The topic that I'm most interested in looking into is Life Harmony. I've always heard of work-life balance which is certainly a topic that a lot of people are interested in and it's part of the overall life harmony but still implies a struggle between "life" and work. But even private life also needs a harmony between chores, leisure, goals, etc. With this mindset, you can actually integrate work into your life in a way that feels more complete and integrate your private "musts" with your "wants". This way, you don’t need to view work and having personal time as separate.
Unfortunately, unless we’re consciously making an effort, our brain is not always the best at making accurate judgement calls when it comes to prioritizing. It tends to have a bias towards short term benefits and short term costs.
As there are often many more options our brains link to short term benefit; when you’re trying to focus on a task that gives you a long term benefit, that task usually becomes low priority. This is otherwise known as Priority Chaos (more on that below).
I feel that now that we are in quarantine those topics are even more important since almost everything, if not everything, is done within the same space (that in some cases isn't very big) so we don't have the physical separation of tasks within spaces to aid with balance. I decided that this is the topic that I wanted to research for this assignment.
I had a personal emergency last week that prevented me from uploading Week 1 assignment so I will make this post that is meant to be for both Week 1 and Week 2.
ASSIGNMENT
Week 1:
Prepare to share with the class an overview of the issue and why it is important based on market research. Include some high level data that validates why the issue is important.
Identify 3-4 opportunity areas or places where you intersect with the issue. Be narrow and specific.
Week 2:
Define problems for the user
Conduct at least one or two user interviews (qualitative). Run a survey if possible.
Based on the topic you are focused on creating a persona. Your persona should include user research and both quant and qual insights. Your artifacts should also include interviews and survey data.
Create an empathy map that represents your user insights
Create a current state experience map for the topic
Identify the pain points in your map and propose three questions that could lead to product ideas. Your ideas should start with a question “Is there a better way to….” or “How can our product solve …” The statements in the last three slides of the lecture are helpful templates to frame your questions.
ISSUE
Achieving complete harmony in life is often difficult and requires a lot of planning and effort.
IMPORTANCE OF ISSUE
According to this article the reasons that this issue is important are:
- To maintain mental health
- To ensure physical health and well-being
- To increase productivity
- Become a more rounded individual
- To simply enjoy life
A 2015 study from the Center for Work and Family at Boston College found that only 20% of Millennials said they would want to advance their careers if doing so meant losing personal or family time.
Harvard professor and researcher Joel Goh has estimated that workplace stress accounts for up to $190 billion in healthcare costs every year in the U.S. - that’s nearly 8 percent of all corporate healthcare spending. The Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace says that one-third of workers report high levels of stress resulting in higher healthcare costs, periods of employee disability, absenteeism, higher turnover, and lower productivity on the job. David Lee, noted expert on employee stress, sees increases in all of the following within high-stress workplaces: absenteeism, workers comp claims, litigation, grievances, accidents, errors of judgement, violence, customer complaints, and others. And, of course, all of these have big costs associated with them.
A cross-generation of employees picked work-life balance as the leading example of a successful culture, according to a new survey by cloud-based software provider Mavenlink. The firm's Future of Work report found that 62% of the 1,002 respondents thought work-life balance was the most important part of a workplace culture, followed by team-building activities, continuous learning and a collaborative environment.
The report also showed where the generations differed: respondents in the 18- to 24-year-old age group were the least likely to choose work-life balance as a key aspect of company culture; 35- to-44-year-old respondents chose "continuous learning" as the most important example of a successful culture; and 18- to 24-year-old respondents (40%) were more likely than other age groups (34% overall) to give team-building the highest rating.
The same experts say that instead of looking for work-life balance, the search should be for "synergy" between work and home. For example, survey findings from 15Five found that synergy allows employees to take a more realistic approach towards having a fulfilling personal life, supported by an equally fulfilling work life.
WHY IS IT AN ISSUE
It's an incredible struggle to find this balance because of technological disruptions and other distractions but we can't really afford to disconnect completely given the world most of us live in. I'm an international student and my parents worry about me living on my own in a foreign country. Therefore I have to always have my phone on hand in case they call or text. Work is done through email (more now than ever). It looks as if our devices are inescapable. And perhaps could be the solution.
But first I must research HOW you solve this issue. What must be done at a psychological level in order to refrain from distractions and be able to find balance between all the things we need to do.
