Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life (19 page)

CASE STUDIES IN THE ORGANIZED LIFE

Megan: Banking on change

Megan is thirty-eight and a rising star at a Boston-area public relations firm. She has two children, ages five and eight, and a husband who works in the insurance business. Right away, there are the pressures of a household in which both parents work. Moreover, Megan recently committed to a charity run, agreeing to raise money for breast cancer, which her mom has been battling. She has to raise money and train to do a five-mile run—which at the moment she's not in shape to do.

When I first met her, Megan had just received a big job promotion, earning the title of vice president. Normally that would be good news for anyone, but she admits that she's beginning to wonder if she should have accepted it.

“Maybe I should have said thanks, but no thanks,” she said ruefully.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I don't think I can handle it. My daughter is in kindergarten; my son's in third grade. They're both really involved with after-school activities, like every kid these days. So I've got a lot to do with them. Plus, I've got my mom. And the fund-raising and the run. And of course, Bill needs me. Meanwhile, now I'm supposed to be attending more meetings, supervising more people and running bigger projects?
I don't feel like I can keep it all together. Some mornings I just don't know what to do first. Do I boot up the computer, open up the box of Cheerios or put on the running shoes?”

As she talked, Megan grew more and more agitated. She was obviously being pulled in many directions and feeling overwhelmed. She also told me she hadn't been sleeping well—or nearly enough, as she worries about what she neglected to do yesterday and what she's going to try and get accomplished the next day.

Megan needs to get organized!

Phase One: Master the First Three Rules of Order

I explained to Megan that the first thing she needed to do was find a way to tame the frenzy.

After a lot of detailed questioning about her lifestyle and habits, we came up with some strategies to help her sleep. This will help her in many ways, not the least of which is that she'll more likely be able to remain calm if she's well rested.

No caffeine past a certain hour. (Megan sometimes liked to have coffee after dinner, and this was not helping her with sleep. We suggested that she make it decaf instead!)

Once the kids were tucked in, instead of going on the computer or having her customary two glasses of wine, I suggested that she turn off her computer and cell phone at 8:30 pm, go into her room, and do ten minutes of deep breathing focusing on her heart and not her head.

Then she could put her “legs up the wall.” Anyone who has taken yoga classes knows this move. You simply lie on your back with your legs perpendicular on the wall. Do it for five minutes right before you go to bed, and it will help you get to sleep.

Megan also tinkered with her libations and refreshments. No more chocolates at night, no more coffee, and she cut down her wine from
two glasses to one. Too much wine can lead to awakening in the middle of the night.

Now she is more relaxed and sleepier when she gets to bed. And we suggest that she get in bed an hour earlier. Megan tells me that she's been getting an average of five to six hours of sleep per night. The optimum level needed by most people is seven to eight hours.

It pays to pay attention

Our first goal is to tame the frenzy, and part of the way to do that is by helping Megan enjoy quieter nights and more and better sleep. Now, we want Megan to make a conscious effort to sustain attention more fully, mindfully and for longer periods of time. I suggest that Megan try doing something that has worked well for me.

When she gets to the office, now hopefully a bit better rested and less frenzied, don't flit about like most of us do, gnatlike, from one thing to another.

We coach Megan to schedule no meetings before 10:00 am, if possible, and to focus on what she perceives as the most important task of the day (fully aware that there are some days this can't happen, when the client or her boss will demand an 8:30 am meeting or some crisis or new development will emerge). But on the days that she can control her schedule and to-do list, we want Megan to come into the office with a deliberate plan.

No meetings, no checking e-mail first thing, no being distracted by office chitchat. There's time for that later. First thing, I tell her, is to put down the other stuff and focus…really focus on the task you deem most important.

For Megan, it turned out to be learning about her new client's business and its past marketing and public relations effort. This is what people call a “situation analysis,” and as the name suggests, this
means to examine in detail and depth the organization's problems and opportunities, in terms of the way it is communicating (or not) with its key publics.

Analysis, by its very nature, demands focus, so it's the perfect opportunity for Megan to begin mobilizing attention, which I suggest that she do—again, blocking out the first sixty to ninety minutes of the morning, ignoring e-mails, letting the phone ring, keeping the gossipmongers away. I want her to just
focus
on that situation analysis—which involves reading a great deal of material and (that undervalued commodity) thinking!

Her focus time is the morning; for others it may be the end of the day or right after lunch. Exactly when the period of “focused focusing” occurs is not important. What is important is that you learn to put everything else down, turn your attention on something and keep it there.

You don't have to be rude about this either. A closed door and a few words to your administrative assistant, office mate or spouse (“I hope you don't mind, but I need to concentrate on this for a little while…”) should suffice. Remember—everyone else is dealing with the same kinds of distractions, so they know what a precious commodity focus time can be.

Hit the brakes

Now Megan has adjusted her prebedtime schedule and modified her habits just slightly. As the frenzy begins to quiet, as she wakes up more fully rested, she is more easily slipping into her morning routine of “full attention” on her new client, the rewards of which are already being reaped, as she's learning a lot about the bank and feeling more confident that she and her colleagues at the agency will be able to solve some of the communication problems facing the client.

Her third piece here is to resist impulsive behavior—to exert that inhibitory control that is at the core of our Rules of Order—apply the brakes.

This goes hand in hand with her focus time, but as she's making a conscious effort to sharpen this skill, she sees it spilling into other aspects of her life. She practiced a mindful response to interruptions, taking a breath and then saying to herself “This interruption is calling for my attention. I get to choose my response. I'm putting my own hand on my shoulder and providing wise advice. Right now the best choice is to set the first focus aside until later in the day.” Occasionally the interruption is urgent, and Megan pauses and chooses to step into another focus and returns later in the morning to resume the situation analysis by rescheduling her day. The act of creating a moment of pause to allow her internal counselor to speak makes all the difference.

