worksmartplayhard

Welcome

Hi, I'm Carol McLachlan, chartered accountant, professional coach and NLP practitioner.  I set up Carol McLachlan Coaching Ltd in 2005, following an 18 year career with top 4 accountants, Ernst & Young, working in London, Liverpool and Manchester, as an accountant and people developer. Welcome to my new venture, WorkSmartPlayHard.  Through my experience of coaching and training both fellow accountants and coaches, I have developed a specialism in work-life balancing or work-life blending as I prefer to call it, along with a fair dollop of time management expertise. Whether you are embroiled in the corporate long hours culture, a busy working parent or an entrepreneur grappling with defining what's work and what's play, there will be something here for you. Subscribe to my enewsletter to receive tips and techniques direct to your inbox or grab my feed and don't forget to check out my 121 and group coaching services. My philosophy has always been that coaching is not necessarily about turning your personal or professional life upside down but about making the best of opportunities you already have and creating small changes that can really make a big difference to achieving your potential and maximising your success. So let me help you tap into your inherent resources, read on, subscribe or email me directly at info@worksmartplayhard.co.uk

The Myth of Multi-tasking

Those Ancient Greek giants with fifty heads and a hundred hands apiece must have been whizzo multi-taskers. Computers are. You, if human,are not.

Almost certainly, however, you are expected to be, have claimed to be, or aspire to be, an ace multi-tasker. You may even believe, mistakenly, that you are one.

What? I hear you protest. I can simultaneously do my CPD by podcast, review reports, field phone calls, burn CDs illegally, watch Dave, send and read text, juggle jelly, feed the tapir and learn my children’s names!

Oh dear!  Multi-tasking as a time optimisation tool - it’s a big, big 21st century delusion.   When you jam all that stuff into your poor overloaded brain, are you being effective – or merely efficient?

Let’s be clear. Efficiency is getting things done. Effectiveness is getting things done to worthwhile effect. Don’t be fooled by self-styled ‘busy’ people whirling round like demented windmills: they’re fooling themselves. 

In fact, according to time leverage expert, Tim Ferriss, as a multi-tasker, you’re simply

‘doing more to feel productive, while actually accomplishing less’.

The University of California moreover, finds that workers take on average 25 minutes to resume their original task after email or telephone interruptions.  And the BBC reports University of London research showing that phone and email traffic hits a worker’s IQ harder than smoking dope.

Can it get any worse?

Oh yes. Researcher David Meyer (University of Michigan) links multitasking to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline and so to loss of short-term memory and potential long-term illness. That’s worse! It means humans are just not wired for multitasking. (Don’t panic, however: being able to count your feet while breathing doesn’t mean you’re a freak of nature until you count more than two.)

Multitasking is now ‘old century’. Although widely viewed as the norm in workplaces, it has been shown to reduce productivity as well as IQ. It seems efficient in the short-term but is seldom so in the longer term, with its adverse effects on how people learn and retain information. We’re experiencing, increasingly and globally, and largely because of crowding technologies, a phenomenon termed ‘continuous partial attention’.  CPA was one of Harvard Business Review’s ‘Breakthrough Ideas’ for 2007.  A concept identified by Linda Stone, the consequences of which are superficial understanding which spawns boredom and impatience.

Take your average business meeting: vibrating mobiles, buzzing blackberrys, pinging laptops.  Whoever decreed the pre-eminence of devices over flesh and blood?

Enter New Kid on the Block – the single-tasker.  Yes, the 21st century way is single-focus, in which effectiveness is valued above busy-ness and time is used more profitably by stressing attentiveness and mindfulness.

It’s not really new, though:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

Alexander Pope 1688-1744

But we shrug and say ‘it’s the job’.  Really? Are these the same clients who tell me they’re dying of trivia overload? Shouldn’t the job be effective action to meet core goals in business and life?

