Tag: life_design

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Reclaim Your Calendar

Time is more valuable than money. You can always make more money. You can never make more time.

Jim Rohn

If a year of working and schooling from home for a year did anything for the world, it focused, even more precisely, the need for us to balance our work and home lives.

An absolutely excellent tool that I have used to help me with this balance is the Reclaim.ai tool.

I wish I recall how I came across this tool, but I absolutely do remember the pain I was going through that got me looking for it

I was failing at managing all my calendars

Solopreneurship and Time Management

Two years ago, I was squarely in the solopreneurship category (aka freelancer). While ConnectedWell has grown quickly since then, each client I brought on board created a set of problems I had not yet solved for. Each client brought an email address, slack channels (or, heaven forbid, teams chat) and calendars to manage.

  • Slack was easy to add in to my slack app. Done.
  • I solved the email issue with the grace of a ballerina with Missive app.
  • Calendaring was killing me

I found myself relentlessly trying to block out meetings and keep things from getting double booked

And it wasn’t working.

Reclaim Blocks Your Calendars For You

And a lot of other smart things as well.

Basically, it can smartly two-way synchronize between your calendars, allowing you to either have a copy of your personal calendar events on your work calendar, or creating “busy blocks” of time so that when a dance recital or spelling bee shows up on your personal calendar, your work calendar gets a “BUSY” calendar item automatically placed there so the time is preserved!

Hack: Multiple Client Calendars

To solve my multiple client calendars issue, I do use Reclaim to share/sync my work and personal calendar.

But then I also setup a reclaim instance with my new client’s calendar syncing to my work calendar as if it were my personal calendar.

I don’t copy events over, just “busy” blocks of time.

The result is that if any event is booked against any of my calendars, within 3-5 minutes, there’s a smart busy block on each of my other calendars, to ensure Client A doesn’t schedule a meeting during an interview for Client B. And vice versa.

Where Did The Time Go?

No worries, Reclaim has your back here, too. I get these reports on Fridays helping me get a little insight into the time sucks that I didn’t see coming. For example, TWENTY hours of meetings? Ugh. No wonder last week felt like a bit of a slog. 😉

Reclaim sends me productivity reports each Friday. I need to cut down on my big meetings!

Final Thoughts

I’m not affiliated with Reclaim. Their tool is currently free. If they ever charge for it, I will be first in line to pay, though. They have saved my life. If time is money, then I need a reclaim tattoo right on my wallet. They have saved me so much stress in managing my personal and work calendars as well as multiple client calendars as I have juggled my growing client base and company.

Tell me what you think!

Categories
Blog Life Relationship

Five Mental Health Behaviors That Have Changed My Life

Photo by Robert Merrill on Unsplash

Five years ago, I thought I had everything figured out. I didn’t appreciate then the good advice of a mentor who would often say, “Use this time of life to prepare for the next.”

That next part of life came and, I was not prepared for it. 

Here are five mental health behaviors I have added to my daily routine that I am glad I have added.  What’s more, if I were to meet my 2015 self and tell them I was doing these things, I think he would laugh at me.

The five behaviors I have added are:

  • Mindfulness and meditation
  • Meeting with a therapist and practicing IFS 
  • Journaling intentionally every day
  • Purposeful walks and excursions just for mental clarity
  • Monthly retreat to refocus and renew

Mindfulness and Meditation

Practicing mindfulness has been the mossy-dramatic shift for me in the way that I think about life and how to flow through my days.  I use the Headspace app and try to spend 20-30 minutes a day getting a little break from the clouds and craziness of my life with the headspace app.  

Sometimes, I use it when I drive home (there’s a driving headspace). Other times, I use their sleep sessions to fall asleep (the desert fire one is my favorite) and other times, I use it to open and link my mind and heart before (or after) an important call or presentation.

Being able to allow the “conveyor belt” of my mind to present things to me without freaking out when something rumbles along that I don’t particularly like has been quite helpful.  I can choose to let it just keep going, if I want, or I can question it or consider for myself what that thing is trying to do for me, if anything.  

Either way, mindfulness as a focus has been monumental for me so far this year. 

