Hi folks,
Back at it today with a look at some books I read prior to 2011 which, in hindsight, led me into life changes (1).
*Eat This, Not That
Note: Eat This, Not That is actually a book series. Its inclusion here is based on two books I read in late 2010.
As I alluded to in a post about 2011 books, I spent a significant amount of time in my first full year out of college reading about nutrition. What I learned from all of that reading forced me to challenge assumptions about what I considered to be healthy food, taught me a great deal about grocery store design, and better enabled me to understand the challenges that many faced in trying to live healthy lives (*).
dull, dull syllables a more rigorously
researched book. This series is easy to
read and even easier to digest- I am sure
everyone will learn at least one
nutritional fact that comes as a total shock. And we can all benefit from the occasional reminder of just how much
broccoli you need to eat before
you match the caloric intake of a Hershey's kiss.
These books are also a terrific place for someone ready to explore dieting but lacking the time and mental resources to make wholesale changes to their eating pattern. Just get started by switching to a similar brand with better nutrition or substituting one high-calorie recipe for a lower-calorie one and see where it goes from there.
*The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
I read this book in late 2010 and I would return to it a couple of times over the next few years to refresh my understanding of its many observations and underlying wisdom.
The initial change grew from an observation the book made about how people tend to approach tasks. The author placed tasks into four categories, which he called quadrants, based on how they measured along two continua- urgency and importance.
Quadrant One- urgent and important
Quadrant Two- not urgent but important
Quadrant Three- urgent but not important
Quadrant Four- not urgent and not important
Most people handle quadrant one and four appropriately, leaving quadrants two and three for deeper analysis. What I took away from reading was that the balance of these two quadrants is crucial for productivity. The author's insight was that urgent but generally unimportant tasks, such as answering the phone, often acted as interruptions that curtailed the concentration required for completing not urgent but generally important tasks (*).
a box of cupcakes).
However, I did decide to pay off my student loans as quickly as possible and I think understanding that above quadrant two concept helped push me in that direction. Instead of merely keeping up with the minimum loan payment, I tried to minimize spending and ignored building up savings in favor of pouring all of my extra cash into paying off the student loan debt as quickly as possible. The effort cut down the term of the loan from 10+ years down to around one and a half years and saved a good deal of money in the future through the form of not accumulating additional interest (*).
My return to this book over the ensuing years saw me gather new insights that I missed on my initial 2010 reading. There are, in particular, two insights that I recall which made quite an impact on how I approached my ever-evolving workplace management philosophy.
One of these insights is how a good manager creates the capacity to handle quadrant two issues on her own through delegation and teaching to lower levels of a company. The idea is to push quadrant one (and quadrant three, I suppose) activity down the hierarchy so the top decision makers were able to devote uninterrupted concentration to important, non-urgent matters.
This one was a difficult one for me to grasp intuitively when I began managing. I think the difficulty is universal if you earn such a role by promotion from a lesser role. This is because the mentality of high-quality execution on workload is a difficult one to shake off. Instead of relying on what succeeded for you in the past- producing strong final results solely through your direct involvement in the production process- you instead have to learn to take responsibility for final results while reducing your involvement in the production process to an indirect role.
Meeting the challenge presented by this mentality shift is a significant one but there is a general insight I have that might help. It is critical to know the difference between doing something at a high level and doing something at the minimum acceptable level. The tendency for managers who worked their way up to the role will be to have their team emulate their own high level of performance.
These high standards are all well and good. But a managers who cannot say 'good enough' tend to constantly meddle with final products and stunt the development of both manager and subordinate in the process.
Knowing the minimum for acceptable work is vital because it does two things. First, it makes the manager responsible for determining if it is time to step in and take direct involvement in the production process. All that is required is setting up a tracking system to determine when quality falls below the standard.
Second, it creates a safe environment of failure for the subordinate to experiment and develop her own skills. One of the benefits of moving a high performer into a managerial role is that the replacement will possess a different set of capabilities from the predecessor. These capabilities might not immediately be applicable to the current needs of the business but it is vital to allow the replacement to play to her strengths and try to apply those to the business.