She no longer feels compelled to immediately attend or respond to every e-mail. While working on her situation analysis in the morning, she will occasionally see e-mail previews pop up on her screen. In the past, that's all it took. Immediately she was off topic and on to a response to the e-mail. Now she keeps her attention on the main task.

It's the same thing with the phone, with the office gossip girl or even the friends who come by and want to ask her if she saw who got voted off
Dancing with the Stars
last night.

Megan knows how to do this politely—she's not slamming doors in people's faces—but her external demeanor is as important as her internal reaction to potential distractions. Her mind is now getting better at putting the hand on her shoulder and gently returning her to the client's work.

There will be plenty of time to respond to e-mails or chitchat with colleagues later.

Oh, and a funny thing has happened, Megan reports to me during our biweekly phone coaching session that while she's been practicing her attention and inhibitory control skills at work, she's noticed that things have changed at home, too. Megan can now focus on making dinner, having a conversation with her mother on the phone or helping her daughter with homework. A noise in the other room, a phone ringing or a dog barking does not pull her off task the way it used to. She is learning to acknowledge the other stimuli and evaluate their importance. (“Was there a crash or the sound of something shattering? No? Okay, good. Whatever fell can be picked up later!”) Instead of running pell-mell into a new crisis (whether real or imagined), she now sticks with what she was doing, therefore accomplishing more and feeling less frenzied, which in turn (and along with her lack of caffeine, reduced wine consumption and deep breathing and yoga moves) is allowing her to sleep better.

Phase Two: Now We're Cooking!
Set Shifting, Working Memory and the Organized Life

When Megan first came to see me, she didn't really seem to know how to handle all of life's demands simultaneously. She was constantly worrying about the neglected domain when attending to another domain—her job and the promotion, her kids, her marriage, managing the household, supporting her mom and allowing time for her outside activities such as the fund-raising and training for the run.

She clearly didn't want to fail in this new responsibility she'd been given at the office, but on the other hand, she didn't want to neglect time with her kids. There was a huge inner conflict.

One thing we did was to help organize her priorities by thinking strategically—and applying the two “higher order” Rules of Order which,
as you'll recall, are the ability to mold information (working memory) and cognitive flexibility (set shifting).

I'm not a therapist, I'm a coach—a specialist in change—but in order to change her behavior we did have to talk a little about what was underlying her anxieties. She realized that the key to managing her overwhelming feeling was handling her office job (as opposed to her other “jobs”: mom, spouse, homemaker, etc.). The other aspects of her life were clearly important, and they were adding to her sense of distraction and disorder, but concerns about her job performance seemed to overshadow the others.

She decided to make her organizational challenge work-focused—specifically the new client she had at work, a Boston area bank.

The feeling was if she could get on top of this project, she'd feel better about her job. And that in turn would help her feel better about (and more in control of) other domains of her life. In other words, if she wasn't coming home worrying about what she hadn't gotten done on the bank project at work—if instead she came home a little more calm and feeling as if she'd made progress—she'd be more available to the kids and to her husband and would go to bed more rested.

So the decision was made: and now, with some of the first steps successfully taken—frenzy tamed, attention sustained, distractions on the job managed—she's ready to get to the most exciting and rewarding part of personal organization.

The development of the “higher level” skills of working memory and set shifting will not only help you get better organized, but they will also make you more effective and improve the quality of whatever you're doing.

In Megan's case, figuring out how to give the local bank a better image.

The bank had problems, as almost every bank in America has during rough economic times. Surveys showed that everyone hated the bank; they hated the checking and ATM fees and the fact that they seemed to have given out loans too easily before the housing crisis—and too reluctantly afterwards. Some older customers still resented the fact that they no longer used “passbooks” for their savings account. Younger customers complained that there weren't enough ATMs or that the website wasn't fast enough for them when they wanted to do their online banking.

The bank executives had presented these issues in a meeting with Megan and her bosses—who promised the client that they would fix everything; “Just leave it to Megan,” they said. (“Great,” thought Megan. “They left it to me!”) At first—and this was about the time she decided to call me—she didn't know what to do. The problem seemed intractable. Financial institutions across America were in a crisis of historic proportions. This bank was probably lucky not to have shuttered its doors. The economy was coming back but not nearly fast enough. How could she possibly change all the negative attitudes toward her banking client in this kind of climate—and with all these factors that were well beyond the control of a public relations agency?

I certainly didn't know the answer because I'm not a public relations practitioner. However, as we just discussed, in our efforts to get Megan better organized, we did suggest the morning focus hour, where she cut out a block of time every morning in which distractions were avoided as best as possible and full attention paid to the problem at hand.

There, as she read and thought and began to analyze and fully understand the client's situation and outside trends in the industry and among consumers, a cooler and calmer Megan began to realize that she could indeed help this bank.

Assembling ideas, achieving insights

Megan now needed to build a vision for the campaign she was going to propose to the client. She needed to assemble the working memory “pieces” that would provide both the foundation and the spark of the big idea for the campaign. She jotted down ideas from her meetings with the client, ideas from some suggestions her boss had made, and, of course, she had a bunch of thoughts that had popped into her head during her quiet focus time—and even a few things that she'd thought of while on the treadmill, preparing for her five-mile run. She also held a brainstorming meeting with her staff to generate and collect more ideas that way.