Meeting a Therapist and Practicing IFS 

Somehow, there’s still a bit of a stigma around therapy, but I have found this a tremendous boost for me. In my relationships with others, I have discovered that the way I see others is often a reflection of the way I am seeing myself.

The Internal Family Systems model (IFS) of therapy is a working model that helps me put together the different “parts” of myself into a cohesive and helpful working group inside my own mind that I can visualize as a set of helpers who are trying to assist me through my days.  Some of them help me connect with and feel empathy for anyone from the teller at the bank to the most important people in my life.  Some of them freak out when I sense danger and do their best (albeit sometimes poorly) to help protect me. 

All in all, this mental model has helped me greatly make sense of my past, deal with unresolved issues I have left undone for myself as well as helped me grow in ways I never thought I could. 

IFS or therapy might not be right for you.  If you’re not sure, consider all this like hiring a life coach. Yeah, that’s cool, right?

Journaling Intentionally, Everyday

I used to journal.

I used to try and write in my online apps like Bear and Evernote.

But then I realized that the only way for me to actually recall things is to journal, intentionally, with a pen and paper.

This may not be the same for you, but I am guessing if you didn’t use a keyboard every day of your life, pen and paper still helps you retain something that keyboard typing simply does not. 

I fought this for years, but now I embrace it.  

I wrote about how taking notes is a secret weapon in my meetings and work, but it’s also how I retain more information and insight, and allows me to capture information and feelings (somehow) that I would not have had later on, if I just tried to recall data like a mental google search result. 

The format or function of the journal has become a bit of a thing for me through this, preferring the moleskine style notebook, though I have been buying the Leuchtturm 1917 A5 bullet journal style (with page numbers!) now for more than a year.  (I link to this in my note taking article, above, should you be interested) – just ctrl-F for “journal” and you should see it)

Having a journal for “work” and another for personal (including spiritual, and mental health) insights has become my preference. 

Purposeful walks and excursions just for mental clarity

I try to walk in mornings where I don’t do another workout.  

I try to walk in the afternoon between 2-3pm.

I am not perfect at these things, but perfection is not as important as intentionality and doing a little more today than yesterday. 

Sometimes, this same walk has been some of the most connecting time I have had with my partner. In fact, she showed me the route. A part of me is with her each time I walk it. 

If you live near me, you have likely seen me.  My route is boring. A two-mile loop from my house (or my trailer-office) around the greater neighborhood and back again. 

I’m the guy talking to himself or repeating something over and over again.  

Sometimes, I put in earbuds. I have been listening to the Binaural Beats Focus podcast on Spotify to with the volume low to help calm and focus my mind.  

By the time I am home again (about 50 minutes) I am refreshed and ready for more — OR — I have solved for and mentally completed my “work” and now can put that aside (or “hang it on my mind tree” as my therapist says) and actually be done with it. 

Monthly retreat to refocus and renew

I need more work on this, but late in 2019 I realized I needed to be about and off doing other things rather than endlessly repeating my weeks and weekends here at home. 

I work in an RV.  

Which is ironic because for two years I think it sat here at the house, getting used as an RV only a few times. 

Since I realized this need, I have a goal to go once a month and do SOMETHING else.  Ideally, for me, it includes hiking, being in nature, experiencing something I have not seen before, practicing a craft or being creative in ways I enjoy like http://instagram.com/r._.pix or writing. 

I got this idea from a colleague at Workday, who led a “class” on creativity once.  They noted how the human mind cannot allow itself to be creative while it is focused too much on a task at hand—something with an end result or a product.

This is one reason you have brilliant ideas in the shower. The mind is unfocused and not trying to solve for everything. 

Once a month, can you disconnect? Perhaps this looks like a morning where you purposefully do not “SLAY ALL DAY!!!!” But you intentionally cancel your meetings, go for a slow walk somewhere beautiful, paint what you feel, feel what you see, meet a friend, talk to yourself about the things you appreciate, listen to others when they tell you the things they appreciate about you. Wear pajamas all day. Try something you can purposefully NOT accomplish. Do something that is not your normal — if you are a computer person, build Something with your hands.  If you are a project person, do something that has no real outcome possible.

