lengths are freestyle (or “crawl”). I try to stop as few times as possible, often swimming continuously, although in recent months I’ve started stopping once or twice per swim to check in with my fellow swimmers for a few minutes. This morning I did 206 non-stop. My record is 300 non-stop, and I’d like to hit 400 non-stop before the end of the year so I can meet Effy’s challenge to me (although to be precise, Effy’s challenge is 400 in a single swimming session, not non-stop – I just want to see if I can do it non-stop). I don’t ever get bored in the water.

In the closing days of 2019, I wrote out my priorities for 2020. I was going to write “swim 400 lengths a week,” but with many of the other priorities having a 5 in them – e.g., “begin with 5 minutes” – I thought I might as well just go for 500 lengths (why not). And it had a nice ring in the statement I went for: “Swim the Michael 500” is close to “drive the Indy 500,” the latter of which I will never do, but the former of which was a stretch goal at the time that I wanted to challenge myself to accomplish. For all of 2019, I’d only swum 10,416 lengths in 89 swims, for an average of only 117 lengths per swim (just under 3km). The most I had ever swum in a single week was 468 in mid-December, and 10,416 lengths across 52 weeks is only 200 lengths a week, so the idea of 500 a week every week was a significant uplift.

My swimming year started the week of January 6 (once we were back from holidays), but it took a couple of weeks to ramp up to 500. The first week was 434, the second 446, and then I hit over 500 lengths a week consistently for the next 9 weeks (min 502, max 606). Mid-March I was going well, having clocked 5640 lengths in 11 weeks, compared to 10,416 for all of 2019.

And then the COVID-19 lockdown took effect in New Zealand, and the pools were closed. For 57 days. I counted.

When the pools re-opened in mid-May, while I should have swum 9500 lengths by then, I’d only done 5640. I was 3860 behind already, and it was May (month 5 of the year). My choice was simple: write it off as a sunk cost, or refuse to allow the interruption of COVID to take me off my intent for the year.

I took the second. All my swimming data was migrated from my journal into an Excel spreadsheet. Week by week. Swim by swim. Averages, shortest swim, longest swim, total count for the year-to-date, by week, by month … everything. And in mid-May when I headed back to the pool, in order to re-capture the lengths that the lockdown had stolen from me, my average per week had to hit at least 629 for the rest of the year. I swam once the first week – 102 lengths after being out of the water for 60 days – and then did 646 the week of May 18, 644 the next, then 660, then 780, and then an average of 810 until the week of August 17, by which time I’d made up all of the stolen lengths in only 15 weeks, not the 33 weeks remaining at mid-May. I swam 1060 the next week – mainly to hit the monthly challenge on my Apple Watch – and then apart from a 200 length swim on Monday, took the first week of September as a rest week. And then I was back into it, with a new goal of 800 per week – or “20for20” – the conceptual “I’m thinking about it” challenge of swimming 20km a week for the next 20 years. I imagine I’d be a fit almost 70-year old by then.

I swim because … it gives me space to think and ponder.

I swim because … my feet are too busted to run anymore (and I only took up running because I hadn’t committed to driving to the pool regularly).

I swim because … it gives me a whole lot of “life” to enjoy in addition to the “work” and “family” commitments that require much of the rest of my time.

I swim because … I am a swimmer.

Update December 8 – goal (or, minimum performance standard) reached for 2020: 26,000 lengths (500 lengths per week for 52 weeks).

As I was on my way to the pool under the cover of darkness, I saw a cacophony of lights in the distance. Accident? (there seemed to be no red lights of an ambulance, however). Police stop? (at 5.30? … and there were no blue and red lights either). As I drove nearer the orange of the lights became clearer and the pilot vehicles in the front had the usual pulsating lit up red batons to warn oncoming traffic of a huge load following. Not the “bigger, bigger digger was brought up on a truck” type of big, but house big. Without street lights, it was hard to see what was coming, but with three pilot vehicles of increasing size all shouting the same non-verbal directions (“get off the road”), I drove onto the grass verge of the backcountry road.

And then the snails came. Huge trucks – two of them – each carrying half of the house. The trucks were driving in their allocated lane, but their load spanned the full road. It was good I was off the road, otherwise, I would have gained a convertible car at a fraction of the price. The dimly lit shapes shivered past quickly, their outline clear to see for but a moment, but their presence on the road out of place nonetheless. I felt sorry for the driver stuck behind them going at a snail’s pace compared to the normal speed, and who would have no options to pass unless the whole armada found somewhere safe to pull over. While there was a grass verge on their side of the road too, the unevenness of the landscape and the presence of water races (irrigation channels) would condemn such an attempt to fodder for “New Zealand’s worst drivers.”