I've found some recurring "tips" or "steps" that are meant to achieve this:
Play to your strengths
Don’t try and be all things to all people. Focus on your strengths and outsource the others. If you’re not a whiz at accounts or graphic design, outsource them instead of wasting time.
Set your priorities
In order to overcome Priority Chaos and be in better control of your time, identify the tasks that need the most focus to get accomplished. If it’s a big task, then it’s good to break it down into smaller bite-sized actions that will provide you with a clearer short term benefit.
When setting up tasks, give yourself a time limit. The brain has a bias towards short term benefits, and your attention span is limited, so if your tasks are going to take ages to complete, you’ll end up losing focus… and wasting time.
Figure out what you want your priorities to be, not what you think they should be. Ask yourself, “If I could only focus on one thing in my life, what would it be?”
That answer is your top priority. What would you focus on second? Third? Fourth? Fifth? You’ve now identified your top five priorities.
You may have a to-do list (or priorities) with 50 tasks on it, so you need to prioritize those tasks into four categories.
They are:
Urgent and important
Important but not urgent
Urgent but not important
Neither urgent nor important.
Track your time
For one week, track how you spend your time. How much time do you spend doing things that don’t matter to you? Or that don’t align with your priorities? Eliminate these things from your life, or delegate them.
Concentrate on one thing at a time
Forget multi-tasking. It’s not possible to focus on two things at the same time. Instead, devote your full attention to the task at hand.
When you are working, work. When you are spending time with your family, focus solely on them.
Schedule one thing you look forward to each day
Book some time to play tennis with a friend, go to an art museum, or have a massage. The activity doesn’t have to be time-consuming, complicated, or expensive.
Put aside an hour on your schedule to read a book, take a walk, or just to be alone.
Respect your private time
An emergency would most likely have to come up before you’d reschedule an important work meeting. Give your own time the same respect.
Once you’ve put private time on your schedule, protect it, unless there’s an emergency.
Take a look at your personal habits and general lifestyle
Lack of sleep, poor nutrition, and bad exercise habits can cause you to feel a lack of balance in your life, and can counteract any efforts you are making to achieve work-life balance.
Take a vacation
At the very least, take two weeks off from work per year. You don’t need to go far and you don’t need to spend lots of money, but you do need to recharge your batteries in order to be the most productive, creative, and happy person possible. Turn off your cell phone and computer, and enjoy.
Ask for support
Tell your boss, family, friends, colleagues, and anyone else involved in your life that you are seeking a better work-life balance.
Tell them what your plan is, and ask them to respect it.
Hire a personal coach
A personal coach can assess your current work-life balance, and can tell you what you can do to achieve optimal balance.
Get plenty of exercise
It may feel counterintuitive to add another activity to your life, but exercise relieves stress, clears your mind, and ultimately makes you more productive.
Don’t skip it. You’ll find that you greet work, family, and personal commitments with renewed vigor.
Set boundaries
Today’s technology can make the line between your work life and personal life quite blurry.
Turn off your cell phone and laptop when you’re at your son’s soccer game, and ask friends and family not to interrupt your workday unless it’s an emergency.
Find a mentor
Do you know someone who has it all — a successful career and a terrific personal life?
Ask him or her to give you advice on career development, setting priorities, and time management.
Learn how to say “no”
Don’t acquiesce to every request that comes your way. If it doesn’t fit into your schedule or align with your priorities, don’t overwhelm yourself by taking on more.
Evaluate your work-life balance on a regular basis
Achieving work-life balance is a never-ending journey, and your needs will be different at different times in your life.
Set aside some time once every other month or so to reflect on your current balance, what you would like it to be, and what the plan is for arriving there
Know your peaks and troughs
Are you a morning person?
If you are, assign tough, high-concentration tasks to the mornings. Don’t leave the tough tasks until it's night time and vice versa.
Resist the time suck
There aren’t enough hours in the day, right? Maybe they are if you can learn to identify and eliminate the many time sucks that are already in your life. You may think a minute or two on social media or surfing the internet is an insignificant amount of time to waste, but these minutes add up. For one week keep a “time-suck journal,” writing down each way you waste time and how much you lost to the time suck. This allows you to create a practical plan for dropping these time-wasters.
