Stress – Page 15 – mardihumphreys.com

It’s About Time

When did the United States know it was time to bring workers from the fields to the factories? Who decided working eight hours a day for five days in a row was the best schedule for optimum productivity? The 40-hour workweek became a law in the United States in 1940. If we haven’t thought about how long it should be since then, may we please use COVID-19 as the trigger for redefining how long it is now?

Not News

How long both the workweek and the workday should be is not a new conversation. One of my favorite thinkers is organizational psychologist Adam Grant. He has lobbied for the death of the five-day workweek for at least a couple of years. There is plenty of evidence to support his position from respected sources like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The Huffington Post.

Mother Knows Best

The catch is, if employees spend less time on the job, isn’t it logical that the job should pay less? Mothers have struggled with this prevalent employer attitude for years. In Mika Brzezinski’s book, Know Your Value: Women, Money, and Getting What You’re Worth, Carol Smith, former publisher of Elle magazine told Mika, “I love hiring women (for) four days a week because they actually will produce at least five days’ worth of work for four days’ worth of pay.” As an employer that’s a benefit to her, but as a woman, it is a detriment. Her story in the book goes on to note that the moms of young children who work for her are willing to do anything to have a four-day workweek including accepting 60% of their salary.

Proof of Concept

Of course, employees do not want to make less money, but why should employers shorten the week without also shortening the paycheck? Here are two examples. This article talks about a four-day-workweek-no-pay-reduction experiment the company Buffer offered its employees. To shorten their workweek, they cut back on meetings and social events, sped up the pace of their day, and improved their focus (e.g., employees reported spending 35% less time surfing the web). The experiment was so successful, it’s still running. Buffer made $21 million in revenue in 2020. Also, American businesses should vet the plan Iceland commissioned from Alda (Association for Sustainable Democracy), an Icelandic non-profit, and Autonomy, a British think tank, to condense the workweek. These two organizations partnered to run two large-scale trials of a four-day workweek from 2015-2019. They published their results in June 2021. In addition to productivity remaining the same or improving in their test-subject companies, the study also concluded that employee welfare markedly increased (e.g., less burnout). Even if employers prioritize revenue over employee well-being, these studies prove a four-day workweek is profitable.

Life always holds an element of uncertainty. Did we really need a pandemic to remind us of what our priorities should be and how far we’ve strayed from them? Let’s rethink the current workweek model and consider what compensation for productivity could look like in 2022.

Would you rather be paid for your time or your productivity? Please share in the comments.

My Way or the Highway

I keep stumbling over the word agency because it’s a contributing factor to The Great Resignation. It’s trending in the context of one of its lesser meanings (check out #9). As I struggled to visualize it, I received an unexpected email of encouragement from my manager. In reassuring me that I am achieving our goals, his email helped me label how I achieve them. It also woke me to the fact that not everyone has this freedom in their work. Employers had to give up a certain amount of control over their workforces at the height of COVID-19 when they weren’t allowed to have employees work under their watchful eyes. An employer who has issues with employees working remotely is not a logistics problem, it’s a trust problem.

Control

If it’s not enough to complete the task correctly and on time, but it also has to be done the way the manager prefers, then you have a lack of agency. For example: toward the end of her life, our grandmother was not physically strong enough to wash the windows on her house herself. During a visit, my husband offered to do it. She immediately pointed out what equipment to pull from where, gave him a recipe for the cleaner, dictated while he mixed it, and window by window instructed him on how to clean them. Kudos to him for his patience. There were 13 windows on that house. It was a long afternoon. Haven’t we all had a micromanager? Or one who insisted we be available to them 24/7/365 like Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada? If this is your current situation, can you set boundaries on when you’re available to your manager? Can you transfer to another department that allows you more freedom? Is having agency important enough to you to find a different job? Whatever you decide, take time to think about how you got into this situation. Are you habitually involved with people (managers, people you date, etc.) who want to control you? If you determine that you’re the common denominator in these relationship equations, talk about them with a trusted friend, therapist, or coach to help you identify red flags in both your behavior and your manager’s. Otherwise, the lack of agency is likely to follow you to your next role.

