Eat, Work, Sleep, Repeat

Today is Groundhog’s day.  A day I more closely associate with the Bill Murray movie than with the furry, winter-loving, Pennsylvanian rodent.  You remember, Bill Murray’s character wakes up to find he’s living the same day over and over.

It’s hard to be creative and think of better, more interesting solutions if you find yourself on auto-pilot most of the time.  I find this particularly true for me.  I very easily fall into the same patterns and can see my productivity plummet when things feel too familiar.  I try to mix it up with varying degrees of success by working from different locations, grabbing coffee with different people or varying my ‘to do’ list so that it uses different sides of my brain within a given day.

But I’m curious what others do.  How do you stimulate yourself and your team?  Please comment if you have ideas.  A few thoughts if you don’t:

Photo by Stefano Pizzetti

Photo by Stefano Pizzetti

  • Pepper in projects for your team that are important and forward-looking rather than always focusing on the urgent and immediate
  • Shift around the responsibility for those mundane tasks that are redundant but that you’ve deemed ‘necessary’ - are they even really necessary?
  • Ask everyone on your team (including yourself) to teach the group something new - anything of their choosing.  Give them all 90 minutes to assemble props and knock together an outline for a two-minute tutorial.  Encourage creativity and keep it light
  • Take a different route to work every day for a week and take notice of something small; the different types of doors, tree trunks, whatever interests you
  • Schedule a meeting outside

We may have six more weeks of winter this year, but I’m hoping that doesn’t mean six more weeks of the same old thing.

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