In the new age of mobility, the mental state of “work” is changing. Work is home, home is work, and you’re never really away from anything when you’re traveling. With the benefits of flexibility come some major challenges as well. Some of the biggest challenges include staying focused, productive, and balanced. After hundreds of interviews with free-range workers, we’ve identified a few best practices for working without boundaries.
Stay Focused: Use Weekdays for Execution, Weekends for Inspiration
If Thomas Edison was right when he said that genius is “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration,” then we should question why creative people – especially freelancers - spend so much time brainstorming and “seeking inspiration.” A few especially productive freelancers interviewed by Behance claim that they use every weekday for execution and preserve their weekends for inspiration and “unfocused thinking.” This is not to suggest that weekdays should be void of creativity, but rather that we should focus on moving the ball forward during the week and then contemplating the ball itself on the weekend!
After all, weekends are spent out of the typical flow of work and are more relaxing and conducive for thinking of new ideas. Consider keeping your weekdays for relentless execution and then your weekends for reflection.
Stay Productive: Measure Your Progress in Action Steps
You can fill your day with deep thoughts, back-to-back meetings, and extensive planning — and still fail to actually make progress on your projects. Ultimately, achievement starts with taking action. As such, we believe that people should work with a bias towards action. This means that you should focus less on note taking and organizing and more on simply capturing and completing action steps. When our team was developing ActionMethod (an online productivity tool), we interviewed some of the most productive creative people we could find across industries. One commonality we discovered was an obsession with intricate to-do lists. Daily rituals of reviewing and re-writing lists of action steps were not uncommon. As you decide how to spend your time, consider the argument that JUST capturing and completing action steps (yet alone anything else) might put you in the top 5% of productive professionals!
Stay Balanced: Compartmentalize Your Work & Your Thoughts
One consequence of mobility is the ability to “always check.” Your email and voicemail are easily accessible, and your tendency is to want to check it. When you get up in the morning or before you go to bed, your blackberry flirts with you via the subtle blinking LED light – and you decide to take a quick peak. The integration of work and life becomes troublesome when we fail to set limits.
The precious period of peace you have before or after work is easily tainted by a quick glimpse of your work. Even if you spend just five minutes checking email, the messages themselves remain in your mind. Inevitably, your time unplugged becomes consumed by work-related thoughts. The best practice is to only check your work when you’re willing to be in a “work state of mind” for at least 2 hours afterwards.
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[...] tiempo al trabajo al menos por un par de horas. Artículo original en Inglés: Three tips for discipline in a nomad life Autor original: Scott BelskyTags for this post: Nómadas [...]
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