Trust

Your lack of agency means your manager doesn’t entirely trust you. Some things to consider:

Have you done something to lose their trust?
Are they micromanaging everyone, or just you?
Is your relationship strong enough that you can ask them what they are afraid of?
Is there a way you can reduce their insecurities?
If you do what you’re told the way you’re told to do it every single time, there’s no learning. Would your manager let you experiment, fail, then learn from the result? For example: Can you do a project how, where, and when you want to, successfully complete it, deliver a report of the results to your manager, then ask for this process to become your standard operating procedure?
Have you had success on your own initiative that you can remind them of to prove your credibility?
Would more communication (e.g., weekly status reports) on projects give them more confidence in you?

You train people how to treat you. You cannot change other people’s behavior, you can only change what behavior you will accept from them. If you can’t achieve the autonomy you need at your current position, then your decision is whether to stay or go.

What do you do when you experience a lack of agency at work? Please share in the comments.

No Labor Today

Our wedding anniversary typically falls around Labor Day. My husband and I usually schedule time off work around the holiday weekend to celebrate by traveling a bit. This year marks our 30th wedding anniversary, so we decided to do something special. We visited Grand Teton National Park. We not only needed a grand gesture to celebrate our milestone, but also to get as far away from our day-to-day as possible. Pre-COVID-19, I wrote about how it benefits your job when you take a break from it. Mid-COVID-19, a break feels mandatory. With the blurred boundaries between work, home, school, etc., how can you process what you just lived through (and continue to live through) and use those learnings to iterate the next version of your life post-COVID-19? You don’t have to go all the way to Wyoming, but you should unplug, reset, and filter.

Unplug

We chose to get away to a place with little to no cell service, mostly because I can’t be trusted to enforce my OOO boundary. But maybe your children are in the throes of the beginning of both the school year and their fall extracurriculars so you need to stick close to home. Get creative about taking time to recharge. For example, take half-days off for a week. While the rest of your household is doing their things, turn off your phone, laptop, Xbox, etc., and change your scenery. If your job is sedentary, go to a Metropark and bike, walk, or kayak. If your job is physical, go to the library and read, journal, or listen to music. Whichever you choose, commit to only answering your mobile if there is a life (not work) emergency.

Reset

Get out of your comfort zone. Choose one activity you’ve never done before and do it every day for the week. If you work by yourself, follow CDC guidelines and do a project with others. If you work with others, find a solitary pursuit. You could:

Volunteer at your local food bank, church, or YWCA
Study coding with Python
Learn to cook your favorite restaurant meal with YouTube videos
Listen to different music (e.g., rap if you’re a country fan)
Read a different genre (e.g., non-fiction if you normally read sci-fi)

By the end of the week, you’ll know whether or not your choice is an activity you enjoy. If it helps you reset your mindset, then make time in your schedule to keep doing it.

Filter

At the end of each day, journal about your new activity. You could write, doodle, voice memo, whatever is your choice for making notes. Think about:

What did you see, hear, touch, taste, and/or smell?
How did it make you feel?
What did you learn?
What does it make you want to change?
What does it make you want to keep doing?
How will you use these new insights to influence your work?
Are there priorities you have to reset? People to whom you have to communicate boundaries? Comfort zones you have to get out of?

Prioritizing your physical, mental, and emotional health gives you the energy you need to bring your best effort to work, life, and people in your circle of influence.

What are you going to do to recharge? Please share in the comments.

Tempting Talent

Last week we discussed how to retain your current employees during the Talent Tsunami. But despite your best efforts, it’s likely that some of them will still jump ship (cue Debbie Downer). From a financial perspective, hiring a new employee is an expensive process. You not only have to calculate salary, but also the cost of recruiting, training, and benefits. If you are a company of 0-500 people, this price could average $7645. How can you ensure you’re attracting trustworthy talent?

Congruity Through Change

It’s tempting to just increase the top of the salary range or offer a sign-on bonus and publish the “We’re Hiring!” post. But throwing money at the problem is not a long-term solution. The pandemic proved the workplace can function very differently than it’s been allowed to since the industrial age. This excited employees, but management not so much. COVID-19 fast-tracked the inevitable evolution of the way knowledge work gets done. Protocol that made factories run efficiently (e.g., all employees work five consecutive eight-hour days) are no longer in employees nor companies best interests here at the end of the digital revolution. If you make this an arbitrary rule, you risk losing out on valuable talent. Conversely, if you explore innovative alternatives for running your business, then you keep your company’s vision intact by taking advantage of modern methods to manifest it. For example: How many processes can you automate? Can you employ subcontractors? Can you upskill high-value individual contributors? Concepts like remote working and unlimited PTO that your company deemed impractical before COVID-19 are now your competitors’ widely advertised company perks. Ponder how implementing such changes may impact your business. A company that helps its workforce navigate work-life integration attracts employees who want to make that company thrive. Be a company that allows employees autonomy to get their projects done, advance in their career and life, and affiliate with both their coworkers and company. Prioritize being a great place to work; a place where employees are valued as human beings and not treated like cogs in a machine. When you do, that becomes part of your brand. In short order, you have an inspiring story to tell everyone and you will attract a workforce excited to invest in the company’s success.

