83: Seven Ways to Stop and Think
Coaching for Leaders
Dave Stachowiak
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2013
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
7 Ways To Stop and Think
Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, posted an article this past week titled The Importance of Scheduling Nothing. Here are seven ways that you can also stop and think:
1) Stop telling yourself the lie that next week/month/year will be better
2) Book time to think each day, especially if you are a scheduler
- Dedicate time each day to think
- If you really want to discover what’s important to you, check your calendar and your bank account
- Check out this advice from Ursula Barnes, the CEO of Xerox
3) Brainstorm with yourself before brainstorming with others
- Check out the interview with Leigh Thompson on the most recent HBR Ideacast highlighting the truth about creative teams
4) Turn things off
- Turn off the phone and email
- Here’s a recent New York Times article citing research on the importance of freeing our brains
5) Write stuff down
- Check out David Allen’s book Getting Things Done
- Michael Hyatt produced a podcast on the Lost Art of Note-Taking on episode #47 of his show, This Is Your Life
- I use the Moleskine notebook for Evernote for all my note-taking…but it’s more important you have and use a system, than what the system is
6) Put things into “later” buckets
- I do this most actively for physical mail, bills, and online articles
- I use Pocket to save things to read later
- I use Buffer to queue posts to my social networks
7) Start saying no to more
- Start with something small
- Are you getting at least as much as your are giving? (financial, enjoyment, love, contribution to the world)
- I’ve left some professional organizations where the above wasn’t the case
Bonus) Eliminate choices that may seem sacred
- Get rid of TV?
- Do you need to always be tied into the internet?
This week, I’m taking 15 minutes every day to stop and think…please join me. Connect online to discuss your results!
Thank you to Carmel Purdey, Mad Oo, MIchael Oneski, and Emad Aladawee for either liking our page on Facebook, following me on Google+, or following me on Twitter.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When was the last time you stopped for a bit to think? |
| 0:04.0 | No, seriously, when was the last time you really |
| 0:08.0 | took time just to stop and think about something? |
| 0:17.0 | If you haven't recently you might want to try it. In this episode How to Do It. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode number 83. |
| 0:23.2 | Produced by Innovate Learning, |
| 0:25.6 | Maximizing Human Potential. |
| 0:28.7 | Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your |
| 0:37.4 | host Dave Stahovia. This is a weekly show to help smart people improve their communication and leadership skills, |
| 0:46.0 | but also to stop and think. |
| 0:50.0 | And there is a bias in our organizational world and in our personal lives too that we need to be doing something all the time. |
| 0:59.0 | And in fact this topic has come up on several recent episodes with guests about there is this bias certainly in the American business climate and I believe many other places of the world too that if you're not doing something actively you're not adding value to the organization. |
| 1:15.6 | And certainly stopping and thinking about something would not be considered actively |
| 1:21.2 | working in many places and many organizations. |
| 1:25.0 | But it is such an important thing for all of us to practice as leaders. |
| 1:31.0 | So this week, I'm looking at seven ways to stop and think and I just saw |
| 1:38.6 | this week an article from the CEO of LinkedIn. I'm going to have a link to it here in the show notes and the title is this space is this space intentionally left blank and I'm blanking on his name at the moment but I will put that in the show notes and he talks about how as he's |
| 1:54.8 | become gotten into increasing levels of responsibility and as their company has grown |
| 1:59.4 | how he has had to be really intentional about blocking time in order to think, in order to just consider |
| 2:10.7 | what the next steps are going to be and take time thinking about strategy and |
| 2:14.2 | really the reality is all of us need to be able to block that time so that we |
| 2:21.2 | can think and consider where we're going to go next, think about our strategy, |
| 2:26.8 | but also to give ourselves a little bit of margin. And I love the phrase that margin is the space between our load and our limit. |
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