But the obnoxious technological imperative can be beaten.  Here’s how:

·    Go – proactively - with the flow. Technology won’t disappear. Agrarian society changed with the industrial revolution: our post-industrial lives must change likewise.  Re-engineer your job; evolve into the 21st century.

·    Discover what psychologists call flow – that glorious mastery of a single activity.  Where the consummate control exercised by a musician or dancer makes time stop. Indeed balancing a set of accounts used to do it for me.

·    So you can’t match Pavlova in Swan Lake. But does a colleague display intelligent single focus? Or a friend? Emulate them - and don’t assume you can’t learn from youngsters. It’s all about modelling behaviour – right at the heart of Neuro Linguistic Programming – a rich treasure trove of techniques to support the evolution of the 21st century workplace.

·    Learn about mindfulness. Mindfulness teaches that awareness is more than being simply awake (‘I’m sorry – I was miles away!’). It is a constant focus on awareness, more ‘mind over mind’ than ‘mind over matter’.  My interest was sparked when I heard about a recent presentation to a bunch of Accountancy Big 4 Managing Partners.  Watch this space – this will be big this century.

·    Understand your preferred learning style.  And then leverage it – on the job or in the classroom. Most of us never learnt about learning styles or techniques at school or university.  Here’s your chance to bring your skills into the 21st century.

·    My own solution is Blended Living™: reconciling conflicting issues productively - not multi-tasking but transforming problems into opportunities. Killing two birds with one stone.  You don’t for instance take your children into work on Saturdays if you’re writing a report – but you might if you’re counting paperclips.

 

So improve your game by nurturing intelligent, focused attention rather than task switching.  These solutions help postpone the dark day IT governs us completely – while relieving stress!

If you need any further persuasion, here’s a contribution from Lord Chesterfield.  Writing in the 1740s, he cited ‘singular focus’ not only as an effective method of structuring your time but also as a mark of intelligence.  ‘This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure a mark of superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind’

And to cap it all

Way back at the dawn of the techno-age, Umberto Eco noticed the error of assuming your mobile was empowering. He pointed out that, with a mobile, you were in fact on call 24/7!

 

Carol McLachlan, FCA is a chartered accountant, executive coach and NLP practitioner.  This article was inspired by Christine Rosen’s work ‘The Myth of Multitasking’.

Email me at info@worksmartplayhard.co.uk to sign up for your free monthly personal development newsletter

Blended Living™

Blended Living™ is a brand new innovation in work life balancing for the 21st century.  Quite simply Blended Living™ is a methodology which enables you to maximize the opportunities of modern living, while taking control of the demands and conflicts. Blended Living™ is for anyone and everyone.

Let Blended Living™ help you maximize your personal investment in the 21st century. 

Email me at info@worksmartplayhard.co.uk for more information

Read on to discover the definitive guide to Blended Living™ and how it can help you. 

The new breed of Career Do it Alls

Can it really be thirty years ago that Shirley 'life's too short to stuff a mushroom' Conran wrote the book and colloquialised the term 'Superwoman' for the female career/domestic juggler?  I had to check.  I thought it was a 1980s term and to me it was personified in the 90s by Nicola 'having it all' Horlick (my old school chum from Birkenhead High, I kid you not!).  But unbelievably Shirley Conran wrote Superwoman in 1975!

And 30 years on, it seems we're still at it, sisters!  The noughties version is 'Do it Alls'.  Do it Alls or DIALLs is the current handle, immortalized in Bibby's report on the domestic burden.  The survey found that most women spend in excess of 3 times more hours on housework than their male partners.

Having been there, done that, sported the t-shirt (lost it and donned it a second time), and built a business helping others to work life balance, I was recently interviewed by the Liverpool Daily Post for my comments.  You can read the interview in full here. 

But in the meantime, what's your take on this, readers?  Male and female, air your personal experiences of sharing the domestic load right here on the worksmartplayhard.co.uk blog.  Guys please have your say.  What's your angle on Shirley Conran's other famous quote 'you don't need a pair of breasts to take a child to the dentist'.

