By Colleen St. John
The lines between personal life and professional life can certainly be blurry in 2022. Covid has changed the way many of us work these days, with many of us working permanently remote or in some sort of hybrid situation. There are many pros to this new work-life environment including flexibility, minimal-to-no commute time, and work location freedom. However, as with many changes, these pros come as part of a double edged sword. The increased flexibility many of us appreciate about remote work has also created a work environment where we are always “on” and always staring at a screen. Even my optometrist claimed to see increasing levels of eye fatigue when I complained about my eyes at a recent appointment. She recommended I follow the ‘20-20-20’ rule: for every 20 minutes on my computer, look 20 feet away for 20 seconds. How hard can that be? Well it turns out, when you’re in back-to-back Zoom meetings all day, it’s pretty hard to carve out that time. After realizing that I struggled to simply look away from my screen throughout the day, I’ve been on a mission to find tips and tricks on how to find balance in this new work-life world.
Startups inherently lack balance but for the past few months I’ve really tried to get creative for my own sanity and for the sanity of my team. Don’t get me wrong, we have our moments when it’s ‘all hands on deck,’ but I’m doing my best to keep those moments few and far between. A few things that have helped recently:
Study your calendar - Every quarter, I run through the recurring meetings on my calendar and review the purpose and objective of each meeting and the attendee list. After reading, “Powerfully Simple Meetings” by Peter Kidd and Bryan Field, I realized we were in need of some serious meeting hygiene. As a fully remote team we were meeting a lot just to keep us all on the same page. However, we are now committed to keeping our meetings tight. We have replaced any unnecessary informational-type meetings with updates in other non-meeting formats and team meetings have an agenda and a focus. We do our best to keep the meeting to the time scheduled or wrap up early if the agenda is light.
Turn the video off when appropriate - Again, as a fully remote team we always keep our video on during video conference calls, which is all of our meetings. This has been great in building a team environment with strong rapport, especially in the early days as the team was growing but (see ‘20-20-20’ above) can be challenging when you have a meeting-heavy calendar. We continuously work on our meeting presentation best practices but for now we ask that the team keep video on for client calls and ideally for team meetings (but this is flexible). However, we’ve moved weekly 1:1’s to phone calls, or in our case Slack Huddles. If a team member needs to screen share or would like to use video that is always an option, but for now the meeting invites default to a Slack Huddle. This has been great for 1:1s because we can discuss items added to the agenda while on a walk or simply looking away from the computer.
Time batching - Another book that inspired me recently was “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World,” by Cal Newport. Newport writes about how to focus on a cognitively demanding task by removing distractions. This book made me realize that every week I was bouncing between team meetings, client meetings, 1:1s and then struggling to get strategic projects completed that really needed my focus - I needed time for ‘deep work.’ Over the past few months I've been playing around with the idea of time batching on my calendar (see below). Time batching is a concept that allows you to work on a specific task for a set amount of time to encourage focus. In an attempt to stay on track I set a recurring 7am reminder of the theme of the day as I schedule meetings. Of course, these are flexible and sometimes meetings need to move but seeing the daily theme has allowed me to set some boundaries on what I allow on my calendar on specific days for non-urgent items.
Monday: 1:1 Day & Team Reset for the week
Tuesday: Cross Functional Meetings
Wednesday: Deep Work Day (minimize meetings)
Thursday: Project Day (typically team collaborative work)
Friday: Wrap up the Week & Prep for Next Week
Throughout this exercise over the past few months I’ve also encouraged my team to take a holiday ahead of our upcoming busy season and opened the conversation to any new ideas we might be able to incorporate into our daily work. I’ve learned the hard way that burnout is real so I’m always paying close attention and fine tuning how I spend my days and of course always on the lookout for other ideas to encourage focus and balance in this busy life. Any other CS Leaders find tips that have greatly improved their mental and/or physical health lately?
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Colleen St. John - As Director of Client Services, Colleen leads the implementation, support, and customer success teams at Littera Education. Colleen is an experienced customer success and professional services leader. She relies on her extensive corporate background in customer success and project management as well as her academic Masters in education, to design effective strategies for clients to follow from initial rollout to long-term adoption and expansion. A licensed teacher, Colleen holds an MA in Education Administration from Notre Dame de Namur University and a BA in Liberal Studies from San Diego State University. Originally from California, Colleen now lives in New Jersey with her husband and three children.