This is one reason why I think hiking is so, so, so good for me. Something happens differently in the body and in the mind after two or three miles of a good hike, somewhere on the earth, where you can feel with and be with all the motions and emotions of the world around you.

And exist there.

Without needing a reason or an agenda.

And without expectation for the world to be anything for you than it just simply is.

And breathe that in.

Categories
Blog Life

Make the ‘Good-er’ Choice

I dont know what challenges you will face today, or what decisions you will have to make, and I’m not going to tell you if your choice is right or wrong.

I can encourage you to keep choosing the good.

But, if that brings some kind of remorse or shame or pressure to make sure you’re making the right choices, then let me break it down for you a little better:

Just choose the good-er one.

As you pick between

  • Two potential new jobs
  • A job versus caring for a member of your family
  • Or for caring yourself (for a change)
  • Saying no to the busy work you always get left with
  • Or to stop pretending you’ll make time for that relationship when things settle down (spoiler: they won’t)
  • And every other choice you make in a day

Choose the one that feels even 1% good-er than the other one, and you will be alright in the end.

Because that 1% more of the good things you choose builds and builds over your life, leaving you the result of a good, rich life, over time.

Side note: Turns out that good-er is usually not the one with the most money involved, at least at the outset.

  • That relationship you finally made space for
  • That mental peace and emotional resilience you developed through meditation, exercise, and/or working through past trauma
  • That ability you finally developed to say No to things that made you look one way but feel another

All these good choices have a compounding effect.

A goodness about you that will pay its own dividends in peace, good work, centeredness, full love, and better alignment of your reality and your expectations.

And, instead of searching for riches, you will find richness—in your heart, your life, faith and work.

That, my friend, is a good, good life.

Categories
Blog Life

Waste Hours —> Save Years


I’m writing this near a hideaway campground I found near Capitol Reef National Park. I took a few days off this last week, not just physically but mentally as well — something I haven’t done in six months and something I think I have never actually done well.

So, I am nostalgic. Bear with me.

Someone I highly respect said once that as you get older you start experiencing what he calls “long days and short years.”

I am starting to understand some of that.

I wonder if this same sentiment is echoed in Robert Frosts’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening where he laments how many miles to go he has before he sleeps, and in Five for Fighting’s “100 Years” (YouTube) remarking how he is chasing the years of his life and speaking back to his fifteen-year old self telling him he’s got plenty of time ahead.

I saw this sentiment come up again in a different way recently when @ShaneAParrish quipped “We waste years because we cannot waste hours.” *

And I am reading Four Hour Workweek for the first time (yes, late bloomer, I know) and considering his admonition that we should take Fridays off, even if we “work” but focus on self-work or learning new things, and that compressing our work is better for us than relentlessly trying to hustle for more, more, more and more.

So, as I pack up to take my remote trailer office home today, I am pondering the value of just unplugging and letting things that I have built on over weeks and months and years “fend for themselves” for a few days.

And nothing blew up — that I know of.

And I am fresher and more excited about the good things I need/get to do.

And I am also more keenly aware of the endless loops I get myself into where there is a lot of hustle but no production — a lot of noise but little signal.

And a resolve to do better about breaking that cycle. Now.

Partly by forcing myself to waste some hours in the week. On purpose. So I can ALIGN myself better with what I want to DO, which I am decoupling from (and still appreciating the overlap in) what I do for money.

What are you doing to not waste your years?

— — —

By Robert Merrill, written near Capitol Reef National Park, Utah, USA

*The debate in the comments to this tweet point to the idea this sentiment was previously noted by the late Amos Tvsersky, whose Nobel-prize winning work I love, though I admit I like Shane’s packaging better.

Categories
Blog Communication Life Relationship

Be Interested, Not Interesting

Here on the corner of my computer screen, I have a little piece of a sticky note with the following on it:

Interested > Interesting

Meaning, being interested is better than being interesting. And, if you’re in the people business, or have any personal relationships that are important to you, this is good advice.

It comes from Mark Goulston, Author of Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone.

This is a great book and, for me, has been instrumental in me trying to really deepen some personal relationships as well as going farther to develop connection with the people I work with, both as candidates, hiring managers and as just other great humans I want to know better.