Not Your First Rodeo

You’ve been short-handed before, so now is not the time to panic. Employment is a long-term prospect. You need to discern whether a new hire will be a loyal member of your team or if they are just riding a Talent Tsunami wave. Be as selective in choosing whom to add to your staff now as you were pre-pandemic. When hiring, consider:

Why are they changing jobs?
Did COVID-19 cause them to be laid off or furloughed?
What did they learn during the pandemic that will help them succeed in this role?
Are they looking for more purpose in their work?
What specifically drew them to your company?
Did someone you trust from your network connect you to this talent prospect?
Do they seem excited to meet with you?
Did they tailor their resume to the open position?
Did they ask you good questions about both the company and the job?

This power shift to job seekers won’t last forever. You’ll likely have the same pre-pandemic issues (e.g., finding employees with specific skills) you always had, but if you refresh your policies to create more win-win working conditions, you’ll attract quality talent.

What makes your organization attractive to talent? Please share in the comments.

Red Alert

Our daughter was born seven days before my 31st birthday. While pregnant with her, my OB/GYN referred to us as a geriatric pregnancy. Has a bit of a negative connotation, don’t ya think? I prefer to think of us as trendsetters because these days plenty of women are following in our footsteps. At the time, I hoped that within twenty-five years society would evolve to the point where it’s easier for parents of minor-aged children to work full-time. The deadline to fulfill that hope is January 2022. Looks like I’m going to be disappointed.

Acknowledge

The corporate sector has done little to address this issue, and as we discussed last week, bias against working mothers hasn’t changed much in 25 years. Since the pandemic spotlighted their plight, now is an opportune time to use that momentum and advocate for permanent changes with employers for both mothers and fathers. Child care is necessary for parents to work. Work is necessary to drive economic recovery from COVID-19. More than half of the parents who took this survey anticipate that the cost of child care will increase because of the pandemic. The child care crisis is now a red alert and it affects all of us.

Communicate

If you are a parent in the workforce, the pandemic probably taught you the necessity of work-life integration, especially if your children are very young and/or school-aged. For example, the need for your physical presence when your child is an infant is not the same as when that child becomes a teenager. Even if your work responsibilities don’t change during those years, where and when you do the work can. Gone are the days of sitting in an office for eight hours waiting for work to appear. Work happens 24/7/365; so does the rest of your life. Figure out where your boundaries are, then communicate and negotiate them with your manager. When your employer knows that you’ll write the quarterly report after your daughter goes to bed in exchange for attending her soccer game that afternoon, they should respect your work-life integration. If they don’t, then you can find an employer who will. Right now there are more jobs available than people to fill them. You need to be in an employment situation where you can have transparent, on-going conversations with your manager (e.g., performance reviews) where the goal is to define both what the company currently needs from you, and what you need from the company in order to meet its needs. The result should be an arrangement benefitting both you and the company. If you and your employer are both fair and flexible, not only will you successfully integrate the responsibilities of your life, but you, your employer, and your children will benefit also.

How does your business address the needs of working parents? Please share in the comments.

Defense Mechanism

It’s my mom’s birthday and I’m reflecting on some of the work she’s done so far: Registered Nurse, Director of Nursing, Sunday School Teacher, and now a Christian Counselor. These jobs share a common thread: compassion. Being the well many draw from saps her energy and she has to intentionally replenish it. Can you relate? If you are a parent, teacher, or in any type of care-giving role, what you assume is burnout due to the constant stress, change, and loss thanks to COVID-19 may be Compassion Fatigue (CF).

What is it?

Also known as secondary traumatic stress, CF is one of your body’s defense mechanisms. You become emotionally and physically exhausted when you’re repeatedly exposed to stressful events. This can leave you numb to others’ suffering. The condition is usually associated with health-care workers, but anyone who is consistently exposed to someone else’s hardship (e.g., first responders, clergy, public librarians) can experience it. CF can also be caused by a heavy workload, excessive demands, and long hours. For example, the mom working from home while supervising her children’s online school is a candidate for CF. You’re particularly susceptible if you watch a lot of news, have too many priorities competing for your energy, or work in a dangerous environment. Remember, since COVID-19 began, environments once considered innocuous are now seen as dangerous (e.g., grocery stores). Any time you have less energy, add more fatigue, then have to expend more energy, you are at risk. For example, you’re worried about your at-risk parents’ health while you are working longer hours, then a friend tests positive for COVID-19.

