“Work simply. Live fully.” These are the words of Carson Tate, renowned author, coach, and expert on workplace productivity. Each week CMLE will focus on a particular tip from Work Simply (a book our staff love). We hope to summarize concepts and share manageable bites of information for you to try in your daily life. And of course, we hope you fall in love with the book too!
Your beginning activity: Discover your productivity style
A main argument of Work Simply is that one-size-fits-all approaches to time management just don’t work. That is because people have natural inclinations for the ways they work. Instead of fighting against these inclinations, find out what they are and harness them to your benefit! You will need your type to work through this series!
(This does require you to enter your name and email address)
P.S. I found out I’m an Arranger (Angie). Finally, an explanation for my love of multi-colored pens! The other productivity styles include Prioritizer, Planner, and Visualizer. So go ahead, take five, and learn more about your productivity style. Let us know in the comments if it is what you expected!
Have you heard of LibrariesInLife? I am not quite sure what to name it, but OCLC Next recently did a bang up job of proposing a way using Twitter to get conversations going about how you and I save our users time. They write clearly about the convenience imperative…and venture that in today’s fast moving world, that convenience trumps everything else. Today’s dilemma for librarians is about how to “free our users’ time.” They go on to propose that Ranganathan’s Fourth Law of saving the time of the reader, should now be first! Makes sense to me….I witness this all the time when friends or family want to read a book but do not want to wait for it through the public library. With one touch, they simply buy the eBook online and the transaction is over! It is hard to argue with that kind of convenience.
Take five minutes to read the full post to better understand what this conversation is all about.
On Twitter, join in the conversation with hashtags #LibrariesInLife and #OCLCnext. Can’t read one more thing? Listen to Lynn Silipigni-Connaway in this video as she describes this work.
Image credit: http://tinyurl.com/qhnqv3o, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
We all suffer from too much email, but many people don’t realize there are things we can do to help us manage our inboxes. A recent article by MakeUseOf led us at CMLE to compile a list of ideas to stop email clutter, especially before it hits your inbox.
Please note: Phishing or scam emails should never be opened and you should never click any links in them. Please read Microsoft’s post about identifying fraudulent e-mail and phishing schemes for more information.
Unsubscribe – Reduce the email coming in: Turn off notifications from social media sites. Mass unsubscribe from “bacn” (pronounced “bacon” – it’s a techie term referring to email that’s “better than spam, but not quite as good as a personal message”). There are even services like unroll.me that can help. A few years ago New York Times columnist David Pogue found that the “unsubscribe” link in emails usually works. If you continue to receive junk mail even after you have attempted to unsubscribe from the service, you can take additional steps like reporting the mail as “spam” to your e-mail service provider, or adding the sender or domain of the sender to your “blocked” list.
Declutter Daily – Remember the mantra: “Respond, Delete, File, Archive. With each email, you’re going to perform one of four actions:respond, delete, file, archive.The goal is to completely clear your inbox.”
Move Your Conversations Elsewhere – “For work-related or team-based communication, set up a central platform using services like Asana, Basecamp, Huddle, etc. For communication with friends, switch to a common social network wherever you can.” For quick questions, pick up the phone, use Skype, or go talk to the person face-to-face.
According to the folks at MakeUseOf, “The time has come where we all make promises to ourselves that we’ll be better, harder, faster, and stronger by the end of 2014. Twelve months is a long time, though, and it can be easy to lose steam over such a long period. What can you do about it? Our approach: break the year down into months and dedicate each month to a particular change. This method lets you internalize one change at a time before moving onto the next one. Front loading all of your resolutions together is just a recipe for being overwhelmed. A common resolution for most working people is to be more productive. If you do it right, by the end of the year you’ll be doing more work in less time!” Credit for the content of these monthly posts goes to Joel Lee, MakeUseOf.
Image by AJC1. Retrieved from Flickr. Used under Creative Commons’ licensing.
March’s Bad Habit: Working Too Long
“There are two forms of working too long: 1) working so much that it detracts from your rest and recreation and 2) working over long stretches of time without any breaks. For the most part, there’s nothing you can do about the former since your job is your job, but there’s a lot you can do about the latter.
Solution: Ever heard of the Pomodoro Technique? Essentially, you divide the work day into 30-minute chunks: 25 minutes of work followed by 5 minutes of break. You can personalize it to your own needs (e.g. 45 minutes of work and 15 minutes of break). The point is that you’ll be more productive working in short bursts than long crawls.”
Note: Please consider whether your employer is onboard with this technique before you drastically change your work habits!
It is always unfortunate for CMLE staff that the MEMO and MLA Conferences are back to back. It is hard for us to both be out of the office, but we always come away from both conferences with new programming ideas and connections in the library field. The two conferences are quite different in look and feel, which is what keeps it interesting. MEMO is of course very focused on school media and their issues, while the MLA Conference is heaviest maybe in public library issues, followed closely by academics. Our staff intentionally looks for the breakout sessions that are bursting at the seams, to see what is most popular. If we join the fray, we are looking on behalf of all Central MN library types, but also watching and listening to see how the content is received, and if the questions from the attendees indicate something might be lacking in content. If the speaker is phenomenal, we ask them about their willingness to bring their expertise to our region.