The whole book is interesting. Mark, who trains hostage negotiators, opens the book with a pretty intense confrontation between a man threatening to commit suicide in a mall parking lot. You see two kinds of negotiations take place. The “Hey, you’re in big trouble so put the gun down” kind that we see on TV and a much different approach that diffuses the situation and brings a peaceful resolution — listening.

One challenge I admit that I have in listening better is, well, asking questions. It sounds funny, but I sometimes get stuck just knowing what I should be asking someone!

So, from my notebook to yours, here are some fantastic tips you should hold on to. Let me know how it goes? I am definitely curious! ?

Great Questions You Can Ask Anyone To Show You Are Interested

As quoted from the book Just Listen by Mark Goulston. See the snippet here on Kindle.

Professional:

  • “How’d you get into what you do?”
  • “What do you like best about it?” 
  • “What are you trying to accomplish that’s important to you in your career (business, life, etc.)?” 
  • “Why is that important to you?” 
  • “If you were to accomplish that, what would it mean to you and what would it enable you to do?”

Personal:

In personal relationships—for instance, at a party or on a first date—questions like these can often trigger a heartfelt response: 

  • “What’s the best (or worst) part of (coaching your kid’s soccer team, being away from home, etc.)?” 
  • “What person has had the biggest influence on your life?” 
  • “Is that the person you’re most grateful to? If not, who is?” 
  • “Did you ever get a chance to thank that individual?” (If the person asks, “Why are you asking these questions?,” you can say: “I find giving people the chance to talk about who they’re grateful to brings out the best in them.”) 

FTD Delivery

Mark goes on to talk about how he tries to get people to respond to questions that include how they feel, what they think and what they did or would do. He mentions in passing that you can use the initials of those phrases, FTD, and the name of the popular fast florist delivery company of the same initials as a way to remember the formula.

“I know that when people ask me questions that generate all three of these answers, I feel known by them in ways that I usually don’t if we’re talking exclusively about what we feel or what we think or what we did or would do.,“ Mark continues.

He finishes with these sage words that I am trying to take to heart day by day.

Much of who we are is composed of what we feel, think, and do, so when we’re in conversations where we get to express all three, we feel more satisfied. Eventually, one of your questions will click and you’ll see the person lean forward eagerly to tell you something with enthusiasm or intensity. When that happens, do the right thing: Shut up. Listen. Listen some more. And then, once the person reaches a stopping point, ask another question that proves that you heard (and care about) what the person said.”

Try this tip out and let me know how it goes!

Read The Book:

Editor’s Note: The links to Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone by Mark Goulston in this article reference Amazon.com with an affiliate code. Using this link helps to support our services. However, if you’d prefer to go directly to the book page on Amazon, this link is affiliate free !

Photo Credit: Priscilla du Preez on Unsplash

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Categories
Blog Economics Jobseekers

Let the Adventure Begin

image_11798ab3-6a86-48e3-bcbf-064a13b092e3

I have a mug that says this on the side in cute, right-aligned, lower case serif letters:

let the
adventure
begin

The alignment, the blatant disregard for conventional spacing, capital letters and punctuation give it a playfulness I love and I find makes my heart smile a little each time I read it.

Does ‘work’ feel adventurous to you?

In a small way, isn’t this what work could feel like, too? I can hear the voices of droning mall-store bosses lecturing well-rehearsed ted-talks on the merits of hard work and thats-whats-wrong-with-your-generation speeches, but aside from all of those sounds, let’s just ponder for a moment.

What if work actually did feel adventurous?

I think, if you look around at the people you admire in your field*, the ones who make it look effortless, I think you will find one thing they have in common is, almost a sense of wonder that they get to do what they do and, perhaps, a sense of awe as if the things that seem to just “go right” for them, they never would have expected.

*Side note: If you don’t see anyone in your field you admire, that might be your sign ?

Now Is the Best Time to Have an Adventure

The world is freaking out right now, and, well, they should be. There are some seismic shifts happening in the world today.