What Does it Look Like?

Symptoms of CF can be both physical and emotional. Watch for these behaviors in both yourself and those you interact with:

Physical:

Distracted, forgetful, withdrawn
Aches, pains, nauseous, insomnia
Work absenteeism, unproductive, relationship conflicts
Self-medicating/Substance abuse (food, alcohol, drugs, gambling, more work)

Emotional:

Helpless, sad, hopeless, isolated
Anxious, worried, overwhelmed, depressed
Irritable, restless, tense, self-doubt
Dissatisfied with self and/or job

What Can You do About it?

Self-awareness: When you feel three or more of the above symptoms, define your triggers. When you just don’t care anymore, why is that? What is the root of the stress? What can you control? Will you accept help from others at home? Can you delegate tasks at work?

Boundaries: Prioritize your needs over what others need from you. Set, maintain, and enforce limits for: work-life integration, time spent scrolling through social media, care giving, realistic expectations.

Self-care: Do something everyday that boosts your energy: eat well, exercise, read, listen to music, drink water, journal, sleep, meditate, pray, talk to a friend, spend time in nature, laugh.

Compassion Fatigue should not be normalized, but talking about it openly should be because it’s not going away. Everyone has a new, longer-term complication and they want your support. For example, adjusting to emerging working conditions (e.g., remote, in-office, hybrid), concern for their young children going back to school, or comfort after the death of a loved one. Figuring out how to balance restoring, conserving, and giving away your energy is a key to effectively helping those you love and work with.

Are you experiencing Compassion Fatigue? What measures are you taking to recover from it? Please share in the comments.

Travel Team

It’s vacation season and if you have a spouse, you want to travel together. But there are things you want to do that they don’t, such as spend five hours at one art museum, spend three hours at a coffee shop, or spend an hour reading a book at a botanical garden. Luckily, you have friends who think these pastimes sound heavenly. In addition to traveling with your partner, take a trip with a friend. These adventures are ripe with lessons you can take back to work.

Getting to Know You

Constant togetherness reveals hidden talents as well as idiosyncrasies. For example, you discover that your friend has an uncanny ability to quickly spot your Uber while they notice that you can easily navigate large airports. On the other hand, maybe you are irritated by your friend’s obsession with the weather forecast and they are annoyed by your insistence to walk everywhere. We learn to be more considerate of each other because our time together is finite. The same is true at work. Projects have lifecycles. Acknowledge an interpersonal conflict when it starts. Be quick to define both your and your teammate’s boundary. Additionally, recognize that taking the time to unravel and resolve miscommunication is time well spent.

Plan B (or C or…)

When traveling, sometimes Plan A won’t work. Issues like flight delays, a car rental company losing your reservation, and a broken air conditioner in your hotel room provide multiple opportunities to not only find out how good a business is at customer service, but also work with your friend to figure out how to overcome the obstacle. Which one of you will: Take the lead in patiently communicating the unacceptable situation to customer service? Motivate the other to remain calm? Influence the service you receive by confirming that everyone is working toward the same goal? After recovering from the setback, you can take the lessons you learned (e.g., active listening, empathizing, aligning expectations) back to work and apply them to your team’s next project. When unpredictable obstacles occur, you can confidently take the lead to solve them because you’ve experienced the emotional intelligence required to get through a frustrating process.

Teamwork

The first time you travel with a friend to a destination that’s new to both of you, logic dictates that you set the parameters of the trip and start negotiating. Who is booking the transportation? Who is booking the hotel? Who is booking reservations at the restaurants, museums, sites, etc. that you want to visit? You divide up the task list according to talent. They are good at determining how much time you need between connecting flights. You can detect if a hotel is as good as its marketing says it is. You must trust each other to complete these tasks. During the trip, you both are gracious when unforeseen challenges happen. You patiently support one another when mistakes in judgement cause setbacks. You encourage each other to stretch outside of your comfort zones. You remain flexible so both of you can reach the individual objectives you have for the getaway. See what I did there? These activities are examples of collaborative teamwork. The same skills and mindset you use traveling with your friend apply to the project you’re tackling with your coworkers.

