Keeping productivity and motivation high at work
Personal get-up-and-go suggestions
Sometimes it is good to have tricks to keep motivation high at work. Not that you are unhappy at the office but you may feel disheartened or disappointed, sometimes disgusted, by a decision that was taken. With low motivation comes low productivity and this is why it must be addressed as soon as possible.
I used to discuss this topic with some close colleagues and also to search for a few ideas from the community, and I came around by simply printing some quotations, or extracts, and displaying them under my computer screens. I noticed that it helped a lot and this is why I would like to share it:
- 10 things that require zero talent
- Don’t be afraid of hard things
- Let others inspire you
- (Bonus) Write your daily/weekly status
10 things that require ZERO talent
Source: https://mollyfletcher.com/zero-talent/
All of them may sound very common and normal. But in reality, if you pay attention to what happens in your job (and elsewhere), you shall notice that it is far from being always true.
Let’s review a bit more in detail 3 points in the list above.
Being on time
How many times a week do you see people arriving 10 minutes late at the office, or 5 minutes late at the daily standup meeting? Nothing serious, you say? OK, let’s check:
Say you are part of a team of 7 persons, and you arrive 15 minutes late to the team meeting. As nobody was informed of your delay, your 6 colleagues have been waiting for your arrival for 10 minutes, then they started without you. It means already 6 * 10 minutes wasted, i.e. an hour. Then you join the meeting, apologize and ask for what was discussed until now. The whole team has to wait 5 more minutes till you are up-to-date and ready to continue the discussion: half an hour wasted. In total, your team has been penalized for more than 1h30 because of your little delay (and it does not count your own wasted time). As a manager, it would drive me crazy.
Being prepared
The same idea applies to being prepared. Coming to a meeting with ideas, proposals, topics, questions will speed up a meeting and save time for everybody. And this is especially true when you have to talk or present slides! I regularly have to give small talks in my team and trust me, it takes me a lot of time to build my presentation, to illustrate it, to make it a bit fun. And to train, of course! But on the other hand, I also had meetings where the speaker does not even reopen his/her slides before the meeting. And guess what, it always turns to a disaster, all attendees waste time and the speaker loses credibility.
Body language
This one is interesting. This may not be the very first thing that comes to my mind when I think about working. But in fact, it is more than pertinent. How do others perceive you? Hard worker? Motivated? Always in a good mood? Smiling? Sleepy? Tired? Kidding? I am deeply convinced that having a good body language gives a positive signal to others and that it will eventually help a lot in your discussions, negotiations, decisions.
Don’t be afraid of hard things
As you probably know, we are commemorating the 50 years of the Moon landing by the NASA team. If you dive into this History topic, you can measure how incredible it is to have succeeded in such an adventure at that time (just think about the kind of “computers” they had, that is ridiculous). I read that Apollo missions had cost 125 billion dollars and 400'000 employees had worked for this.
The Americans did it because they had been inspired, highly-motivated, and the whole country made big sacrifices to achieve this extraordinary goal.
President John F. Kennedy pronounced a historic speech in 1962 at Rice University for this, and I still find it incredibly motivating for all kind of jobs, especially when you are facing technical challenges (which is my daily job):
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.
John F. Kennedy, 1962, “We choose to go to the Moon” (source)
We should never be afraid of doing difficult tasks, to try something new, to fail, and to start again. We cannot accomplish great things without challenges. Let’s dream big!
Let others inspire you
A few days ago, I read a tweet posted by a young woman I didn’t know. She was proudly saying that she had just been named Professor. Good for her, but the most important part in her thread was her mentioning that she achieved it although she is a single mom with 3 children. And then she listed a few reasons that helped her to never give up. One of them particularly caught my attention:
Surround yourself with people better than you
In my career, I have met a few people who honestly liked the comfort they had in their position: they knew the business well, they had been doing the same job for years, and it was fine for them, no need to change. But what a lack of stimulation, what a stagnation!
On the other hand, I often noticed that what makes me improve myself is to have smart and skilled colleagues around me (and sometimes against me). Such people challenge decisions, they propose other ways, they discuss the strategy, they bring new ideas. Exactly what you need to avoid falling asleep in your job. Just make sure that they do not only criticize or report problems but also bring realistic solutions. To me, this is the key difference between smart and harmful colleagues.
No matter your position in the hierarchy, I can attest that having people more skilled than you will definitively make you grow and learn, and it will force you to double-check what you say, what you think, what you decide and how you argue for it.
We should never be afraid to be put in the shade by someone more talented, we should take it as an opportunity to learn, to progress, and to fight for our ideas.
How inspiring this single mom is!
(Bonus) Write your daily/weekly status
I recently read a post from Micheal Lynch about his experience in writing daily status at Google. He explains how these “snippets” have saved time for his meetings and how motivating it has been.
I like the idea that all what you do has value, although it may not have an immediate impact on your company, thus may not be correctly appreciated by your boss, and that the simple act of writing what you delivered this week gives the feeling that you did a good job.
Definitively a recommended reading: https://mtlynch.io/status-updates-to-nobody/
Wrap-up
A daily application of those 10 things-that-require-no-talent is a low effort but may bring an incredible gain, and not only at work, because your whole mindset is positively affected.
And keeping in mind inspirational actions from other people will also lead you to work differently, trying and eventually achieving great things.
I do believe that productivity and motivation can be kept at a high-level thanks to those little thoughts.
