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Saturday, December 31, 2016

My One Word for 2017 - Discipline - and my starting point (aka the Size of the Task)

This post explains how I stumbled over One Word earlier this month and then how I decided to select a word for 2017 and then how I started my first steps in adopting that word in my life as 2016 closes and 2017 starts.
Background
Isabel de Clercq recently posted “A bad website has the same effect as nose-picking. It kills the attraction. 10 words that shaped 2016.”. This got me thinking about words and I posted on Isabel’s FB wall as follows:-
You gave us lots of words for last year. I remembered the "One Word that Will Change Your Life" book.

What is "your" one word for 2017?

I have been thinking of doing this for the first time this year. I have not chosen one yet but it could be "discipline", "focus", "organisation" etc.

The hashtags on Twitter are #oneword and #myoneword.

.. and I was also reminded of "The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results" book that may also be useful.

What is "your" ONE thing?

The Twitter hashtag is #theONEthing.

If you have one word AND one thing hopefully they should be consistent and work together ;)

So as well as sharing this with others, I also started thinking about the new year for myself.

I have done informal stocktakes most year ends including setting some new year’s resolutions that tend to end up in abject failure in a short space of time. I do like the simplicity of having One Word for a year. I read parts of the book and the word “discipline” rapidly came to mind as a way of addressing some of the issues that I believe I need to overcome to be even more productive in each area of my life. This was based on a mental assessment of these issues but I am now writing these down to help me clarify what these are. I am aware that I am more demanding of myself than may be others are!

Issues to Address
So a few thoughts via a personal brainstorm typing as I go.

  1. Work Life
    1. The nature of my work role is such that there are multiple immediate (project and live systems support) tasks always on the go and pressing. I am easily distracted and chop and change instantly between them. Latterly this year, I have even been finding composed emails that have not been sent. I have been playing with KanbanFlow a whole ago and Trello/Pomello more recently to help me focus more but can do much better than I am doing currently.
    2. I have reduced the number of notifications I receive on the laptop and mobile but need to go further. Not having email on and checking it regularly is probably a non-starter given that support of live systems is a part of my job role.
    3. Working from home each Friday is a positive for me but there needs to be clearer split of work time from personal time as I tend to start and end work later than when I am in the office.
  2. Personal Development
    1. Using the Personal Knowledge Mastery 3-stage classification of Seek, Sense Share, I assess myself as follows:-
      1. Seek: there is nothing too wrong with the variety of my incoming streams of content. My issue is probably that my interests are too wide and there are multiple “inboxes” that contain intimidatingly large quantities of content items. This results in me often not being able to locate content that I know I have seen. I blogged about this recently in my post titled “My input content streams, content management and content sharing tools”.
      2. Sense: On the back of the proactive and reactive Seek-ing above, I don’t do much sensing unless the Seek-ing is for a specific personal immediate need. I do not spend a lot of time Sense-ing and definitely need to do more of that and go deeper with the content I have seen. Arguably, I need to do more Sense-ing than I do currently on Share-ing. In the second half of the year I played with Degreed as a way of curating content into role pathways. I need to explore this further as a way of helping me group content together for specific reasons.
      3. Share: I recently analysed, at a very high level, the tweets I had sent in 2016 in the post titled “Analysis of my 2016 Tweets”.I share content in the following ways (nearly exclusively via Twitter but latterly I am interacting with more non-social groups on Facebook):-
        1. imply sharing what I am watching, playing, listening to etc with no named recipient]
        2. sharing specific content with named recipients if I believe it will be of interest to them
        3. responding with specific content to people who have asked specific questions or where they have said something that I want to respond to.
    2. Using Isabel de Clercq’s 3 Levels of Participation in Online Knowledge Flows (see graphic), I assess myself as follows:-
      1. Consume (existing materials): I do lots of that!
      2. Contribute (to existing materials): a weakness of mine and I need to do more of this.
      3. Create (new materials): I do very little of this and have already more recently been addressing this via blog posts.I have started reading Cal Newport’s Deep Work and have been deeply challenged by the book already across Work and Personal Development dimensions of my life. I need to take specific actions away from that book and get on with it.
    3. I am hoping to start a WOL Circle shortly and may even lead/facilitate it if no one else wants to! This will be a challenge in terms of time but know it is something that I need to do to develop myself more formally. I have high hopes for what I will learn about myself and from others.
       