But you don’t have to freak out and wring your hands

Let me show you why:

As I write this, the world is trying to re-awaken economically from the COVID—19 pandemic. We still don’t know what will happen and, in the United States, with official unemployment numbers topping 14% (as of May 8, 2020), people estimating the real number is much higher and could climb as high as 25% before this is said and done, there is a lot to be mindful about. The first part of that is it means we are undergoing a once-a-century forced reset of how our economy works at all.

During this unprecedented time when, in the US, many people are earning more on unemployment than they were at work, what this strange, strange time in history may become is the perfect seed ground for whatever it is that you want to do next.

Many of the great companies of our time have come about during times of economic downturns. Facebook, Microsoft, Disney, Trader Joe’s… its a long list. And, look, you don’t have to be the next Warren Buffett to see an opportunity to work on something you feel passionate about and, since some of the people you trust to work with you are also out of work, why not!?

Passion Doesn’t Mean Travel OR Entrepreneurship. It Means Being On Purpose

Don’t get me wrong, there’s something deceptively alluring to packing your bags and moving to Taiwan for a year and hoping everything works out financially, but you don’t have to start a company or go traveling the world to match your work with your passions.

If you can choose, purposefully, the things you will do and will not do in your life from this day forward, you will have a singular advantage over every other person working for a buck in the world who does whatever they’re told, won’t say no, then complains to everyone about how their life feels soul-sucking and useless.

Your advantage? You will be doing things on purpose.

But—that doesn’t mean glamorous, either.

But it does mean actively choosing.

I know plenty of people who purposefully do very difficult things today so they don’t have to do those things forever.

I also know several who gladly give up certain perks and benefits of a cushy white collar lifestyle so they can have other things more important to them, like family time or being able to volunteer when and where they want.

So… What Do You Love?

For me, this question surfaced recently in a raw and powerful way. I made the choice in 2005 to fully dive into recruiting as a way of life and I have not looked back.

Now, 15 years and recruiting for fantastic companies and meeting thousands of incredible humans later, I find myself asking what is next? The next job req? The next placement? Those things still bring passion and fire in my belly, but I find myself scratching at something more… something just beyond that which I still have not quite uncovered but it has me, and this is critical—

It has me CURIOUS.

  • I realized a year ago that I want to be truly helpful to the world and one way I can do that is to help 1 Million People get Better Jobs in 5 Years. I am 9 months in and have not scratched that, it seems. But each Resume Review I do and each webinar or newsletter I send out seems to do a little more, and I expect the results to be compounding.
  • I realized that I have mastered a series of recruiting behaviors in my career that can both help anyone become a master recruiter and can help any recruiting team do their best at keeping hiring more human, solving the problems of bias in their workplaces, being more inclusive, and welcoming.
  • Finally, I realized that my true passions lie around recruitment automation and helping companies minimize the processes that computers can do and instead maximize the things humans are best at doing.

All of these things do not take me away from recruiting, and I will never stop having candidate conversations as often as I can to fill those interesting roles, but I do think I can have even more excitement in my work as I follow these paths to more adventurous outcomes than simply keyword searching for candidates and repetitively busting out linkedin messages will get me.

These are the things I love… now your turn

Perhaps you need to take a walk or a hike, sit on a mountain or in a quiet room and think about the things you want and the things you love.

How can you marry those things with the things you do?
When you step back, what is it about the things you get very excited about which you can replicate? Is it process management? The chance to be creative? Closing a deal? Seeing the balance sheet work out perfectly? Consider these signals and follow them closely.

Now What?

Follow my lead and work to proactively choose to say YES to the things on your list of things you love and NO to the things you don’t.

Write down your things. Each time you feel you are forced to sacrifice one of your long-term loves because of a short-term necessity, write it don on a sheet you can recall. Go back in a month, three months or six months. Have things changed? Ask for them to change again and see what happens.

If you consciously push on these boundaries of things you’re asked to do versus things you love doing, and do this for five years straight, you will be living a MUCH DIFFERENT LIFE than you are now.

Which is good, since the world has changed, too.

Welcome 🙂

—
Written by Robert Merrill 5/18/2020 from near Salt Lake City, Utah
#blog #askrobertmerrill