ENEMY #1: DISTRACTIONS
Small constant distractions ex: our phones. Whether it’s the constant notifications popping up, or the need to scroll through your social media news feeds.
Bigger, less constant distractions: wanting to go to a game on a beautiful day, or taking a weekend holiday even though you have a deadline due on Monday.
What are Distractions?
Distractions are things that divert away your attention from the action that you’re trying to do. They make you lose focus and put you off track. Repeated interruptions of this sort can lead to demotivation, because you’ll feel like you’re overwhelmed… yet not getting anything done!
Contrary to popular belief, our brains perform best when we’re focused on one objective at a time.
How Much Do Distractions Cost?
If you’re a typical working American, you’ll be distracted every 11 minutes; and, it will take you 25 minutes to settle down again to your task. Additionally, the more complicated your project, the longer it will take to regain your focus. This happens because your brain has to put in considerable effort when switching between complex objectives.
Internal Distractions
It’s very easy to blame external distractions as the cause when you can’t focus. But, there’s actually a hidden type of distraction beneath the surface. These are Internal Distractions.
The problem with internal distractions is, if you’re not acutely aware of them, you can be wasting both time and energy without even knowing it.
1. Priority Chaos
There are a few types of internal distractions, but let’s start with probably the most common one: the concept of Priority Chaos.
One of the most common distractions we encounter is that we have too many options on hand. This can cause priority chaos. For example, some people may find it hard to focus at home because there are too many options to choose from. You can choose to feed your dog, read a book, watch TV, have a snack or take a nap.
Besides the costs of distraction mentioned before, priority chaos is a big demotivator:
- When there are too many potentially attractive options, it’s hard to focus your energy and choose one of them – ideally the one you should be doing.
- It makes you feel guilty. When you let your internal distractions overtake your focus, you’re the one who chooses to divert your own attention and energy away from your task. So when the task you wanted to complete doesn’t get done, you can’t blame an external factor. Whether you do it consciously or not, you’ll end up blaming yourself.
Why does priority chaos happen? Well, your brain subconsciously prioritizes tasks based on three factors:
To fulfil an existing need. For example, you need to go to the bathroom urgently, so your brain is guaranteed to prioritize it.
To achieve a certain feeling of satisfaction, such as the satisfaction of eating a delicious chocolate fudge cake.
The perceived cost of achieving the benefit. What is the effort, energy or time required to complete this action?
Unfortunately, unless you’re consciously making an effort, your brain is not always the best at making accurate judgement calls. It tends to have a bias towards short term benefits and short term costs.
As there are often many more options our brains link to short term benefits, when you’re trying to focus on a task that gives you a long term benefit, that task usually becomes low priority. This is the essence of Priority Chaos.
2. Long and Short Term Benefits
Short term benefits usually have a relatively low cost and are concrete, allowing our brains to easily grasp them. We usually associate long term benefits with high cost, and these perceived costs are usually not as clear cut. The longer term it is, the more effort it takes to imagine the benefits. This automatically creates a mental barrier and resistance in our brains. As a result, we tend to trade long term gain for short term gains.
This is the reason why you might know that something is good for you in the long term, such as losing weight and exercising, but for some reason, you can’t force yourself to feel excited about it. On the other hand, you might know that something is bad for you, such as binge eating junk food. But, the anticipation of short term satisfaction overwhelms your conscious ability to resist it.
This is the next type of internal distraction that we face, and it is called Short & Long Term Mismatch.
Know that we more or less know how to achieve it. How do we keep this harmony long term. How long will it take to assimilate? What are the roadblocks?
On average, it takes more than 2 months before a new behavior becomes automatic — 66 days to be exact. And how long it takes a new habit to form can vary widely depending on the behavior, the person, and the circumstances. In Lally's study, it took anywhere from 18 days to 254 days for people to form a new habit.
In other words, if you want to set your expectations appropriately, the truth is that it will probably take you anywhere from two months to eight months to build a new behavior into your life — not 21 days.
Interestingly, the researchers also found that “missing one opportunity to perform the behavior did not materially affect the habit formation process.” In other words, it doesn’t matter if you mess up every now and then. Building better habits is not an all-or-nothing process.
According to a 2012 studyTrusted Source published in the British Journal of General Practice, habits are “actions that are triggered automatically in response to contextual cues that have been associated with their performance.”