    4. TweetChats: These were new to me this year and already these are an important part of me marshalling my knowledge by contributing to the chat and also realising what I do not know and need to know more of. Some of the tweetchats are with tribes that I would not normally consider my natural home.
  3. Personal Organisation
    1. Despite being what other people would call “organised”, I know I can do much better.
    2. When saving non-work-related content onto a hard drive, I tend to simply save into a “Downloads” directory and not think about where it should really go for long term saving and retrieving. This is also partly an “Inbox” issue as things go there that I intend to read later.
    3. I have been trying to go paperless, scanning paper documents that do not need to be kept in paper form. This is another “Inbox” issue as these pile up until I need to “tidy up”.
  4. Physical and Digital “Possessions”
    1. I have a strong hoarding instinct. This is not quite as bad as some of the worst cases you see on TV where there is no floor space to be seen. I downsized boxes slightly when we moved house in  May 2015 but there are boxes of books etc that have not been opened since the house move which was also the case before we moved. In the recent past this was my “change challenge” that I used on the Harvard “Immunity To Change” MOOC in Q2 2014. This was the deepest MOOC I have done in terms of inward thinking and challenge. During that course, the exercises revealed lots of deep things about me (note: having just now reminded myself of that content, there is too much to add here but I may do a separate blog post on just that).
    2. This hoarding also extends to digital hoarding of content which is easier to get away with as no one else sees it directly! I note that some of the same tendencies with my physical hoarding extends to digital hoarding. I often share this BBC Radio 4 Digital Human podcast “Silt” on this subject.
    3. Ideally, the boxes all need emptying from my home office, the dross chucked and bookcases bought and setup and “populated”.
    4. Since moving house and now only playing mp3s, I have an objective to clear out all my CDs. The (smaller number of) vinyl records
  5. Calendar
    1. I am always on top of my Work Calendar but less so on activities outside of work – nothing catastrophic missed! – just a case of knowing I could be better
  6. Culture Club and All Age Worship (both at Church)
    1. These are two types of events (monthly and 6-weekly respectively) that I lead and deliver. The former is going well (involving others in the planning and delivery) but the second could be tighter in terms of planning, developing and getting more members.
  7. Exercise
    1. The only exercise I do currently is a 3-mile 55 minute walk each lunchtime when I am in the office. I know I could do more specifically on days when I am not in the office.
  8. Weight
    1. I do love my food and I know I am slightly (??) overweight.
  9. Book Club
    1. I am a member of a fiction book club that meets in real life monthly. I often fail to finish the book in time and not always because the book pulled out of the hat is dire! Some planning ahead and getting on with some actual reading would help.
  10. Planning vs Spontaneity
    1. As a type-A project manager, I prefer planning than spontaneity but I know that I need to be able to handle interruptions better, regardless of the context. 
  11. Finance
    1. My family do not have an extravagant lifestyle. The joint credit card has always been paid off in full each month because we use the card as a substitute for cash. However, I know I could budget better and track actuals not in a heavy way but just to have more of a forward look. I am also aware that having worked for a number of employers I have a number of pensions that should really be reviewed for any changes to be made as appropriate. I am not financially knowledgable and tend to defer these issues ad infinitum. I am also aware that I am not getting younger and now heading for my 55th year.
  12. Building a MOOC
    1. Those that know me well will be aware that I have started and completed a large number of MOOCs and that one of the more recent ones was “Making MOOCs on a Budget”. Following on from that course, I had a real urge to build one for myself and once I had started I realised that would be able to do this for free for anyone to do the MOOC. In the months since, this enthusiasm has waned significantly  as other things have become of more interest. I know that I need to nail this task and actually deliver. My progress to date is summarised in this graphic where red is course stage, green is 1st pass content done and yellow is 1st pass content to do. This needs to be on the list for completing at the very latest by the end of this year!


Starting with my One Word
While thinking about what word I should use for 2017, “discipline” increasingly came to the fore. “Focus” was an early candidate.
I have a huge tension between being a generalist and being a specialist.
I started as nearly always with a definition of “discipline”:-

... and some other tweets as part of this reflection period ...




… and the best summary of some of the places where I need to get to is laid down in this extract from a Jocko Willink podcast:-
This may become my main graphic to keep at it:
Discipline - Quotefancy-2000864-3840x2160

Next Steps
As can be seen from the above assessment, there is a lot to improve upon and I cannot address all these issues in one go. I intend tweeting progress in 2017 with my One Word using the hashtag #discipline.

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