In the darkness, they were daunting opponents on the normally quiet road. But when I arrived home after my swim, I saw them both again. A house chopped in half they were not, but rather the two sides of the new classroom for the country school just down the road. So while the children slept dreaming of the school day yet to begin, the snails were already at work.

It’s weird not travelling. Actually, the right way to say that is, it’s weird not having the option to travel freely out of the country and across the world, even though I have no great nor pressing need to do so at the moment. My globe-trotting days ended abruptly in 2015, and while I have done a long-haul international trip most years since then, I haven’t gone back to the multiples per year I was doing from 2009. Almost all of my work these days is delivered remotely from my home office, and while that usually works well for me and my family, the prospect of an upcoming trip to meet clients or speak at a conference was deeply energising. I hated the jetlag but relished the quiet spaces that such travel afforded between engagements. Wandering through huge airports, eating breakfast at a hotel, and even watching the world zip by from a train all provided a different pace of life along with new experiences to think about. But now such excursions aren’t even practical, even if I had a pressing need to fly away.

The pool has been my lifesaver this year. Physically, I can swim further and faster than at the beginning of the year. Mentally, swimming length after length after length has afforded an uninterrupted quiet space to mull things over that I struggle to find in other locations. Sometimes the thing has been how to deal with a current client project. Other times it’s been a family matter. One recent mull-this-over-while-swimming episode was about how to solve a vehicle dilemma at home. It’s easier to get into the parallel flows of swimming and thinking when I’m not sharing a lane with another swimmer, as the constant need to track their whereabouts to avoid a crash inflicts a cognitive load that’s deducted from thinking space.

My friends are getting older, and by implication, so am I. Peter has just turned 58. Bruce was 60 earlier this month. Jon several years beyond that. Jim’s 91 next month. I haven’t yet hit the big 5-0, but it’s not that far off (and once it happens for me, it’s only a month before it happens for James and Jason too). But the maths works; friends I met 25+ years ago while I was in my 20s and they in their 30s are now approaching, reaching or surpassing 60. Dave at the swimming pool this morning – who’s 60 – said that when he hit 50 he noticed his energy levels took a massive dive. Thanks for the heads-up, Dave, and the “promising” outlook. Numbers that used to seem far off in the distance and old beyond old are coming nearer for some and in the rearview mirror for others. As my wife’s grandad likes to say, “If you keep waking up every morning, eventually you reach 100.” Given he’s now 102, the approach seems to work beyond that point too.

I happened upon a couple of pieces of classical music that I’ve had on endless repeat over the past couple of months. Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major has been played the most, and Vivaldi’s Double Concertos the most often over the last few weeks. I’d heard a bit of the Bach one before but never sat to listen to the whole thing. Vivaldi’s Double, on the other hand, was entirely new to me. It’s amazing the breadth of music so easily available to all of us; we live richer than kings of a couple of centuries ago in terms of music, as they had to assemble an orchestra to get what we have but a few clicks away.

If we’re going to exit lockdown conditions stronger for it, it will only be because we’ve re-discovered what effective patterns of work look like. Not that we used Zoom or Teams to re-create the broken design of work we had at the office.

As I wrote those words, I was very aware that while it is simple to critique what isn’t working, being able to hold up a lantern towards the right path is much harder. And more important.

This is my attempt.

Balloons: What We Know About Being Productive

Being productive means getting the right stuff done. This calls for clarity of intent (what is the right stuff to do), an appropriate time-space in which to do it, and access to any required tools or resources. The picture in my head of what being productive looks like is all about balloons. Balloons offer the shell of something that needs to be filled – with breath or helium in the case of an actual balloon – and with ideas, focus and work with figurative balloons (the task you need to achieve). Balloons are also fragile and need to be protected. It’s hard to put an in-progress balloon down without losing what you’ve just put into it. It’s also hard to blow up an actual balloon via breath when there are lots of other things going on because the exhaling of so much breath can quickly cause light-headedness. You have to be present and in the moment.

Thinking about a balloon as a task, it benefits from:

• The breath of clarity – on what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and whom it serves / benefits as a consequence (frequently an internal/external customer, but it could also be yourself, as the standard-bearer of what you’re working on).
• The breath of creativity – of seeing deeply into the task space to identify connections that aren’t immediately visible.
• The breath of concentration – of being present, of focusing on the task at hand, and of only trying to blow up one balloon at a time.
• The breath of appropriate engagement with others – with people who are aligned, invested and collaborating towards a common goal, and working together on their tasks that will join the resultant festival of balloons.

