Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [63]
A mind map created by teacher and podcaster Chris Gladis to focus his thoughts before a 2005 radio appearance. (Used by permission. CC by-nd.)
Look over your calendar for the months before, during, and after your time out of the office to spark recollection of any other open activities.
Once you feel like your head is clear, group the things you wrote down into goals and projects. Identify the next actions in each of them and the date by which they must be done. If the deadline is before your trip, then schedule a day to do them. If it's during or in the week after, do them early or delegate them. If they're due more than a week after but less than a month after, list them in a clear, prioritized way on a piece of paper, and set that front and center on your desk as your starting point for your return.
Briefly talk over at a high level the status, next actions, and upcoming deadlines for your active projects with your boss and colleagues who may cover for you while you're gone. If they'll need to cover a lot of new ground in your absence, provide them with a similar sheet listing next steps, goals and deadlines for that project.
Place a clearly marked inbox on your chair or desk to receive papers and physical objects that come to you while you're out.
You'll be able to travel knowing that nothing is forgotten—you gave yourself three whole weeks to remember anything known—and you've prepared others to deal with unknowns within the context of your goals.
It also helps to return from long vacations on a Wednesday and use Thursday to recombobulate at home and finish unpacking. Then, spend Friday on processing email and, if you quietly sneak into the office, any accumulated inbox papers. Say to everyone that you'll be back in the office on Monday, but use Friday to get yourself soundly back on your feet at work, with a weekend as an additional reward for doing so!
A business travel variant on this trick is not to fly back the day a big conference ends, but instead fly home the next afternoon or evening. Ask the front desk at your hotel for late checkout so you can take your morning as slowly as you want. Then leave your bags at the desk and go putter around, have a nice lunch somewhere, and see something you might have otherwise missed. Give yourself a little breathing room to internalize the value of your travels.
Returning with a fresh perspective
Before you dive back into your inboxes, give yourself the gift of an hour or two of high-level, undistracted, newly relaxed thinking about your work, tools and processes. Pull back for the big picture since travel has already provided with you a little distance. Look at your space with fresh eyes. Have a large trash can and some archiving boxes brought to your workspace and purge stuff that is not currently useful, required, or inspiring. This kind of strategic time can be hard to carve out of day-to-day business, so take this opportunity for quality thinking.
Think about your roles and responsibilities:
Where do you repeatedly need to be applying your focus and energy?
Are you currently in a period of growth or stability or stagnation?
Are you routinely giving yourself the clarity to have the answer to the question, “Where do I stand?”
What’s the next thing you need to learn?
With whom do you need to build a connection?
How are you communicating your values and priorities to prime others for your future decisions and actions?
Once you have a better understanding of what’s going on at those high levels, you can descend into looking at specific goals—the waymarkers on your journey. Consider where you want to be in a week, a month, six months, and a year from now. Think about your current strategic position and where it should be at each of those points. Identify the feedback mechanisms that will tell you how things are going.
Clarity on the highest levels of what you want for yourself can reveal goals that are no longer valid for you. That’s fine. Not all goals are equally important; some you’d regret on your deathbed