Addiction & Freedom

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Addiction, whether to coffee, social media, sugar, chocolate (my nemesis), email/hipchat/trello/{insert system here} notifications, alcohol, food, or whatever, any compulsion that we act on without thinking and can’t say no to, is an addiction. Which may seem harmless enough until you realize that your addictions are in control, they decide for you, and if you aren’t deciding for you, then you have lost your freedom. If you can’t abstain from your addictions you have lost the ability to decide what the one thing you can absolutely control, you, is doing.

Tending To Good Habits

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Building good habits, whether for yourself or an organization, isn’t like the physical world of making something. In the physical world you pour the foundation and assuming you have done it right, you can now focus on the walls that stand upon it. The foundation if solid is immutable. Building good thoughts, good practices and good habits, for you and your organization, doesn’t have that benefit. They fade and wither if not constantly tended.

When creating a good habit that you want to keep you have to leave something of you behind to tend to it. If you move to the next habit and don’t look back what you have worked so hard to build will disappear. You move from one good thing to the next, oscillating in place, running in a circle, and not moving forward. You have fleeting moments of feeling great about what you are accomplishing but you have this uncomfortable, probably unconscious, realization that you are spinning in place.

The effort has to be on how to maintain a practice. If I do this next great habit, how do I give it my attention and keep what I have accomplished to date, and more importantly, how do I maintain what I will do next. Starting, or creating, the next good “habit” is easy, the tougher question is how do I do it, and hold it, and keep what I have accomplished so far.

The better way to think about it is how many habits, good practices, and good thoughts can I tend to? What structures can I put in place to help me maintain what I have? And once I have those structures and I have squeezed out some capacity to tend to more, then, and only then, what good practice should I pursue next?

A Perfect Close To The Week

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On Friday a co-worker says to me at the end of the day "In the last 6 months I have learned more than the last 10 years."

And then an hour later this arrives in our email in-box:

These are the reasons I get up in the morning,  come to work (okay, walk downstairs, we all work form home), create a culture that creates a company, that looks after the people who make up that company, and the people in turn look after our customers. Perfect way to close a Friday.

Self Organizing Company

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What does a self organizing company look like? By way of example:

Non-Self Organizing:

Coworker; I am doing okay but I think I we could be doing more. I want to pursue this thing... I want to do X...

Coach; Interesting point. Let me see if there is something I can do to make this happen for you.

Self Organizing:

Coworker; I am doing okay but I think I we could be doing more. I want to pursue this thing... I want to do X...

Coach; Figure out how you can do X to solve a real problem for the company and see if you can get a few co-workers to back you, and if you can, make a pitch for resources and get this going. If nobody lines up with you they unfortunately don't share your enthusiasm.

Where would you rather work?