Darts: What We Know About Not Being Productive

Not being productive means not getting the right stuff done. Getting taken off task. Getting sidetracked on superfluous issues, queries and distractions. Getting lost down rabbit trails. Not being productive, as a picture in my head, is all about darts. And darts and balloons don’t mix.

The darts of not being productive are all derivations of the core theme of disruption. Disruption comes in many shapes and sizes:

• The dart of unwanted noise that breaks concentration – the background hum in the office, the musak that plays all day long, the phone call that loud-mouthed Doug two desks over has just taken.
• The dart of interruption, as someone asks you a question unrelated to your task at hand, or you happen to overhear a question to which you know the answer.
• The dart of insufficient time-space in which to work on the task, due to having to snatch snippets here and there between back-to-back meetings and never being able to corral enough time quantum to invest into the work.
• The dart of surveillance, of being watched, of knowing your keystrokes are being monitored due to some sick-minded belief that productivity is linear and can be tracked minute-by-minute.
• The dart of surprise, such as a knock on the door or discovering that someone is watching over your shoulder after quietly walking up.
• The dart of enforced stop time, such as an appointment at 3pm, that overshadows the day with awareness of an alternative commitment.
• The dart of visual noise in your place of work – the unread magazines on your desk, the unprocessed expense receipts in line of sight, the folder of articles-I’m-going-to-read-any-day-now on your computer desktop, or your collection of books on the bookshelf that call to you to read them.
• The dart of attempting to do more than one thing at a time.
• The dart of pings and dings emanating from email, social media, text messages, WhatsApp, and the related cacophony of notification-driven apps that play roulette with your attention.
• The dart of your phone ringing, or someone attempting to contact you by instant messaging for a “quick question.”

Balloons and darts don’t mix, and it only takes one dart to bring down the most amazing balloon. If the work requires balloons, it’s sheer madness to hand out darts to everyone.

What Now?

Irrespective of whether you normally work from home, are doing so under company or government orders due to the current pandemic, or usually work in an office space, the first and most essential question to ask about what happens next is this: how do you get your best work done? And the second is like it: what are the darts that stop you from doing so?

Informed by the types of tasks characterising your job role, what does “best” look like? The future of work should never be about migrating your work practices to the latest and greatest tool. It’s about answering these two questions, and then doing all in your power – individually in your own area of work, collectively in a team or group, and corporately as the designers of organisations – to optimise breath for the balloons and banning the darts.

As the world shifted to sudden remote working due to this global pandemic that caught us unprepared, the biggest numerical gains in application usage were with Zoom and Microsoft Teams, which in combination, have so far grown to around 500 million daily meeting participants. We seem to have nailed the meeting from home thing, but in doing so have undermined the work thing.

Whenever people are asked where they get their best work done, it’s unusual for “the office” to be the answer, unless it’s early in the morning when no-one else is around, or late at night after everyone else has left. Only then is the office (as physical space) conducive to the work of working (thinking, planning, writing, drafting, creating). Only then are the interruptions and disruptions inflicted by the constant noise of everyone else silenced for long enough to develop and hold coherent thoughts, but even that is predicated on being able to not interrupt or disrupt yourself by twitch-driven checking of email and the enterprise social network.

The forced transition of most knowledge workers to working-from-home arrangements hasn’t automatically created the haven of concentrated produce-ability that people who regularly work from home have developed. Instead, as can only be expected under forced substitution of place, when a new place (the home) replaces another (the office) without any deeper thought of rethinking the broken culture of work evident at most offices, chaos will reign.

Group size in many of the video meeting pictures is another area for deep concern. Sharing a picture of a Zoom meeting with 12 coworkers isn’t a badge of honour; it’s a sign of insanity. Effective groups are small enough to produce, but not too large to inflict diminishing returns on deliberations, decisions and forward-action. Three or four is a good number. Five to seven can work well in some situations if you have to. But anything approaching 10 or more reveals a lack of task structure, trust and accountability. There are just too many people, and as group size gets larger, it’s the free-riders, know-it-alls, and talk-much-but-do-little people who join to the detriment of group task, cohesion and culture. I think Microsoft had it right in Teams with a maximum of four people only showing per video screen: it was an app set up for effective task group sizes.

COVID-19 caught us out – no doubt – and being forced to become suddenly remote was essential when governments banned going to the office. But if we’re going to stay in this space for a while, the broken assumptions about how best to get work done need to be challenged. Less talk, more work. Fewer meetings, more working. Stop the interruptions, and create space for focused and concentrated work.

