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How do you work when you don’t even feel like heading to the office? The very thought of an hour-long crawl through the traffic, where your heart is split between the duties left unfinished at home and the ones staring at the office, inundates you. You must punch-in well before the timeout, get your vitals back and deliver a job-saving performance amid all the uncertainty and chaos. Add to this the general crumbling of the world order, intrusion of technology onto your most sacred realms and the plague of connectedness.
An average employee today is working harder, sleeping lesser and is a lot more anxious than those from the previous generations. And yet one must continue to work, in whatever form, to maintain social equity, fend off negativity and to prepare for the economic apocalypse. The times are such that while several aim to retire by their 40s, we regularly hear of those not managing to see their 40th birthday —collapsing on the treadmill, drowning in the pools, jumping off the roofs, or simply choosing the noose. The culprit is our excessive urge to know it all and to be in the thick of the things. Let’s look at an alternate approach to managing life and career.
It’s time to peer into your ‘Zone of Concern’ and ‘Zone of Influence’. The zone of concern relates to all of what clamours your attention. It can range from the worldly to most trifle. If you are a regular consumer of newspaper, or worst still 24-hour news channels, you might pride yourself in a missile-by-missile update on the ongoing war (I know of one such person), or draw inspiration from the dialogue-by-dialogue update of office politics (we all know such people). The more expansive your zone of concern, the lesser is your ability to focus on what really matters and your volition. The zone of influence form the events that you can shape through your attention, capabilities and appropriate incentives. For instance, while you may be a bystander to the Ukraine war, as a supply chain manager you can device new means of securing raw materials for your factory.
The zone of concern is invariably larger than the zone of influence, for we are always bothered about a lot more than what we can meaningfully bother. And if you get to a situation where your two zones overlap, you get to the state of flow, the realm of peak performance and creativity. In this sphere, you are concerned precisely of the event that you can actively shape. The way to achieve such desirable states is by shrinking your zone of concern and expanding your zone of influence. In a work environment it can make all the difference between feeling helpless and to be highly consequential. You would not want to be in situations where you know it all, but can’t act at all.
Here’re three workplace strategies to reclaim order amid chaos. Firstly, start with a high-quality no. Your propensity to say yes just because you don’t want to upset people is killing you and your relationships. As a rule, your yes has to be visceral (oh yeah!), while your no must be cold. A high-quality no is a no that doesn’t follow regret. Where you put a premium on your yes, a premium on your time. Say no to meetings that have a mundane mutual value add. You don’t want to be a rubber stamp. A cold no goes a long way in conveying to others that you aren’t a free good. A cold no doesn’t hurt others, for there aren’t any emotional undertones, and so saves you from misery. A highly qualified yes then becomes the resultant, and not the default. As Nikola Tesla noted: ‘The smarter you are, the more selective you become.’ So, start with a cold no and see your zone of concern shrinking rapidly.
Secondly, prioritize incessantly every demand that comes your way. A mental heuristic is to create a spatial, temporal, and psychological gap between you and the situation. Whenever a problem appears, create a space and look at it from a distance. Not only that it will start looking smaller, but also in its perspective. The spatial gap will help you be separate from the problem and understand if it’s worth your while. Remember that most problems solve themselves or become irrelevant over time. You can create a temporal distance, by buying time. By sleeping over a problem, your response can be radically different. A 6 pm response to an email will be very different at 5 am the next day, provided you bid your time. A psychological distance is the realization that things are never as bad and as good as they appear. By not committing to the loud and the immediate, you can attend to the subtle and the enduring, whereby creating a higher leverage.
Thirdly, eliminate with impunity, delegate with confidence, and automate with deftness. Eliminate the tasks that have far outlived their utility and are done out of sheer habits. Like the twenty-minute tea break, thirty-minute meetings, ten minutes briefing calls, or the countless office rituals. Wield a scalpel at your calendar with impunity. Delegate what’s still left and doesn’t warrant your premium attention. Push the work down, up and sideways to those who can do it reasonably well (don’t seek perfection), and free up your plate to take on higher order, more value adding activities. It helps everyone grow, especially intellectually. Of what can’t be done away with, try if automation can be a resort. You will be surprised as to how much technology has progressed. It’s time to tap into it. What’s left is yours.
As the world throws new surprises at you, be mindful of what’s truly in your zone of influence and do your best with it. For everything else, there’s a cold no, a judicious gap, and some deft tech.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.