We listen at the lunch tables and in the hallways to hear what people are excited about, and what they are struggling with too! For staff like ours, these are all clues as to what type of programming might be helpful in the region. Since so many meetings are now done online, conference season allows face-to-face contact with people in your network. Face-to-face is still best for building relationships and hearing about your needs. As several of us talked about this, we noted how much we miss the face-to-face, as it bonds people in ways that online meetings struggle to produce. A few of my highlights of the MLA Conference included:
Things in a Flash Breakout Session: Bursting to capacity, this fast paced session was populated for the most part with the “tablet crowd”, or the wannabes! I still had not upgraded my iPad to iOS7, as I feared I would not have the needed gift of time to figure out some fairly significant upgrade changes. This session gave me the highlights for navigating this brave new world, which gave me the confidence to download the upgrade. We also heard about many apps that fulfilled a number of professional and personal needs. Out of the twenty or so covered, my two favorites were CamMe, an app that helps you take photos of yourself without the “fully extended arm method” while using your phone! I also really liked Quixey, a search engine for apps. Read last week’s blog post about Quixey.
Sessions on Change Management and Mindfulness: Staff from the Minneapolis Community and Technical College (MCTC) did an excellent session (Conducting Change: Leading a Mindful Tune) about bringing mindfulness into the workplace. Presenters acknowledged that we are living in a time of unprecedented change. We need tools to help us work well in teams and embrace change rather than burrow away from it. Identifying and understanding our strengths, and those of our team members, also makes us better. They talked about WOO (winning others over), working in “flow state”, and the pitfalls of extreme multitasking. At one point in time, multitasking was considered the much preferred option, but it appears it can actually have negative connotations these days. Does multitasking just make us do many things in a superficial, haphazard way? If we focus and/or reflect, can we do a better job?
And, we need tools to help us in letting go of emotions. Acknowledge the emotion, let go of how things should be, and recognize that too much attachment to the end goal can make you miss better things. The presenters showed a hysterical, yet poignant video of C.K. Louis on the Conan O’Brien show to illustrate what they mean about acknowledging your emotions. MCTC created a meditation room in their library this year to allow anyone to engage in 20 minute segments of seated mindfulness (pillows on the floor). Every 20 minutes a chime signals when to enter or leave the room.
Mindfulness and reflective thinking are showing up in both the education and library literature. These practices not only help manage work-related stress, but also improve the quality of library services. Kristen Mastel, MLA president, recently published an article on the topic, Insights and Practical Tips on Practicing Mindful Librarianship to Manage Stress.
After little sleep and a hastily read breakout session description, I stumbled into Roll With the Changes: A Percussion-Based Experiential Approach to Change Management. I will admit I almost backed out of the room when I saw a circle of chairs with a variety of drums and rattles placed in front of each chair. We were quietly instructed by two academics to “sit near the drum that speaks to you.” Okay…I sort of felt like I needed someone to work some WOO on me! However, I pushed through my discomfort while chiding myself for not reading the session description well enough. I have little musical ability and what if I needed to perform solo? But then, I remembered that I could be mindful about my discomfort, embrace it and own it, then let it go, which is exactly what I did! This session began with a review of the research on group drumming or drum circles, some simple rhythmic exercises, and culminated in a full blown structured drumming exercise and debrief as the exercise relates to facilitating change and positive growth in work teams. It was energizing, easy and fun. I left the session smiling and energized to keep exploring new ideas!
I always roll out of Fall conference season on an adrenaline high about what I have learned and whom I have met. Then, I get back to the office and see the piles of work left undone as a result of attending the conference. By writing this blog post, I got my “conference high” back, which felt great.
What about you? Can you share conference high points with others to increase the learning and show the value in developing yourself professionally?
Tip 1: To mine the comments (tweets) of Twitter users at the conference, go to Twitter. Use the search window to type in the #mnlib13 hash tag. By doing this, you may pick up other useful links to materials others shared as a result of breakout sessions they attended.
Tip 2: Were budgets too tight to allow you to attend a conference this Fall? If you work in an academic, public, special or school library in Aitkin, Benton, Chisago, Isanti, Kanabec, Mille Lacs, Morrison, Pine, Sherburne, Stearns, Todd or Wright counties in Minnesota, you are eligible to apply for a CMLE scholarship. Watch our blog posts for other upcoming conferences that might be a good fit for you!
Partnering with libraries for visioning, advocating, and educating
A main argument of Work Simply is that one-size-fits-all approaches to time management just don’t work. That is because people have natural inclinations for the ways they work. Instead of fighting against these inclinations, find out what they are and harness them to your benefit! You will need your type to work through this series!