For example, when you get into your car, you automatically put on the seat belt. You don’t think about doing it or why you do it.
Your brain likes habits because they’re efficient. When you automate common actions, you free up mental resources for other tasks.
According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), pleasure-based habits are particularly difficult to break, because enjoyable behavior prompts your brain to release dopamine.
Dopamine is the reward that strengthens the habit and creates the craving to do it again.
The best three papers I read on the subject are these:
Which say things like:
"Habit-formation advice is ultimately simple — repeat an action consistently in the same context.12The habit formation attempt begins at the ‘initiation phase’, during which the new behaviour and the context in which it will be done are selected. Automaticity develops in the subsequent ‘learning phase’, during which the behaviour is repeated in the chosen context to strengthen the context-behaviour association (here a simple ticksheet for self-monitoring performance may help;Box 1). Habit-formation culminates in the ‘stability phase’, at which the habit has formed and its strength has plateaued, so that it persists over time with minimal effort or deliberation."
PRODUCTS / SERVICES THAT ADDRESS THE ISSUE (AND WHY THEY MAY NOT WORK)
There are many organization / time tracking / to-do list / collaborating apps but many of them are only directed to the work environment and not necessarily personal time as well.
Some, like Forest, Flora and Habitica game-ify the act of getting through a to do list by rewarding good behavior with an immediate consequence. In the case of Forest and Flora, you grow your tree or forest by doing all the things on your list. In the case of Habitica (I downloaded it) you earn coins to buy your avatar powers and armor, etc. My only issue with these apps is that it would go the way of Farmville and Tamagotchi.. people eventually get bored and don't give a f___ about what happens to the character/tree etc.
Others, like the ones up in the image above, are basically time trackers that allow you to assign a time limit to a task and perform it with all your focus during a short period and assign breaks. However they don't seem well-suited for life tasks in general.
Most of these are either time trackers, project trackers, to do lists with reminders and or other features, etc. As we've seen in the research this is not enough to create healthy habits and stick to them in order to achieve Life Harmony.
OPPORTUNITY AREAS
- Provide people with a product or service that helps them reach overall life harmony based on habit-making psychology.
- Provide people with a product or service that coaches them through the hurdles of creating life harmony with work without necessarily creating new habits.
- Provide a product or service that coaches people into creating new habits to achieve specific goals.
WEEK 2
RESULTS OF USER INTERVIEWS (HIGHLIGHTS)
- 68.4% of interviewees said they would prefer harmony in their life even if the lines between work, life, chores and leisure a blurred.
- 89.5% of interviewees said they would prefer to incorporate very small changes over a long period of time as opposed to large changes over a short period of time.
- 47.4% of interviewees said they would use a product or service that aids and organizes their goals even if it blurs the lines of work, life, chores and leisure.
- "More than planning like have a set of achieve goals for each day"
- "I don’t think there’s anything missing, but rather me not using all of its features properly and failing to update it everyday."
- "I haven’t used apps for this actually. I guess it would be important that the app was a good rewarding system and a way to encourage you and keep you accountable"
- "No... I have tried by myself, but I would say lack of consistency has been the main issue..."
- "The only thing that messes up that balance is me wasting time. I feel like there would be that balance, but sometimes I procrastinate a lot, making it harder."
- "I know what I feel must do but I usually postpone important ones."
- "I think there’s a constant struggle to do all of these things."
- "I spend so much time in work and not that much in private life"
-"No, not completely. I feel some things that I want to do are being constantly relegated."
-"Procrastination I don’t know what to tell you, I guess just having my phone close to me, and creating that dependency on it fostered that habit. Also sometimes I put off work just to be with friends, because of “fear of missing out”, so to say."
- "sometimes a part of us subconsciously tells us that we don’t deserve to make that change that is so good for us."
PERSONA
EMPATHY MAP
CURRENT STATE EXPERIENCE MAP
PAIN POINTS
- Is there an easier, cheaper and long-lasting way for busy people to find harmony between the musts and the wants in their lives? So they can lead more fulfilling lives and achieve the goals they want.
- One problem people with busy schedules face is a struggle to create attainable goal plans and try to fit that plan around their very busy schedule with continued motivation.
- Is there a better way to prioritize different areas of life every day or week and at the same time continue to complete responsibilities?
Commentaires