Here are strategies for the final two categories of weeds:
4. TIME: Tackle each time-management weed and make the necessary adjustments in your schedule. Think carefully before scheduling or attending meetings that aren’t mandatory. Minimize social networking on the job, except where necessary for class. Identify the time-eaters that contaminate your “to-do list” and eliminate them.
5. ENVIRONMENT: Everyone knows the old adage, “People who live in glass houses are transparent!” OOPS! Wrong adage! That has nothing to do with this category. I meant the adage, “The grass is always greener.” Well, when you’re using a weed metaphor, this adage works. If you can’t take out the major weeds in your department, take yourself out of the weeds and consider greener pastures and a more fertile environment to nurture your professional gifts. MOVE!
I hope you’ve been able to whack a few weeds over the past week that will add zip to your professional productivity. Let me know if anything worked and if you used techniques that I didn’t suggest. Please share what you’ve learned about whacking.
HAPPY WEED WHACKING!
COPYRIGHT © 2010 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
If you don’t have enough weeds in your mental list yet, here are a few more in the last two categories:
4. WEEDS IN YOUR TIME: Any activities that derail you from accomplishing your mission and daily tasks and steal time away from those tasks are weeds. Meetings that are irrelevant to your tasks are a prime example. Distractions, such as excessively long close encounters of the social kind, e-mail and social media responses, long lunches with too much food, football and basketball games with lousy teams, and similar time gobblers, are weeds. You need to significantly reduce or kill them.
5. WEEDS IN YOUR ENVIRONMENT: You all know about toxic environments. What is it in your department that has a negative effect on your productivity? Could it be the faculty, administration, staff, students, IT support, policies and procedures, institutional rules and regs, resources, or physical conditions? What is it in your workplace that bothers you the most or drives you bonkers? Can any of these weeds in your environment be ripped out or killed? OR, is it easier for you to change your environment and move to a nontoxic, or, at least, less weed-infested, department?
Do any of these weeds in these 2 categories grow in your life or, Pavlov-wise, ring a bell? Add these weeds to the previous list you didn’t make. At least, think about that imaginary list in your head. Have those weeds truly affected your productivity? Which weeds can be killed quickly and easily? Which ones require a longer, slow, agonizing, torturous death? If you don’t dispose of your weeds, your "same ‘ole--same ‘ole" counterproductive or regressive behaviors will continue.
My next blog will proffer some suggestions for killing your weeds. In the mean time, Google “poisons” to research your options and sharpen your weapons.
COPYRIGHT © 2010 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
