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Get this right to streamline your path to success ๐ฏ Wednesday Win
Published 6 months agoย โขย 3 min read
No matter how well thought out your goals, plans, tasks, and schedule, if you aren't working in the right environment, everything will be tough. And this extends far beyond your workplace setting to include all the elements that influence your experience.
Your environment can include your location, your work hours, your coworkers, your customers, and so much more about how, when, where, and with whom you do your best work.
How can we make the most of this? Let's explore:
1. Focus is the key
Why does any of this matter? It all contributes to how easily you can reach and sustain focus for producing your best work.
Real progress only comes from your best contributions towards your goals and the more energy you must expend to overcome frustrations, discomfort, and outright blockage, the less ability you have to use your day's limited concentration on things that matter.
Increase your focused time and you'll speed up your progress.
The best work comes from focused effort
We have limited capacity for focus each day
If that capacity is consumed to overcome avoidable issues, it's ultimately being wasted
Don't waste your focus
2. We must understand ourselves
OK, so focus is important and shouldn't be wasted, but how do we do that?
Everyone has their own idea of the ideal environment. The key for you, is to take inventory and really understand your own. Consider what's worked best for you in the past. What you'd most like to change about your current situation. Build a full list of the characteristics that impact you and rank order them.
Consider:
The physical environment: office or home? Quiet or loud? Bright or dark? Cluttered or crisp? Shared or private? Also consider the basic ergonomics of your ideal workspace
The personnel environment: large organization or small? High tech or low tech? Similar experience or more diverse? Narrow mission or grand? Manager or Individual contributor?
The experience environment: early hours or late? Intense or relaxed? Frequent travel or none? Collaboration or solo? Predictable or dynamic?
And consider how these might change over time as your experience builds
3. Take control
Now that you've built your map, consider your current situation. Where do your preferences align and where do they diverge?
What can you change immediately to make things better? Sometimes just swapping out a keyboard, getting a new lamp, and finding a better chair can make a big difference. Maybe blocking off the first two hours of your day and closing the door to your office or wearing headphones will do the trick. Whatever is immediately available, put it into action.
Then, start considering how to pursue those bigger changes. Maybe they require a conversation with the boss or maybe they might lead you to start something new. Identify viable pathways to make those big changes.
Take advantage and make the easy fixes
Pursue the more challenging, but not life-changing items next
Chart out a course for the large-scale changes once you've made the basic improvements
4. Build for others
As you are improving your own experience, you'll start noticing that you have a chance to extend that to others, too.
Especially if you are a founder or a manager in your organization, recognize that sum of the environment combined with the expressed mission is the baseline culture for the workplace. How people interact is intrinsically linked to how they experience their day to day work.
Take the best of what works for you and see how that can be used to benefit others. Find ways to build compatible experiences for your team so they all can benefit.
Environment is the foundation for workplace culture
Combined mission and environment drive outcomes
Bring the best of your experience to benefit those around you
Action Summary
A positive environment is so much more than a comfortable desk in a pleasant office. Consider all the components that contribute to your best work and embrace finding a road to making that your reality more and more each day. You'll see your positive results multiply.
Embrace the power of focus
Take time to inventory your priorities and what leads you to your best work
Build a path to your ideal environment
Share it with others: create a positive culture for those around you, too
Make it work for others, too. The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle
What do you think? What are the most important elements of your work environment? Reply to this email and let me know.
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