Do you plan to travel with friends this summer? Where are you going? Please share in the comments.

Satisfied ≠ Engaged

When I hear the term employee engagement, in my head I see a scene like the photo above; engaged people satisfied with their work. I thought engagement was synonymous with satisfaction, but no. An engaged employee is probably also a satisfied one, but a satisfied employee is not necessarily engaged.

What’s the Difference?

Satisfied employees do their job, but don’t look for ways to contribute to the mission or vision of the company. They’re satisfied with short term incentives like a raise, and dissatisfied when the work gets stressful. Satisfaction is how happy employees are, which may include things like getting paid for doing as little work as possible. Satisfied employees avoid accountability, try to maintain the status quo, and resist change.

Engaged employees are enthusiastic about their positions, dedicated to the company, and work beyond their job descriptions. They believe in the company’s mission and actively promote it. They’re both mentally and emotionally dialed in to their work, teams, and organizations and expect a long-term relationship with all three. They embrace change; taking the initiative to seek out processes that can be improved and improving them.

Why is it Important?

Eighty-one percent of business leaders said engaged employees perform better than satisfied ones. They’re more productive, less absent, attract new talent, and stay with the company longer than satisfied employees. This results in growth and innovation in a thriving economy and the ability to bounce back after a recession. Engaged employees know their role in the company’s objectives. When an employee knows their purpose, they filter their work through it. The company can then harness and channel this energy to reach its goals.

How Do You Do It?

Communication: Employee engagement starts at the top. Senior leadership should authentically view employees as their most valuable asset and prove it by:

Casting a vision for the company, clearly and repetitively stating it, and lead accomplishing the company’s mission by example
Giving organization-wide updates on the health of the company including changes. Disclose what leadership is doing to improve the current conditions
Focusing constructive feedback on employees’ performance (not the person) and following up
Offering a process for anonymous company-wide feedback and implementing employees’ responses
Publicly recognizing engaged employees and giving them a system to publicly recognize each other

Cultivation: Business moves at the speed of trust. Senior leadership can build trust with employees by:

Defining what success looks like to the company and how to reach it with honesty and integrity
Providing clear expectations, holding people accountable, and focusing on delivering results
Making enriching employees’ lives a company value and acting like it (e.g., supporting employees’ career development with both money and time)
Developing cross-functional teams to complete projects. Pro-tip: When coworkers do projects together, they organically bond and create positive team memories because they achieve communal success

Contribution: Engaged employees want to feel like they’re instrumental to the success of something bigger than themselves. Senior leadership can tap into that desire by:

Matching roles to employees’ strengths
Giving employees tasks they find both interesting and challenging
Sharing ownership of the company’s mission
Reiterating how the work employees do contributes to the company’s success

A company with engaged employees experiences less turnover, higher sales, and more customer satisfaction. When an employee quits their job in America, it costs the employer about $5000 to replace them. It was hard enough to find good employees pre-COVID-19. It’s so challenging now that it’s simply a wise business decision to invest in keeping the ones you have.

Does your company have an employee engagement strategy? How does it work? Please share in the comments below.

Who Are You?

During the first team meeting after Jane got promoted from individual contributor to manager, she admitted she was nervous about the new role and asked her team for help. Her honesty and vulnerability were counter productive. Instead of regarding her as authentic, Jane’s direct reports perceived her as weak and unable to do her job. They didn’t trust her decisions, making it impossible to lead them. Her leadership style should have evolved as she gained experience, but instead Jane lost the courage necessary to promote her ideas.

What Bringing Your Whole Self to Work Means

Being both courageous and comfortable enough with coworkers to reveal both personal interests and flaws, thus creating space for them to reciprocate
Normalizing what employees experience outside the workplace affects them in the workplace
Includes both the impression we give of ourselves (consciously or unconsciously) and the impression we have of coworkers
Some elements we consider: authenticity (“This is me, warts and all”), humility (“I don’t know everything”), and vulnerability (“I need your help”)

Bringing your whole self to work is a relatively new concept. It presupposes that employees want to find purpose and higher meaning through their jobs. During the industrial revolution, no one looked for engagement with their work. They worked to buy food, clothing and shelter. They looked for purpose and higher meaning at church, in nature, or through art. Even today, some employees will never see their jobs as a source of fulfillment. If employees spend their energy trying to fit in to the culture, then they don’t have a lot left to be innovative, engaged, and productive.