This is because even if there is no immediate payoff, the problems and opportunities that might arise in the future are unpredictable and these previously unnecessary capabilities might be just what is required. If the environment discourages failure through inconsistent standards or the manager is micromanaging due to a lack of clarity on what an acceptable rate of failure is, the culture begins to value conformity and the diversity of a team's skillset becomes endangered. Those capable of using their skills in new situations end up being overlooked or are discouraged from making the initial effort.
The second insight that I used to build my own management philosophy was the importance of one on one interactions for building relationships. Since the time needed for such interactions can get lost when there is a consistent pressure to complete quadrant one tasks, it is up to the senior person in the relationship to create one on one time so that everyone is able to have this time to communicate without placing additional stress on the team or on any one of its individuals.
The key to productive one on one time is to cover topics that do not come up in the natural course of a workday. The focus is on the important topics that never take respond to the pressure of the urgent. These topics should focus on the subordinate's interests, such as career development, job trajectory, skills growth, company direction, individual concerns, and so on. In short, the one on one meeting is a discussion of progress on individual quadrant two projects. It benefits the three parties involved- the individual finds time to focus on personal growth, the manager learns about what is going on in the team without wasting time meddling in the day-to-day operations, and the company is less likely to lose employees who value their own development.
As I mentioned above, there is plenty more in the book and I am sure each reader, whether going through this book for the first or one hundredth time, will find something new that proves an immediate catalyst for a new outlook on life. I will undoubtedly read this book again and look forward to the new discoveries I am sure to make. I might even post about it...
Thanks again for reading. Back on Tuesday with a pair of leftover ideas from this post.
Tim
Footnotes!
Postscript...
Note about the author- Stephen Covey, author of the '7 Habits', did write a separate book about how to apply the concepts to families. I read that edition a couple of years later. I suppose there is a chance that I have incorrectly attributed observations from that book to the original '7 Habits' book in the above and if I did so, my sincerest apologies.
1. Keeping track of the reading tangent...
The first book I officially logged as having read is marked with a date of (check- early 2011). This means anything I read prior to 2011 is not formally logged anywhere. I did the best I could with these books from ancient past but do apologies for a couple of books whose contents I recall but names I have lost over time that I will post about in the future.
2. What does the future hold tangent...
A concept I took from a business book several years later really drives this idea home- essentially, whenever there is uncertainty about the short term, it is investment that disappears. Investment is a good 'catch all' term for this quadrant two concept for investment never occurs if there is not a feasible investment project available or if the potential investor requires resources to sort out some short term issue.
Back at it today with a look at some books I read prior to 2011 which, in hindsight, led me into life changes (1).
*Eat This, Not That
Note: Eat This, Not That is actually a book series. Its inclusion here is based on two books I read in late 2010.
As I alluded to in a post about 2011 books, I spent a significant amount of time in my first full year out of college reading about nutrition. What I learned from all of that reading forced me to challenge assumptions about what I considered to be healthy food, taught me a great deal about grocery store design, and better enabled me to understand the challenges that many faced in trying to live healthy lives (*).
*And made me recognize that, unless I kept up my exact college basketball training regimen to maintain my muscle mass, I would soon need to concede that I was twenty pounds overweight.These two books started my journey to those discoveries. The first book was a supermarket guide that compared the nutritional content of similar products. It was eye opening to see the difference in sugar content between, say, Edy's and Friendly's ice cream or to find out that one beer has three times as many calories as another (*).
*Three pints of Guinness = One pint of BoddingtonsThe second book did the same comparison among recipes. The end result was a cookbook where thoughtful substitutions dramatically reduced the high calorie count of many well known dishes. One example that I still use today to great effect is substituting Greek yogurt for any ingredient that makes the end product 'fluffier' (think pancakes). I also recall that using crushed blueberries with hot water and a small dash of sugar makes a terrific maple syrup substitute, as well (*).
