When a vision is shared and agreed upon, that’s a good feeling. A direction has been laid out. Metaphorically, the compass has a true north to point towards. What confuses people sometimes is the difference between a vision and an implementation of that vision.

What’s the risk? Who cares? Well, let’s come up with a crazy simple example. Let’s say the vision is to go after fruit. The leader says:

We want fruit.

So, someone eventually says,

We need to do these things to get oranges. It’s what the leader wants. Don’t you support our fruit vision?

The vision was changed into an implementation. What even compounds the confusion is that the leader had suggested that for a specific team, the implementation of the vision will probably be apples.
Now, it’s easy to see the error in this case when dealing with apples and oranges. It can be harder when a generic word like “initiative” is used.

In this case, what can help is to add on “vision” or “implementation” as needed. For example, someone can propose that a specific team support the “initiative-vision” by using this specific “initiative-implementation.” If a certain implementation doesn’t work, one can try a different implementation without throwing out the whole vision.

Separating out the the vision versus the implementation enables a certain amount of freedom and likelihood of success. It makes the vision more resilient, adaptable, and much more likely to succeed as it gets more fully embraced within the entire group.

May your visions bear fruit. Try not to go bananas while going after it.

Energy is a key component of being productive. It fuels ones attention, passion and ability to do anything at all. The saying of “Time is money” is only partially true. Energy is production capability. I could have all the time in the world, but without energy I will get nothing done.

Where I work right now, some of the departments have gotten many key things right when it comes to energy. One of them is having dedicated email breaks and even a couple of windowless rooms for meditating or resting. If people get done with their email early, they can go take a quick break. This can consist of meditating, relaxing, playing a game with a co-worker, or getting something to eat.

During their break, people are recharging their minds and co-worker relationships. What’s also interesting is that during these breaks, new ideas can pop up. New solutions can seem to come out of nowhere. This can be crucial in a high-tech or other knowledge worker company.

Now if you’re like me, you want take your productivity to the next level. According to Tony Schwartz in the New York Times, even higher productivity may come from doing “..daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations.” Interestingly, it will take much discipline to adopt such activities.

Like other things revealed by science, it will take time to unlearn old outmoded ways of thinking around productivity and energy. For those that seize this new energetic productivity reality, new opportunities await!