Why You Don’t

Maybe, like Jane, you brought your whole self to work in the past and got judged or were less than your coworkers expected
The culture of your workplace is not conducive to sharing, keeping conversations at surface level
You fear revealing certain parts of your personality will make you appear unprofessional (e.g., you remain silent in a meeting after your feelings were hurt)
You are ashamed of something in your background
You feel pressured to always be right because your work culture does not support learning from failure

Why You Should

The more willing you are to be authentically vulnerable, the more positive an impact you have on both your work and your team. Bringing your whole self to work:

Breaks down silos
Accelerates trust
Creates a culture where honesty is valued
Removes the stress of hiding flaws
Allows genuine connection (critical to successful networking)
Enhances productivity and performance
Boosts creative problem solving
Helps managers resolve conflict in a constructive way

Someone who recognizes when to risk being vulnerable also recognizes a smart business risk when they see it.

How You Can

Start the authenticity ball rolling by:

Both recognizing and appreciating coworkers. There is a difference. Recognizing is feedback on performance. E.g.,“You gave an excellent presentation today.” Appreciating is expressing gratitude for valuable human qualities (e.g., humility, kindness, humor) regardless of whether the deliverable succeeded or failed. E.g., “It’s obvious you care deeply about serving our customers.” Recognizing and appreciating them helps coworkers feel seen. This leads to deepening trust and improving job performance
Having a growth mindset. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn, and we learn more when we do it together
Leading through both modeling and celebrating behaviors like: speaking up, taking smart risks, and owning mistakes. This enables your workforce to feel psychologically safe which leads to creativity which leads to productivity which leads to revenue

How comfortable are you bringing your whole self to work? Please share in the comments.

Balance vs Integration

Photo by EKATERINA BOLOVTSOVA from Pexels

I mentioned last week my mom is retired. If you’re envisioning a little old lady sitting in a rocking chair and knitting, you haven’t met my mom. If she’s sitting in a rocking chair, It’s more likely she’s on her laptop in her home office, videoconferencing with a mentee in Turkey rather than knitting. Instead of trying to balance work and life, Mom has integrated them. She’s incorporated elements she loves (The Bible, studying) into her daily routine (counseling, mentoring).

If you have a job that can’t be done remotely, (e.g. factory, hospital) you have a better shot at work life balance because you leave your work at the place you perform it. But those jobs tend to have hours that don’t coincide with the school day. Balance then becomes: Are you going to your eight-year-old’s piano recital on Saturday or are you working your normal shift as a hair stylist? If you have more of a sales role (talent acquisition, productivity consultant) or knowledge worker (software developer, career coach) you have more freedom to integrate all of your responsibilities. For example, instead of working eight hours straight, work-life integration could look like this: you do deep work at 5:00AM while everyone is asleep. You break at 7:00AM for breakfast with the family. You work while the kids are in school. You answer emails after everyone goes to bed. Integration blurs the lines between home and work. Life becomes more fluid and less categorized. For example, developing a marketing proposal for a client and developing a vacation proposal for the family are both duties you may have, and you get paid to do one of them.

When I think of balance, I visualize the Scales of Justice and constantly trying to keep both sides even. But you don’t have work on one side of the scale and everything else on the other. Life is more like a large Marion’s Super Cheese Pizza whose squares are unevenly cut. Some are huge and some are tiny. Your squares include work, family, friends, health, personal development, spirituality, volunteering, leisure, etc. Some days, those bigger squares are going to be children (e.g., you have to attend parent-teacher conferences). Some days those big squares are going to be work (e.g., attending the all-company videoconference). After you eat a couple of big squares, you fill up on smaller ones: checking email while awaiting your turn at the parent-teacher conferences, light weight lifting while attending the all-company videoconference. (I recommend both video and microphone muted for this one.) Only you can decide which squares and how many to eat everyday. Make decisions based on your values, goals, and priorities. When you feel overwhelmed, write down where your T.E.A.M. is going (i.e., how many squares you’re eating). If you discover you’re spending your T.E.A.M. out of sync with your values, goals, and priorities, consider reassigning the squares. Maybe today the biggest square is the slide deck that’s due at noon and the smaller square is the social media post you told your church you’d do for them this week. You can even share your pizza, giving a square (like the social media post) to someone else.

Switching your mindset to integration can help you achieve the balance you want. How have you changed your routine to bring more harmony to your life? Please share in the comments.