*I made more than pancakes from this cookbook- those were just the two best examples I could come up with.I give these books my highest recommendation to anyone interested in learning more about basic nutrition facts who lacks the time to dive into several hundred pages of
These books are also a terrific place for someone ready to explore dieting but lacking the time and mental resources to make wholesale changes to their eating pattern. Just get started by switching to a similar brand with better nutrition or substituting one high-calorie recipe for a lower-calorie one and see where it goes from there.
*The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
I read this book in late 2010 and I would return to it a couple of times over the next few years to refresh my understanding of its many observations and underlying wisdom.
The initial change grew from an observation the book made about how people tend to approach tasks. The author placed tasks into four categories, which he called quadrants, based on how they measured along two continua- urgency and importance.
Quadrant One- urgent and important
Quadrant Two- not urgent but important
Quadrant Three- urgent but not important
Quadrant Four- not urgent and not important
Most people handle quadrant one and four appropriately, leaving quadrants two and three for deeper analysis. What I took away from reading was that the balance of these two quadrants is crucial for productivity. The author's insight was that urgent but generally unimportant tasks, such as answering the phone, often acted as interruptions that curtailed the concentration required for completing not urgent but generally important tasks (*).
*If you are considering why we tend to handle quadrant three tasks 'on demand', it probably has a lot to do with how quadrant three tasks sometime lead directly to a quadrant one task. Unfortunately, you cannot truly be sure that a phone call is not a 'quadrant one' task until you attend to it. Since most phone calls or emails turn out to not be important enough to deal with right away, it could be said that it is 'true on average' (**) that these are quadrant three tasks.It also delved informally into the difficulty of repeatedly using our willpower to steer us away from tasks with quick, short term gains (*) and toward tasks with long term gains that offered no immediate reward (**). The more we use our willpower in a given day or the more time we spend bouncing from one trivial yet urgent task to the next, the more likely we are to become fatigued and put off for tomorrow the quadrant two projects that could be done today (***) (2).
**BLOG NAME!!!
*Such as eating a cupcake, to the extent that such a thing is a 'task'.
**Such as exercising, although I like running. My examples in this paragraph, so far, have been poor.
***Several books since this books publication have explicitly focused on willpower and its depletion in the manner summarized above, including one book which I believe is actually called 'Willpower'.The facts of my life at the time, though, meant that I could not do much with those insights. I had yet to take any formal leadership roles at work, was not dissatisfied with my approach to my personal life, and exercised regularly (even if I tended to distract myself beforehand with
However, I did decide to pay off my student loans as quickly as possible and I think understanding that above quadrant two concept helped push me in that direction. Instead of merely keeping up with the minimum loan payment, I tried to minimize spending and ignored building up savings in favor of pouring all of my extra cash into paying off the student loan debt as quickly as possible. The effort cut down the term of the loan from 10+ years down to around one and a half years and saved a good deal of money in the future through the form of not accumulating additional interest (*).
*Having now been laid off, I do not fully recommend the above approach- I suggest savings to cover expenses for some number of weeks to cover minor emergencies stemming from temporary loss of income- but broadly speaking, I still advocate the 'pay off debt' as the required first step for anyone seeking direction on their personal finances since the return of not paying future interest is fixed while the return of most investment vehicles is hypothetical.The reason I highlight that one example is because I think this is the basic idea of a quadrant two action- instead of taking the simple default action, you instead make the time or effort to do something a little differently in the present that comes around to pay off in the future.
My return to this book over the ensuing years saw me gather new insights that I missed on my initial 2010 reading. There are, in particular, two insights that I recall which made quite an impact on how I approached my ever-evolving workplace management philosophy.
One of these insights is how a good manager creates the capacity to handle quadrant two issues on her own through delegation and teaching to lower levels of a company. The idea is to push quadrant one (and quadrant three, I suppose) activity down the hierarchy so the top decision makers were able to devote uninterrupted concentration to important, non-urgent matters.
