Entrepreneur and coach Jonas Altman explains the nuts and bolts of his new book SHAPERS
Shapers
100,000 hours. That’s how much time you might spend at, or doing, work. Work takes up more time and by God, more energy, than any other aspect of your life. So why not make it meaningful? Even joyful?
Here are some sure-fire ways to set you on the right track:
Light Yourself Up
Our inner drive rests on three innate psychological needs that shape our behaviour. These are autonomy, relatedness, and competence. When these three criteria are met, you are well poised to continually grow and discover meaning.
To put it another way, while status and a paycheck may be the consequences of why you work, the real signal of your contribution and sense of joy comes from what motivates you.
So this means you should strive to feel freedom in your work, connect with your purpose, and continue to get better all the time.
Burst Work
How you work can be as detrimental as what you work on. Enter burst working: set intervals of focused work sprinkled with short breaks. These bursts should last at least 25 minutes and if you’ve trained hard — up to 2 hours.
While everyone has their distinct working style, it’s by managing energy in this deliberate fashion that you can seriously optimise your workflow.
Discovering when, where, and how you work best really does take work. Our offices can often be hostile environments for thoughtful work and with the recent shifts in the world, your home needs to become a safe-haven for productivity.
Set (and Keep) Boundaries
We talk about setting boundaries a lot but do we live it? And I’m talking about both people and technology here.
When we are at our best and want to do the work that matters, we need to stop responding to the world. Discovering and safeguarding this precious time is absolutely essential to make meaningful progress. Shapers religiously schedule uninterrupted time for when they hit a stride, permitting them to indulge in moments of optimal performance.
Practice Doing Nothing
We are human beings, not human doings. It’s all too easy to forget that. Our identities and sense of self are enmeshed with the principles of making progress. With our fixation on doing, comes the productivity ninjas and struggle pornographers we cherish today.
Shifting into a slower gear means facing our fear of idleness.
Simply doing nothing from time to time can work wonders. ‘It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing’ wrote author and poet Gertrude Stein.
Dedicated times to bugger off have led to the discovery of many things we know and love: scotch tape, sticky notes, and gravity to name but a few. Intuitively we know when we need to rest and yet it’s easy to ignore this voice by powering through the day and pounding another latte.
Shapers organise their day and their minds to ensure there is space for great ideas to happen. To do and be our best, sometimes we simply need to slow down.
About the Author: JONAS ALTMAN is the author of SHAPERS: Reinvent the Way You Work and Change the Future. He is a speaker, writer, and entrepreneur on a mission to make the world of work more human. As the founder of award-winning design practice Social Fabric, he creates learning experiences to elevate and grow leaders at the world’s boldest organisations. He speaks regularly at conferences about the future of work, advises companies on culture change and travels the globe learning about the changing nature of work. His chronicles have appeared in The Guardian, Quartz, The Telegraph, and The Sunday Times. For leisure he enjoys riding waves. For more information visit www.Shapers.life or www.JonasAltman.com SHAPERS is out now.