“No matter how trivial the recollections seem, note them down, and try searching for a pattern in them.”
- Dr Prem Jagyasi

In periods of disruption, it can be valuable to take a step back, out of the fray and notice the patterning around you. The ability to find patterns in disruption is a skill set which can be cultivated, and also has been indicated to be a valuable skill in leading in disruption.
​
Questions to consider:

• What are the key themes and activities happening? (Consider in your context, in your workflows, or in your team.)
• If you were to zoom out to the 30,000 foot view of this (imagine you were in an airplane looking down), what would you notice?
• If you were to zoom in to the granular sand detail level, what do you see?
• What are the patterns you are noticing?

 
For more on this topic, check out Teams365 #2137 – Navigating VUCA As a Team. You can find it here.

Enjoy the focus!
​Jennifer

"If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else."
​–Lawrence J. Peter

Welcome back to an accountability check in. These are built in to provide you with an opportunity to stop, pause and reflect on what you wanted to get done, and how it’s gone.

Pull out your latest quarterly plans and take a look at what your goals were, then work through these quarterly reflection questions. You may also want to check out this 30 minute video and work alongside it with your own copy of PlanDoTrack, or the Coaching Business Builder.

Grab a pen and your planner or journal and reflect on these questions to consider: 

• What were your major achievements this quarter?
• As you consider the goals (and resolutions) you made at the start of the quarter, how are you doing with these on a scale of 1-10?
• Which goals are becoming new habits, or something you can check off?
• Which goals need to be adjusted or let go of?
• What do you notice about your metrics?
• What do you notice about your team?
• The thing that helped me be most successful this quarter has been __________
• The thing that has helped me be happiest this quarter has been __________
• What has helped me be most healthy has been __________
• What I have noticed about my work/productivity/results and/or relationships is __________
• Looking ahead to the next quarter:
• Success at the end of the quarter includes:
• I also need to think about __________

Enjoy the reflections!
Jennifer

Back in 2016 I started experimenting with the notion of sprints in terms of accelerating my work cycles. Sprints usually consist of setting a more condensive work boundary around a project, task or activity. Those working in the tech and design sector have been leveraging the power of sprints for a while.
​
Sprints are based on the idea that I could get just as much done in shorter windows of time, particularly as it related to new ideas and programming.

What it can look like:
In the short-term, sprints might involve dedicating a 60-minute window to the initial part of design of a program, rather than giving it a whole day. While we might not complete everything in one sitting, it’s likely that it will move the needle forward.

On the longer-term, some teams are moving to a process where they dedicate a week or two to a project, to build it and get feedback on it.

There are multiple benefits to sprints including:

• Compressed, focused time around an activity, usually at 100% productivity.
• Immersion – Being able to focus only on one thing for a fixed period of time to design, and pilot, the activity.
• The ability to dedicate all resources to that activity.
• Getting the important things DONE and usually at a stage where they will become embedded, rather than when projects get started but aren’t really far enough along to stand on their own

​Questions to consider:

• What are the areas you want to be involved in creating or designing?
• What’s important to take action on, and get traction around, this quarter?
• What could you do to leverage the power of a sprint?

Let us know about your experience with sprints!

Enjoy,
Jennifer

​Jennifer Britton - Potentials Realized
Author of PlanDoTrack (2019), Coaching Business Builder (2018), Effective Virtual Conversations (2017) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013). Pick up a copy of any of her books at Amazon.

Book Jennifer for a coaching session to explore productivity, teamwork and business issues.
​Contact her by phone at (416)996-8326

Check out these Instagram accounts @coachingbizbuilder & @remotepathways!
Check out upcoming programs on our calendar!

Are you a remote professional? Listen into the Remote Pathways Podcast on your favorite podcast player!

This week’s Weekly Planning Hack is all about undertaking ongoing learning. The world is not stopping for anyone. Each one of us, regardless of how well educated or credentialed we are (and I say this as someone who has multiple degrees and credentials), can benefit from ongoing learning. Whether it’s picking up a new skill set or getting skills into practice, ongoing learning helps with productivity, AS LONG AS it’s not just learning for learning’s sake but “learning for application sake”.
​
I hope that this week you’ll take a few minutes (15 minutes tops!) to think about these questions:

• What learning have you been undertaking?
• How is that ongoing learning helping you?
• As you look ahead at your work, what new learning do you want to undertake?
• How can you learn (think courses, mentors, online learning etc.)?

What else is important to note about learning?

All the best,
​Jennifer

This week’s Weekly Planning Hack gets you thinking about batching your tasks. Perhaps you are a business owner. If writing is a key activity for you, could you earmark one day a week to tackle your writing tasks, or if getting organized is key in the financial area, could you block off a chunk of time (i.e. 90 minutes or more) on one day to tackle to receipts? You might also earmark part of a day (or an entire day) to meetings and calls, and one to work. Consider this and what impact that would have in terms of your levels of satisfaction and FOCUS.
​
When we have to switch tasks that use different parts of our brain – for example, moving from writing which may require synthesis and creativity, to mathematics – numbers and details – there is a certain energy, called “cognitive load” when we switch between tasks. When our brains are taxed or in overwhelm, this cognitive load of switching can be more significant.

This week consider:

• What are the key tasks you want to get done more easily and effortlessly?
• What tasks can you batch to certain days?
• What focus would this create?
• What needs to get deferred?
• What else is important to note?

Enjoy the exploration!
Jennifer

​This week’s Weekly Planning Hack gets you to think about reframing. Reframing issues may mean that you step into a new perspective around it, look at it through a different lens, or take a different time frame around it.