If we’re going to exit lockdown conditions stronger for it, it will only be because we’ve re-discovered what effective patterns of work look like. Not that we used Zoom or Teams to re-create the broken design of work we had at the office.

I made up a phrase that I started repeating each time the unpleasantness hit again: I’m enjoying every minute.

When the seat in the plane was uncomfortable: I’m enjoying every minute.

When the border control lines at LAX were long, nonsensical and unfathomable: I’m enjoying every minute.

When the security protocols at international airports for in-transit long-haul travellers made no logical sense: I’m enjoying every minute.

When the multiple flights took an incredibly long time and it seemed like forever to get to the final destination: I’m enjoying every minute.

When the jet lag kicked in and I felt like death warmed up, my head a foggy mess from unresolved exhaustion: I’m enjoying every minute.

When I faced yet another late-night flight to visit another country for a workshop, and all I wanted to do was sleep deeply: I’m enjoying every minute.

And now, in these lockdown conditions, where life, as it was barely four weeks ago, feels like a lifetime ago, I’m having to re-ignite my travel line. I’m enjoying every minute.

In this report, we explicate six principles and outline a step-by-step model for reimagining effective work.

Download Reimagining Effective Work: Principles and a Process (March 2020) (20 pages)

Nature paints for us a better picture. The rhythm of nature is the seasons – winter always leads to spring, which turns to summer, and then into autumn and back to winter. Every. Single. Year. Balanced. Reoccurring. Reliable. Each with a specific and different purpose. Each intertwined with the others. Each reliant on the others. When the natural seasons get mucked up, we have a super-big mess.

Our financial geniuses have convinced us that the continual and relentless upward swing is the only pattern worth pursuing. Esoteric financial instruments “protect” us against downturns and slower times. The growth season – the spring – is wonderful. Until it’s not. Until it’s spring all the time, and the other seasons of hidden investment (winter), riding the waves and enjoying what we’ve worked for (summer), and pruning that which isn’t working (autumn) are ignored. For years and decades. The absence of the human rest cycle in the rhythm of seasons leads to burnout, depression, broken relationships, and illness. A hollowing out of purpose and meaning. Too many pragmatic decisions that sound right in the moment but violate deeply held values and principles. Going through the motions from the depths of exhaustion – disengaged internally but plastering over the disengagement with too much coffee and other stimulants.

Perhaps that which we refuse to honour in regular small doses – a day off a week, a good night of sleep, time to think and reflect – eventually builds in pressure until the whole planet can’t stand it any longer, and we’re forced by forces more gigantic than any of us to stop. Entirely. Suddenly. Painfully. And with an uncertain outlook.

In this season of enforced rest – “don’t travel,” “stay at home,” “maintain your social distance,” be careful, “the borders are closed” – we can either rail against the apparent injustice of it all or learn to ride the rhythm. To catch up on long-neglected sleep. To read the books that have sat unopened for too many years. To write the long letters of love and appreciation we should never have given up on, rather than relying on the ephemeral and far too short snippets of hurried text messages. To cook real meals at home, instead of relying on fast food and empty calories. To be present with those we live amongst, not the horde of faceless virtual friends we amass too easily on social networks.

And to make different plans for the future, where rhythm and rest take a more dominant place in our practising of life.

It won’t last. The change is too much too quickly for the vast majority of organisations, managers and employees. As soon as the pandemic is over, people will revert. The uplift in remote working will quickly disappear, and the tools provided for free just as quickly abandoned. While COVID-19 is a massive trigger for change in the short-term, remote working is just a band-aid. It’s a surface change only in the location in which people work, forced by an external environmental factor.

Microsoft itself, actually, provides the best example of why the change will be only short-term. Microsoft currently offers the most widely adopted suite of tools that enable remote working, including Microsoft Teams. Even as the vendor of Microsoft Teams (and the broader Office 365 suite), Microsoft hasn’t transitioned previously to a widespread embrace of remote working. It has to in response to COVID-19, but its buildings and campuses around the world emphasise working together face-to-face, and its employees often move to new cities to be close to those office locations. Its extreme short-term measures for remote working will peter out when the threat is gone.

This report explores a diverse collection of changes taking place across the working world, unpacking their nature and considering the evidence about their impacts. While there is much to be excited by—and much to leverage for beneficial outcomes—there are also red flags.

Download Reimagining Effective Work: The Changing Face of Work (February 2020) (22 pages)