Talking Talent

Here’s a great post on Brazen Careerist by blogger Clay Collins (author of the blog The Growing Life).

Generation Y is known for rolling into work late while wearing headphones, and dressing as if every day were casual Friday. We’re often seen TXTing in our cubicles, taking breaks, and instant messaging. While these images don’t exactly encourage others to view us as bastions of uber-productivity, we’re often a hell of a lot more productive than previous generations.

Here are seven reasons why my generation (Generation Y) is often more productive than yours:

Reason 1: We use the best tools
Generation Y is more than comfortable doing the experimentation necessary to find the right tools and technologies for most effectively completing a task. We understand the company’s project management software better than you do because we are comfortable playing with it. And we can probably recommend 2-3 other tools that would work better in the situation because we’re not afraid to rely on nearly-free, online productivity tools from unknown companies. Our to-do lists are carefully maintained, prioritized daily and synced with our PDAs and iPODs.

Reason 2. We’re good at automating
Generation Y has grown up with technology and we believe that computers can do just about anything (or that they will someday). So when we’re receive a task, the first question we ask ourselves is: “how can technology make this task go faster?” Sometimes our efforts to employ technology make things more complicated, but quite often we end up successfully automating a repetitive task, saving ourselves and our companies thousands of dollars.

Reason 3. We get better sleep
Previous generations have lived by Ben Franklin’s aphorism: “early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” Generational Y intuitively knows what psychologists have confirmed: that a significant percentage of the population is much more productive when they go to bed late and get up late. Simply put, you’re more productive when you follow your biologically determined circadian rhythms and get up when your body tells you to.

Reason 4: We’re much more likely to love our jobs
Since Generation Y switches jobs much more frequently than previous generations, we’re much more likely to be doing things that (1) we’re good at, and (2) we actually like. All the job switching and repositioning we do means we’re much more likely to end up with professions that are actually suited to our passions and talents. And every productivity guru knows you’re most productive when you’re doing things you actually care about.

Reason 5: We stay up to date in our fields
Another upshot of changing jobs so frequently is the need to stay on top of the latest developments in our fields. Because job searching is a somewhat continual process for Generation Y, we’re likely to teach ourselves new skills, or pay for training, even if our employers don’t because we want to stay competitive. We see training and skill-building as our own responsibility – not something that our employer will necessarily do for us. And our lifestyle choices reflect a passion for constant learning and development .

Reason 6: We’re experimental
Generation Y is continually doing research and development at the individual level. And because Generation Y cares more about getting new experiences and learning new skills than about not making mistakes , we’re willing to try new things, be creative, and take new angles. While this experimental approach might not result in quantifiable productivity, it leads to the kind of shifts in thinking that save time and money over the long haul.

Reason 7: We don’t “go through the motions”
We’ve seen our washed up parents work shit jobs they hate, and we won’t go through the motions for the sake of job security. If you’re an old-school boss, then this won’t be comfortable. However, not going through the motions for the sake of going through the motions actually makes us more productive in the long run.

Do you live to work or work to live?

There’s no right or wrong answer to this question, but it may help you clarify what’s important to you in life.

In a recent issue of Recruiter Daily, life coach Sophie Robertson said we all need to determine what life balance means to us.

“For some people, they really live to work, which is fine. I heard a radio interview with the late Bing Lee and when asked whether he regretted not having spent more time with his family, he replied ‘No, my work has always been very important to me’.

“So there is no right or wrong answer. However it is important that you live according to your own values.”

Robertson suggests people divide their lives into 10 different areas:

• Health
• Knowledge and Learning
• Social
• Financial
• Family
• Partner
• Spirituality
• Career
• Giving to others
• Giving to self.

Then assess your level of satisfaction in each of these areas.  It will rapidly become evident where your life is out of balance.

Managing your life effectively means balancing each of your priorities and pursuits.  If one significant area of your life is neglected, the whole wheel of life will eventually give way and the road will become bumpy.

There’s no denying that work life balance is a challenge.  John Howard called it a ‘barbecue stopper’ in 2007.  Keeping your career on track, your family happy, your social life buzzing and your bank account in the black often seem adversarial goals.  Life just seems to play an “either/or” game at times. 

In my book, Selfscape: Success through balance, I remind people that we are all busy.  Henry David Thoreau once said: “It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants.  The question is, what are we busy about?”  If you are able to spend the best part of your time on the things that really matter to you – that speak to your highest values – then life slides along on an even keel.  And what do you get?  Work/life balance.

Despite the exponential increase in our wealth in the last 50 years, it seems our levels of happiness have not increased.  While our standard of living has increased dramatically, in some cases our levels of happiness have diminished slightly.  The evidence suggests that being richer isn’t making us happier.

In fact, Australia consistently scores highly (or highest) for happiness in education, health, security and wealth, when assessed by the United Nations Human Development Index.  And yet, other data shows us that Australians have some of the lowest levels of job satisfaction in the world. Only Japan, Taiwan, and six East European nations (including Russia) do worse in this regard.

So what does make us happy? 

Happiness is not a destination, but a decision.  We decide to be happy.

In Learned Optimism, Dr Martin Seligman, a leading specialist in positive psychology, presents scientific evidence that optimists get along better than pessimists in almost ever facet of life: at school, at work, in personal relationships and in sports. According to Seligman, optimists respond better to adversity of all kinds.  What’s more, they have better physical health and may even live longer.  The key is what we say to ourselves when we confront failure and disappointment.

Permanent change comes from rewiring habits. I keep a journal which I write every day before I go to bed.  I always write down my ‘three good things’ that happened that day.  This simple exercise helps with resilience and optimism.  By focusing on the positive, I can pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again when things feel wrong or go wrong in the workplace. Maintaining an attitude of gratitude is simple, yet liberating and empowering.

So, the question is: are you happy?  Seligman’s Authentic Happiness website features countless surveys on happiness, including optimism, relationship satisfaction, work/life balance and meaning of life.  You’ll find some clues to your mental attitude there.

“What do you want to do with your life?”

It’s a conundrum that most of us have wrestled with at some stage of our lives.

If you need some direction, 43 Things is a social networking website built on the principles of tagging.   Users create accounts and then list a number of goals; these goals are then connected to similar goals constructed by other people.

43 Things not only encourages people to write down their goals – an important factor in high achievement – but also provides a social networking space for people to meet other enthusiasts with the same (sometimes very obscure) goal, to share their progress and to learn from other people who already achieved that goal.

More than a 1.1 million people have joined the site and have set themselves goals such as ‘donate blood’, ‘learn sign language’, ‘travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway’, ‘grow my own vegetables’, ‘watch every Bette Davis movie ever made,’ ‘keep up with current web trends’ or ‘be happy even if the rest of the things on this list never happen’.

43 Things is very much like the ‘21 things to do in a lifetime’ concept that I’ve often talked about in motivational workshops, and written about in my book, SelfScape: Success through Balance.

My list includes ‘write a novel’, ‘retrace the steps of a famous explorer’, ‘ learn something from a child’, and ’sail the seven seas’.

The first time I wrote my list of 21 things, it was the result of a session facilitated by my supervisor at the time.  He was a creative thinker and looked for different ways to develop better teamwork among his executive group.  Each of us wrote our list and then one by one we displayed them and discussed each point.

My manager was looking for common areas of interest where the team or a sub-set of it could undertake activities together on the basis that that the best relationships are developed through shared experiences.  It lead to some of the group sailing together through the Whitsunday Islands, some racing cars in serious races and some four wheel driving across the Simpson Desert.

That was in 1995.  I wonder if today we’d all sign up for 43 Things and then share our lists through the Internet?