Let’s look at a couple of examples. If you are a business owner, remote worker or leader it’s likely that you have a number of different issues which are creating some challenge and/or tension for the team. With one of these challenges in mind, consider these questions to help reframe the situation:

• The challenge is ______
• Another way to look at this might be:
• An alternative solution to what we are doing right now is _________________
• The flip side is ____________________
• If I were to have more resources around this issue, I would add _______________. It would help to ______________
• If I were to take a long-term view around this challenge, I would notice ___________________
• The opposite approach to what we are doing is _____________________. If I/we took this it would help to _____________________
• The 30,000-foot view around this issue is _________________________
• If I were to look at it from the top of a hill or mountain, I would notice:
• Alternative perspectives we could take around this issue area_____________
• Alternative steps we could take around this issue are _____________________

There are some excellent facilitation tools which can help us with reframing including DeBono’s Six Thinking Hats. Read more about this from the DeBono Group here.
​
What other questions can help you to reframe your current challenge?

What new insights have you gleaned from working through these questions?

All the best,
​Jennifer

​As I went to write Effective Virtual Conversations back in 2016-2017, I was curious about how much time people were spending in meetings. If anything, the pace of meetings has not decreased in recent years but increased. From face to face meetings, to ones where some are in a room and others are virtual, meetings can take up the majority of people’s time if we let them. What are you doing to ensure you are maximizing your meeting time?

Next week I’ll be bringing in 8 Essential Meeting Questions you want to be asking at any meeting (so stay tuned). In this weeks’ post I thought it would be useful to curate a list of ideas for you to consider as you go to strengthen your meeting processes:

#1 – Is a meeting what’s really necessary? – We often think we need to meet for meetings sake. Is a meeting really necessary or can it be covered off in another way?

# 2 – What is the purpose of the meeting? - Is it to provide information? Invite discussion? Make a decision? Brainstorm? Coordinate across the team? Support learning?
​
These are all very different reasons to hold meetings. Consider what is the purpose of the meeting, and then WHAT the best platform is, and WHO should be at the table? Does it even need to be a face to face meeting or can it be completed some other way? (i.e. a learning event may be offsite or on WebEx/Zoom or other)

#3 – What is the outcome we are looking for? Without a clear direction, meetings can derail quickly. Has the outcome been circulated before hand so people can prepare with whatever is needed? As well, are they able to build in time based on the outcome?

#4 -What involvement are we asking for? Helping frame expectations is another key part of the process. What is the involvement we are asking for?

Enjoy!
Jennifer

Welcome back to the 30th weekly planning hack. This week’s WPH is about engaging in ongoing learning. Today we have many options to engage in ongoing learning – from books, and podcasts to MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses) to industry recommended programs.

What is the ongoing learning that’s going to help you get where you want to go?
​
Consider these questions:

• What are the skills you wish you had in your toolbox, so you could do things quicker or faster?
• What are the practice opportunities you wish you had to translate things you know into action? When can you schedule those in?
• What are the things your mentor would indicate are important to you?

I hope that you will spend a few minutes this week exploring options which exist for you to learn more about these areas.

Enjoy your learning!
​Jennifer 

Scattered throughout some of the 28 different planning tools of PlanDoTrack and the Coaching Business builder is the question “what will wild success look like?”. I love asking this question to people I am coaching as it gets us to think about WHAT IS POSSIBLE, often without a lot of censure.
​
There are several ways to reword this question:

• What’s possible?
• If you were to wave a magic wand, what would be the end result?
• If there were no limits, what would you do?

​The benefit of these questions is that it:

• Helps us look larger and bigger
• It may shift some of the limiting beliefs and inner critical voices we face around that goal and the related change we need to take in order to make it happen
• Helps us stretch
• Supports more ideas and possibilities

As you go about your planning for the next month or quarter, what can wild success look like for you around your most important goals?

Best wishes,
Jennifer 

​In today’s Digitally Disrupted world, the skill set of discernment and focus are taking precedence. The ability to find “micro-pauses” where you can stop, assess and make decisions plays a critical role in productivity, teams and leadership.
​
Here’s what I wrote bout the skill of discernment earlier this year here at the PlanDoTrack Blog in February:

​“Leveraging our time is as much about getting organized, as it is getting clear on what’s important. Against the backdrop of complexity, ongoing change and disruption, getting ruthless with our time management can be so important to many. As a business owner, or remote worker, this is especially true. We can’t get out time back. So, when we go down a rabbit hole (whether it’s doing too much research online, following a shiny red object or thinking we just need to learn “one more thing”), the costs can be tremendous. Not just in NOT getting things done, but in terms of our focus, our motivation and also our profit line!

Discernment is about getting clear on what’s important and what’s not. It is about being clear of what’s going to provide impact now, later or never.
​
As a remote worker or virtual business owner, we are quite control of our time. Our colleagues and/or superiors may be hundreds of miles away, or several time zones ahead. As remote workers, it’s not always about how we manage our time, but how we get our results. Those who feel the crunch in getting something over the finish line is usually only us (and those loved ones around us!).

With this in mind, what is the cost of not being discerning around where your time goes, or how clear your projects are, or what is a more important priority than another?
​
As we embark on new projects, or start a new week, it can be useful to be asking (ourselves, and our stakeholders):

• What’s most important today?
• What are the top 3-5 things I want to get completed?
• What are the MUST Dos?
• What will success look like with this project/task?
• As it relates to this project/task, what’s important?
• Have I considered the short-term, medium-term and long-term in making decisions?
• What would my colleague/boss/peer/customer say is most important to focus on today?
• What impact will this activity have? And that one?

 
What questions do you want to consider asking as you decide one priority to another?”

How can discernment help you in your work and focus right now?

Let us know!
​Jennifer