3 Cures for Your Tunnel Vision
Imagine that you’re speeding through a tunnel. You’re focused. You’re fast. You’re getting places. Actually, you don’t even have to imagine it because you probably spend most of your time racing through this tunnel. Deadlines, challenges, and goals push most of us to keep our heads down. Tunnel vision isn’t just a metaphor. Stress literally causes our vision to narrow.
In a world of constant digital distractions, shoulder taps, and “quick questions,” tunnel vision might sound like an evolutionary perk. And that’s true… unless you want to think like a leader. As a leader, you have the unique challenge of needing to look down and look out. You have to cross item after item off your to-do list, and you have to think strategically, innovate, and develop yourself and others for a future nobody can predict.
Most of us are good at looking down and getting things done. Not only do we have more experience being doers, we also get instant gratification and quicker feedback on heads-down type tasks. Looking outside the tunnel requires more practice, patience, and discipline. And if you want to be a great leader, you have to spend time outside the tunnel. How?
Here are 3 cures for your chronic tunnel vision:
1. Schedule “look out” time.
Literally. Do it as soon as you finish reading this post. Open your calendar and block 1 hour every week. Is an entire hour too rich for your blood? Start with 30 minutes. Ask yourself questions like:
Which objectives am I trying to reach? Why? Are there better ways to reach these objectives?
How might we save more time? Money? Stress?
Who should I meet in my company? Industry? World?
Pro-tip: Behavioral economist Dan Ariely found that we tend to be most productive in the mornings. Schedule your “look out” times when your brain is most alert.
2. Do a to do list audit.
Is your to do list a representation of your priorities or more of a representation of the chaos inside your mind? When too many items creep onto that list, we experience choice paralysis and decision fatigue. To combat those terrible feelings, we either stare off into space or do the easiest, quickest, or most recent thing that made its way onto our plate.
Having a to do list is not enough. To get yourself out of that tunnel, you have to practice good to do list hygiene. Every morning, organize your plan for the day and the week by asking questions like:
Which of these items is truly urgent? What will happen if I delay them?
What are my biggest priorities? Which of these tasks will help me reach them?
If I only have 2 hours today, which tasks would I choose to keep and cut?
Pro-tip: Try out the Kanban Method if a typical list doesn’t work for you. One of the loves of my life is Trello (a simple, brain-friendly Kanban board).
3. Pull for feedback every month.
When surgical teams fail to learn from one another, patients are more likely to suffer major complication and death. Yikes. Even if you aren’t performing surgery, consider what accidental “deaths” poor information flow and a lack of feedback might be causing in your work.
Pull for feedback from your reports, your manager, and cross-functional collaborators on a weekly or at least monthly basis. To extract out juicy information and foster a learning culture, ask questions like:
How do you feel this project went? What process can we optimize?
What should I stop doing, start doing, and keep doing to support you better?
How might we improve the way we work together by 10%?
Pro-tip: Before we leave the death metaphor, I want to mention a new learning tool we’ve noticed more and more of our clients using. It’s called a pre-mortem. Here’s how it works: before you start a project, imagine that everything about it will go horribly wrong. Then discuss what steps you need to make to avoid the imaginary disaster.
P.S. Don’t worry. I’m not asking you to slow down. In fact, with these 3 cures for tunnel vision, you’ll get to where you need to go faster, and you’ll enjoy the ride even more.
*A version of this blog post originally appeared on CultureIQ.*
