Have you ever worked with one of those people who calls you over to their office or cubicle every few minutes to show you some stupid thing that they found online?
Well, I used to be one of those people.
One of my old co-workers snapped me out of this mentality. “No offense,” she said (that usually means that they’re going to offend you, by the way), “but do you not have enough time outside of the office to look at this stuff?”
That’s when I realized that I had a problem.
I’m the kind of guy who needs a lot of structure and routine, so I designed a rigid set of rules and guidelines that helped me to dictate both my personal and professional time. Whether it was filling out reports, taking a break, commuting or even waking up, I set up frameworks for myself that would be a better way to manage my time.
I wouldn’t recommend doing this.
What I found was that although things were fine at the beginning, I would start to push the boundaries of these rule systems. And I would keep pushing and pushing until the rules weren’t there at all. It seemed rational that certain situations would be outside of this structure for me to follow, and the more I believed it, the more it came true.
I tried reading books about personal organization, acting more professionally and performing to a higher standard, but none of it seemed to work. I couldn’t find a happy medium between how I acted and how I wanted to act. But one day, while I was waiting to pick my dog up from the vet, something in my head clicked. It popped out of nowhere, but it seemed to be the most rational thought in the world.
When you change the way you think about things, the things you think about change.
I know that this phrase has probably been said before. Hell, someone might have told it to me. But in that moment, it set off a switch in my head.
I started to look at work as more of an enjoyable challenge than a necessity to life. I began looking forward to new projects to focus on. In short, I took my professional world more seriously, and blended my views of it with my personal one. The disconnect between the two was gone. And the results were amazing.
I didn’t need to plan and schedule my day to a particular regimen. I didn’t need to do something that I felt wasn’t in my character to do. I had made a bridge between the person I wanted to be at the office and the person I was away from it that was more conducive to both places.
The more you try to force out certain habits and practices, the harder it will be to actually do them. Sometimes, you can just think up a way to fix them. And sometimes, the solution can come out of nowhere.
But when you go from the person who shares stupid stuff online to the person who helped make the new product launch a success, the hows and whys don’t matter that much.