This one was a difficult one for me to grasp intuitively when I began managing. I think the difficulty is universal if you earn such a role by promotion from a lesser role. This is because the mentality of high-quality execution on workload is a difficult one to shake off. Instead of relying on what succeeded for you in the past- producing strong final results solely through your direct involvement in the production process- you instead have to learn to take responsibility for final results while reducing your involvement in the production process to an indirect role.
Meeting the challenge presented by this mentality shift is a significant one but there is a general insight I have that might help. It is critical to know the difference between doing something at a high level and doing something at the minimum acceptable level. The tendency for managers who worked their way up to the role will be to have their team emulate their own high level of performance.
These high standards are all well and good. But a managers who cannot say 'good enough' tend to constantly meddle with final products and stunt the development of both manager and subordinate in the process.
Knowing the minimum for acceptable work is vital because it does two things. First, it makes the manager responsible for determining if it is time to step in and take direct involvement in the production process. All that is required is setting up a tracking system to determine when quality falls below the standard.
Second, it creates a safe environment of failure for the subordinate to experiment and develop her own skills. One of the benefits of moving a high performer into a managerial role is that the replacement will possess a different set of capabilities from the predecessor. These capabilities might not immediately be applicable to the current needs of the business but it is vital to allow the replacement to play to her strengths and try to apply those to the business.
This is because even if there is no immediate payoff, the problems and opportunities that might arise in the future are unpredictable and these previously unnecessary capabilities might be just what is required. If the environment discourages failure through inconsistent standards or the manager is micromanaging due to a lack of clarity on what an acceptable rate of failure is, the culture begins to value conformity and the diversity of a team's skillset becomes endangered. Those capable of using their skills in new situations end up being overlooked or are discouraged from making the initial effort.
The second insight that I used to build my own management philosophy was the importance of one on one interactions for building relationships. Since the time needed for such interactions can get lost when there is a consistent pressure to complete quadrant one tasks, it is up to the senior person in the relationship to create one on one time so that everyone is able to have this time to communicate without placing additional stress on the team or on any one of its individuals.
The key to productive one on one time is to cover topics that do not come up in the natural course of a workday. The focus is on the important topics that never take respond to the pressure of the urgent. These topics should focus on the subordinate's interests, such as career development, job trajectory, skills growth, company direction, individual concerns, and so on. In short, the one on one meeting is a discussion of progress on individual quadrant two projects. It benefits the three parties involved- the individual finds time to focus on personal growth, the manager learns about what is going on in the team without wasting time meddling in the day-to-day operations, and the company is less likely to lose employees who value their own development.
As I mentioned above, there is plenty more in the book and I am sure each reader, whether going through this book for the first or one hundredth time, will find something new that proves an immediate catalyst for a new outlook on life. I will undoubtedly read this book again and look forward to the new discoveries I am sure to make. I might even post about it...
Thanks again for reading. Back on Tuesday with a pair of leftover ideas from this post.
Tim
Footnotes!
Postscript...
Note about the author- Stephen Covey, author of the '7 Habits', did write a separate book about how to apply the concepts to families. I read that edition a couple of years later. I suppose there is a chance that I have incorrectly attributed observations from that book to the original '7 Habits' book in the above and if I did so, my sincerest apologies.
1. Keeping track of the reading tangent...
The first book I officially logged as having read is marked with a date of (check- early 2011). This means anything I read prior to 2011 is not formally logged anywhere. I did the best I could with these books from ancient past but do apologies for a couple of books whose contents I recall but names I have lost over time that I will post about in the future.
2. What does the future hold tangent...
A concept I took from a business book several years later really drives this idea home- essentially, whenever there is uncertainty about the short term, it is investment that disappears. Investment is a good 'catch all' term for this quadrant two concept for investment never occurs if there is not a feasible investment project available or if the potential investor requires resources to sort out some short term issue.
