With each passing day, I felt like I accomplished less and less, while conversely putting in more and more effort. Meetings got in the way, and my open door policy led to interruptions, emails, phone calls, and drive-by conversations made it impossible to cross off anything from my ever-growing to-do list. I started skipping my morning workout – and sometimes command PT – in order to get an hour of quiet time in the morning. I stayed late to attempt to buy back some of the day’s lost productivity. I started eating lunch at my desk to clear my email inbox. All these things were brilliant ideas until I’d conditioned my supervisors, peers, and subordinates to expect me to be around to put our fires an hour before work, during lunch, and at least an hour after many had left for the day.
I was at a breaking point, a point where I couldn’t out-work and persevere through my bad habits. Things were slipping; not so much that others had noticed (or if they did notice, they didn’t say anything), but I was indeed at the point where I felt as if my head was just above the water. If I didn’t fix it, my Sailors would suffer.
I needed to start by, “Putting the first things first.” (Yes, that was yet another bit of wisdom passed that didn’t come with any instructions on how to actually do it). I prefer “Prioritize, prioritizing” as my daily reminder to devote my limited resources towards the most needed and most impactful objectives.
Starting with yourself begins with a question:
- Why did you get out of bed this morning?
It is essential to ask this question first, and it’s worth the time to sit down with a pad an pen to explore your thoughts. The essence of this question is to find your Why. This is not an easy thing to do, and if you’re like me, my Why was not inspiring. It took some additional self-assessment for me to tease out my Why.
Think about, and write down six to eight areas of life that are important to you. For me, the list was: Adventure, Education, Health/Fitness, Friends, Family, Personal Growth, Finances, and Job. Your areas can, and probably should be different than mine. Remember, this is just a primer to get us thinking; not some manifesto that binds us to these priorities for life. This exercise is capturing a snapshot in time.
Once you have the six or eight areas of life, take out a fresh sheet of paper and draw a big circle in the middle. Divide the circle into slices (like pizza) in either six or eight pieces (depending on how many areas you wrote down). Next, spend some time to reflect on your level of satisfaction in each area of your life. Fill in each slice to correspond to your self-assessment of each area of your life (fill in from the middle outward).
For me, my satisfaction was about 20% filled on education, adventure, and finance, 50% for health/fitness, growth, and family, and 60% for Job and friends. None of these things were shocking for me to learn about myself. Seeing it graphically laid out, however, was very telling. I could clearly see the areas in my life that needed more effort.
When my supervisor had me do this exercise, we continued on to set goals to improve each area I identified. The concept of goal-setting deserves a series of articles; we will reserve that later. For now, the identification of the areas important to you, and the self-assessment of your current satisfaction of the areas provides the data and priming we need.
After considering your self-assessment, go back to the question, “Why do you get out of bed?”
If you are like me, you won’t have some epiphany; it will take considerable time to discover your purpose. What you might discover though, are areas of your life that need attention. That’s not to say that you should mail it in at work or become an absentee leader while you go on a soul-searching quest. The research says that humans have a limited amount of cognitive ability; our executive functions come from the frontal lobe of our brain and use considerable resources. Our cognitive function controls everything from our ability to pay attention, regulate emotions, think critically and solve problems, be creative, and manage time. It’s like a muscle that fatigues under stress and needs rest to recuperate.
If you are stressed about finances or your relationship with your spouse, your executive functioning suffers. If you fail to get enough sleep, exercise, or healthy food, your executive function suffers. If you allow distractions and non-emergency-emergencies to take control of your schedule, you’ll waste the best cognitive abilities on the trivial.
The goal of the New Deckplate is to make you a better leader. We will explore techniques that will aid in using your cognitive abilities in the most efficient ways possible. Learning about the physiological factors that contribute to cognitive fatigue, how to set goals and build efficient systems to reach those goals, how to delegate and task others effectively, and building habits that move tasks from the frontal lobe to the basal ganglia (the part of the brain that is responsible for habits – and uses significantly less cognitive power) will all assist to increase your ability to perform at a much higher level. Higher performance and more efficiency will buy you the time and mental capacity to be the leader your people deserve.
For now, discover the areas of your life that are most important, determine your current level of satisfaction, and consider the possibility of addressing the areas in which you don’t currently feel satisfied.