Please Feed The Animals

The following is the first of two posts by Michael Bungay Stanier, senior partner at Box of Crayons and author of Do More Great Work.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been pretty much a Good Boy. Without wanting to delve too much into my psychological underbelly, it’s probably got something to do with being an eldest son and the drive to Be Responsible and Get Approval and quite possibly Save The World.

In any case, I quite like rules and (this may surprise some of you who know me) I quite like following them.

The problem is, following rules keeps you doing Good Work and I’m all about helping you do more Great Work.

So here are a couple of insights that help me (and might help you) with a need to conform.

Let’s start with Katharine Hepburn: “If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.”

And then here’s an insight from Mike Abrashoff, the former Commander of the USS Benfold and author of a book from a number of years ago, It’s Your Ship: “If a rule doesn’t make sense, break it. If a rule does make sense, break it carefully.”

So here are six ways to break some of the rules – without setting your life ablaze in the fires on anarchy and chaos.

1. Brief emails

Seth Godin pointed this out the other day – make all your emails two sentences. Or less. Here’s the philosophy explained as clear as day: http://two.sentenc.es/

Email is a transactional form of communication, an exchange of information. Discipline yourself to write less.

2. Ask for the minutes

Not minutes as in Days, Hours, Minutes – although I’m sure that metaphorically this is a good idea too – but the minutes of the meetings you’ve stopped going to.

You know as well as I do that meetings are killing you. They waste your time, chop up your day, suck the life-force from you.

Perhaps I exaggerate. But not by much.

Pick your bottom 10% (or better, 25%) of meetings, and ask them to send you the “decisions made/actions agreed” notes.

3. Embrace adequate

You can’t do everything excellently. So stop kidding yourself that you can.

And even if you could, why would you? Most things don’t need to be done excellently. They just need to be Good Enough. Adequate. Sufficient.

Anything else, and your over-engineering the solution.

Keep Excellent for your Great Work.

4. Halve something

The number of words on a slide.
The number of slides.
The length of a meeting.
The number of people in the meeting.
The number of meetings attended. (See point #2)
The time spent doing email.
The time spent in the office.
The number of “busywork” projects.

That’s a start.

5. Find out what really matters

Sometimes it can feel a little like we’re wind-up toys. Not that anyone has wind-up toys anymore, but if they did – that’s what we’d feel like. Somewhere back in time and space we started something, and then along the way the doing of it trumped the why I’m doing it.

Go back to your boss and ask her, “What are the top three things you really really care about? And what does success for each of those three things look like?” If you’re your own boss, ask yourself these things. And when you know the answers, decide what you need to do differently.

6. Ask a question

Nueorscience shows us that when you give advice, not much different happens in the electrical activity in the brain of the person you’ve just advised. But when you ask them a question that creates an A-ha! moment, you can actually see the new neural pathways being formed. How amazing and cool is that!

So get better at asking (yourself, others) questions:

What do you want?
What really matters here?
What would make the most difference?

What would be a small act of rebellion?

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Michael Bungay Stanier is the author of Do More Great Work: Stop the busywork and start the work that matters. He also created The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun, and is the Senior Partner of  Box of Crayons, a company that helps organizations do less Good Work and more Great Work. You can follow his blog at www.BoxOfCrayons.biz