Seth--Thanks for sharing. Lately, I have had very little "white space" which has had a direct impact on my energy level and at certain times my focus. While I am very aware of my current state, I believe the lack of white space over the last 6 weeks is in part due to the amount of time I am spending coaching and challenging my direct reports.  Just this past week, I saw the result of this investment, in a presentation they made to Sr Mgmt that went very well. I was very encouraged by the change in their behavior and approach.  Now,  that we have some momentum and a positive tangible result, I am hopeful that they will continue to absorb and practice the principles I have learned and shared with them.

--Marie
Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 14, 2018, at 4:21 PM, Seth Braun <seth.braun@stagen.com<mailto:seth.braun@stagen.com>> wrote:

Hey Thatcher,

I am working on several series for our new blog, here is one that likely hits home for the local folks.

Note that this hasn’t gone through our editing and revision process yet, so you are getting it first and unfiltered!

Productivity and I-30: What I Learned From Dallas Traffic

In this post, you’ll learn two essential insights necessary for sustained high performance productivity. This will require approximately 5 minutes to read.

I’ve lived in a lot of places. Detroit. New York City (Manhattan). Miami. Phoenix. Boulder. Most recently, I moved to Dallas from a rural town of 10,000 where half the folks meditate regularly. I’d whine about having 7 cars in front of me at a stoplight on my way to Hy Vee grocery store.

So, during my fist month or two in Dallas, I was nervous. There was a particularly dangerous (statistically validated) stretch of highway where the I-35 North-South axis bypassed the East-West I-30 axis. This was exacerbated by the mind-boggling changes due to construction of bridges, ramps and exchanges. Fortunately for me, I was borrowing my uncle’s conversion van (we only needed to own one car in the small town). Navigating the NASCAR-level merging in the elevated seat of the buoyant behemoth assisted my peace of mind.

What I have noticed is that modern executive-level work is like navigating the DFW metroplex highway system. It is complicated. There are distractions. It is constantly changing. People around you are not paying attention. There are accidents.

My highway time now is generally simplified, requiring a 20-minute commute to and from downtown on I-30, Monday through Friday. However, even in the simplest function, the highway experience provides two simple lessons for daily productive work.

First lesson: Pass-Through Rate

In civil engineering, Traffic Flow is defined as the study of interactions between travelers and infrastructure to further develop optimal transportation networks for efficient movement. This science looks at speed, density and flow. (I think of this stuff when the driver in front of me is going 67 MPH in the left lane.)

Speed refers to the average rate of speed of the traffic over a given segment of highway.
Density is defined as the number of vehicles moving over that given segment.
Flow is the number of units of vehicles moving over that segment in a set amount of time.

At Stagen, as in most high-level leadership development programs, we teach a personal productivity curriculum. We call ours Attention Management. A central practice in Attention Management is what we call Weekly Focusing and Time Blocks. Once a week, we suggest you plan your week according to what I important to you. Then, once you are in your week, you follow your time blocks to execute. Pretty simple structure that I am sure you are familiar with.

What we notice is that many executive lives look a lot like I-30. There is speed, there is density and there is flow.
Now what we observe in the highway can teach us a lot about ourselves and our productivity.

A highway is designed to be used. When I-30 is at 10% capacity, it is not filling the full productive potential. We would say it could and should have more traffic. (I love waking up early, like 4 am, and driving on Dallas Highways, and wouldn’t mind if they were always at 10%). When you have 50% capacity on the highway, the flow is much higher. We might simplistically say that it is 5X more productive.

So, the highway is 10X more productive at 100% utilization, correct? Wrong. At 100% capacity, we could simplistically say that it is 1% as effective, because when the highway is totally full, movement grinds to a tortoise pace… inching along at 5-10 MPH.

Here is the take away: Our lives are not meant to be filled at 100% capacity. What that looks like for participants in our programs is the awareness that they need to schedule “white space,” “blank space,” “openings,” “unscheduled time,” “buffer zones,” into their days and weeks.

Good news and bad news… there is no prescription of what it should look like for you to have the ideal capacity utilization. It is only through awareness and self-observation that we determine what our own personal and professional “pass-through” rate is for our time, energy and attention. The Stagen Leadership Development system emphasizes practices for self-awareness in the context of models like Attention Management, that help you determine that for yourself, while accelerating the insights in a peer-level, practice-based curriculum.

Second Lesson: People Multi-Tasking Cause Problems

OK, this is a soap box moment. No one should ever text and drive on the highway in a major city. No emails. No reading. I hope this goes without saying. If you do this. Stop. It is a habit that bleeds over into reduced effectiveness in your professional life. We have the research and the data. I refer to it several times a month in presentations. *1You are twice as likely to make mistakes and take twice as long to complete a project when multi-tasking. *2Texting while driving leads to a 23X increase in the likelihood of an accident.

If I was nervous about the crazy highway systems of Dallas, the distracted driving has me deeply disturbed. I see people every day, grossly negligent of the responsibility of operating a vehicle. But how many of us are negligent or our responsibility as role models, leaders, parents, by our distracted, habitual use of devices throughout the day.

To recap, there are a couple lessons I learned from traffic on I-30 in Dallas.

One, that there is a rate of flow to our lives that, despite the temptation of busy-ness, is not 100% utilization.
And two, that media distraction is a real threat to our safety and our capacity to move ourselves forward.

To learn more about the Stagen Attention Management content or other leadership development programs, click here.

Footnotes:

  1.  The Myth of Multitasking, Rosen
  2.  2009 report on Driving and Cell Phone Use, form Virginia Technical Transportation Institute

Seth Braun | Executive Coach, Foundational Leadership Program Manager
Seth.Braun@stagen.com<mailto:Seth.Braun@stagen.com> |  303.443.6543
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