And don't forget, if your life needs a little fine tuning in the balance department, you're in the right place at worksmartplayhard.co.uk.  Just email me at info@worksmartplayhard.co.uk to book your complimentary taster coaching session.

Are we really suffering from stress?

I contributed to this article on Stress, featured in the Daily Post.

You can read it in its entirety here.

Time Managment Top Tips II

Short and simple.  3 more top tips on time management.  If you are looking to improve your work life balance and/or time management, my suggestion is this: read the 3 tips and undertake to try out just one new one each month.  Just try it, it may not work for you, but there will be loads more to try.  And I'm only suggesting you try one new one per month. Why?  Well, you know that feeling you get when you are so busy, you know what you should be doing, you know there is a better way, but just can't find the time to introduce any new changes into your schedule (change usually means investment of some sort doesn't it, surely time investment is the last thing I can afford right now).  Well that feeling is permanent with some of us, we are always too busy to change.  So, try just one thing for one month, that's not a huge extra time commitment is it? Here goes, 3 top time management tips:

Time Management Top Tips I

Short and simple.  3 new top tips on time management.  If you are looking to improve your work life balance and/or time management, my suggestion is this: read the 3 tips and undertake to try out just one new one each week.  Just try it, it may not work for you, but there will be loads more to try in future articles.  And I'm only suggesting you try one new one per week. Why?  Well, you know that feeling you get when you are so busy, you know what you should be doing, you know there is a better way, but just can't find the time to introduce any new changes into your schedule (change usually means investment of some sort doesn't it, surely time investment is the last thing I can afford right now).  Well that feeling is permanent with some of us, we are always too busy to change.  So, try just one thing for one week, that's not a huge extra time commitment is it? Here goes, 3 top time management tips:

Working from Home: Idyll or Idiocy?

Working from home; an end to that worklife balance malarkey.  No manic morning rushes into commuterdom, parcelling slightly ailing kids into the car and onto the playground. Savour the aroma; brewing coffee, baking bread, wafting through your sunny sitting room as you chat serenely to a client, washing drumming away in the kitchen. Domestic bliss, professional idyll, multi-tasking paradise. Wait! 

The Life Audit

A fantastic gift idea... Who do you know who would appreciate spending time looking at their life or career and making plans for the future?

Coaching has always been associated with improving sports performance and now professional personal coaches are using the same tools and techniques to maximise potential and performance in life and work. Just a few examples:

• Who do you know who is outwardly successful but wants to change direction, take control of their career, move to next level of success, start a new business, write a book..?
• Who do you know who would like to improve their work-life balance, find ways to work and play smarter, reduce stress, increase personal effectiveness?
• Who do you know who wants to take stock of their life or career, would benefit from a fresh start, is looking for inspiration to make lasting change in some aspect of their life or career?
• Or is it you, yourself?

The Wheel of Life

One of the most powerful coaching tools I use is the Wheel of Life (click on the image to enlarge). It's a simple tool which helps determine the current focus of your time and energy.  This in turn can help identify areas of relative neglect and thus define where you would like to make improvements.  The coach helps you consider each area of your life in turn and assess what’s ‘off balance’.

The Wheel of Life is powerful because it gives you a vivid visual representation of the way your life is currently, compared with the way you'd ideally like it to be. It is called the "Wheel of Life" because each area of your life is mapped on a circle, like the spoke of a wheel.  In the example above, the client feels that their highest levels of satisfaction are in the areas of Finances and Personal Development which they have rated at 80% (4/5).  The lower scoring areas are Family and Leisure at just 20% and these are likely to be where they would like to focus and make improvements.

Initial consultation

I am currently offering all clients a free 20-30 minute, no-commitment consultation session.  For individuals, this would be taken as a free initial coaching session; for corporate clients this could be taken as a  free coaching consultation or  coaching demonstration. For more information or to book, email info@worksmartplayhard.com