I Just Found a New Life Habit: “Why Are You Awake?” Alarm

I just found a new life habit: a daily “Why are you awake?” alarm on my phone, set to 30 minutes before the time I want to go to bed.

The idea comes from a short ebook I just read, How to Invest Your Time Like Money, by Elizabeth Grace Saunders (published by Harvard Business Review Press).

Saunders’s idea is simple but brilliant. She makes this point about habits:

Habits reduce the amount of time that you spend deciding what to do, lower the energy needed to take action, and ensure that you’re spending time on what’s most crucial.

Applying the idea to the decision we make each day as to when to go to sleep, she writes:

How do you make going to sleep a routine so you have fewer decisions to make and more hours resting? (This is the question all parents ask about their children’s bedtime routine but rarely direct toward themselves.)

A very simple approach is to set a “Why are you awake?” alarm on your phone for fifteen to thirty minutes before your ideal bedtime. This reminds you what time it is and prompts you to get ready for bed, unless you’re doing an activity that’s worth losing sleep over.

I set this new alarm in my phone just minutes after reading this section of the book.

Speaking of which… my “Why are you awake?” alarm just went off five minutes ago–sharing such a simple but brilliant idea is surely worth losing five minutes of sleep over… but off to bed now!

Thanks to HBR Press for the review copy of this awesome, succinct ebook. Find it here on Amazon, here at HBR’s site, and learn more about the book here at Elizabeth Grace Saunders’s site. Full review forthcoming!

You’re the boss. People love you… right?

Do bosses over time gradually lose the ability to rightly estimate how other perceive them? Yes, according to a recent article in The Economist:

So not only do bosses set too much store by their strengths, as our Schumpeter column notes, they also habitually overestimate their ability to win respect and support from their underlings. Somehow, on reaching the corner office, they lose the knack of reading subtle cues in others’ behaviour: in a further experiment Mr Brion found that when a boss tells a joke to a subordinate, he loses his innate ability to distinguish between a real and fake smile.

Read the whole article (“Deluded Bosses: Who’s Behind Me?”) here.

I wonder if this is more an issue in the corporate world than in the church, although I suppose it’s true that any leader could be prone to this phenomenon.

It reinforces the importance of regular evaluation in organizations (especially large ones)–as well as making sure that there are accessible systems and processes in place for folks to meaningfully offer input.

Thinking about Email Bankruptcy? Try this First

A few years ago I heard about “email bankruptcy,” where an executive simply deleted all his piled-up email and then found a way to let all his previous emailers know what he was doing. If they wanted a reply on something, they’d have to write a new email or re-send the old one.

It might have bugged some folks, but it got him to “inbox zero” pretty quickly. Only an exec could pull this off; I doubt a middle manager quite has the workplace capital to be able to do it without some repercussions.

For the rest of us, what to do when the inbox creeps past 50, 100, 200 emails?

Here’s a simple trick. It’s totally psychological, but I’ve used it twice in the last six months, and it works wonders. Here’s what my Inbox often looks like, full of messages. (Senders and subjects deleted here for the sake of privacy.) Yours might look like this, too:

Even with a mere 40 messages here, I’m still a ways away from inbox zero. So I’ve created a folder called “0 akj inbox” that shows up underneath my actual Inbox. The “0” is so it alphabetizes at the top. I leave all my sub-folders expanded so I can always see “0 akj inbox.” Then I make this move:

And… voilà! Empty Inbox:

Ever-elusive "Inbox Zero" — Ever-elusive “Inbox Zero”

Sure, this didn’t do the work of actually responding to those 40 messages. They’re still in “0 akj inbox,” awaiting my attention. But the couple times I’ve zeroed out in this way recently (rather than declaring actual email bankruptcy) has really cleared my head and allowed me to focus on the work I have to do. If 10 messages come in in the next hour, I can quickly work through them and keep my Inbox at 0. And even chip away at the new sub-folder I’ve created.

Just a mind trick? Perhaps. But so much of staying on top of email is, I’m convinced, psychological. The more email I have, the harder it seems to work through any of it. The less I have, the better I do staying zeroed out on a daily or weekly basis. Seeing my Inbox at 0, as above, makes me much more efficient on email, even if all I did was a simple drag-and-drop.

And now, on to that sub-folder….

A Few Thoughts on Leading without Authority

Ron Heifetz, in his Leadership Without Easy Answers, says, “The scarcity of leadership from people in authority, however, makes it all the more critical to the adaptive successes of a polity that leadership be exercised by people without authority” (183).

In other words, even though leaders should expect good leadership from those above them, they should perhaps not wait for it such that its absence affects their own leadership adversely.

I’m fortunate to work for a boss who leads well. But any person in a position of middle management should be prepared to lead effectively regardless of what leadership they see coming from “people in authority.”

And effective leadership requires proactivity. Stephen Covey in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People talks about being proactive as taking “the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen” (71).

I wonder whether we might at times fear taking on responsibility beyond what is in our job description, or beyond what our supervisors have explicitly asked of us. We may worry that we’ll do the wrong thing, or try to do the right thing but in the wrong way. Worse is not doing anything at all. Our work energies can always be redirected if misapplied; a mistake can always be tweaked and corrected.

But, as Heifetz points out, leadership and authority are not the same thing. Having a position of authority does not make one a good leader, nor does leading well require a position of authority. For organizations to succeed, workers at all levels–those with authority and those without–need to be proactive in their exercise of leadership. Lacking positional authority is not an excuse to do otherwise.