Hello all, so as many of you know I read a good bit, and I also like to use “audible”. Great way to pass time while traveling or driving is to listen to audio books. Right now I’ve been on a real kick to learn more about business perspective and productivity. Some of the great books I’ve read and talked about before are:
- Grit
- Essentialism
- 10x Rule
- Deep Work
But I wanted to take a minute to talk about the book I just finished, Clockwork: Designing your business to run itself, by Mike Michalowicz. Now I have to admit, I found out about this book when I heard about it a couple of times and it showed up on my “recommended reading” books a few times.
So I was skeptical about this book, mainly because the book talks about how its focused on people starting their own business, and I work for a major corporation. So how can this be helpful to me? Well I have to admit, I was wrong.
I found this book to be really thought provoking, and it caused me to re-examine a lot of activities and work I do to measure impact and importance to success. The author makes the argument that in any organization, everyone has a responsibility to do the following:
- Protect the Queen Bee Role
- Serve the Queen Bee Role
And basically the key part of the business is to take the QBR (the Queen Bee Role) which is the crucial part of your job, and make all of your actions that you take focus on that above all others. Basically the argument is that I should spend every second of my work day focusing on that QBR, and when an activity takes away from that, I should focus on getting done with that as soon as possible, or if possible moving it off my plate.
The intention is that it makes me focus on the bigger picture and creates a scenario where you can take off from work and feel comfortable. For me, I have a tendency to have a hard time unplugging, and stepping away from work. And recently I’ve been setting goals to help myself to unplug. I found that when I started to put this into practice, I was able to unplug with less stress and it helped my overall mental health. For me, I started with the intention of doing the following:
- Blocking 1 hour for lunch everyday
- I will not eat at my desk
This forces me to take a lunch break away from my desk, and honestly it sounds small but it has paid huge returns, I have found that when I come back to work I am more focused, and at the end of the day less drained from a mental perspective. I find that stress level has gone down with regard to work and I also find that the work I’m doing is much more satisfying.
Below is a video that summarizes some of the ideas of the book. The value of this book though aren’t the ideas, but how you execute.
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