Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! One of the good things about winter storms is they usually bring a day of warm weather before they dump on you. Friday we got hit with another storm - an icky mix of rain, sleet, and ice with a few inches of snow on top. But Thursday we had 45 degrees! And you know what that means - kayak time! I teach in the morning on Thursdays and didn’t have any meetings in the afternoon, so I took a couple of hours off and went out in the Lavender Lady off of Adam’s Point in Great Bay. Turned out to be a perfect day for a paddle - still waters, warm ambient temperature - it was fun to look at the snow and ice on the shore.
As I mentioned last week, I finished reading Atomic Habits and I have been thinking about ways to get better at achieving my various goals. One of the things I decided to do to get more control of my time was to create some subordinate inboxes. I follow a number of newsletters to keep up with professional and personal interests, and they were all coming into my main email inbox and I was feeling distracted and overwhelmed. For example, I get a daily news round up from the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Dispatch, Becker’s Health Care News, the Healthcare Financial Management Association, the Medical Group Management Association, and some others. I also get other newsletters less frequently - like from the American Hospital Association, ACHE, etc. And then some other writers like Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, who I have shared here. These all were getting dumped in with my regular work email and I was watching the unread messages pile up and it was stressing me out. So to take control of this, I created a subordinate inbox and rules to route all of these newsletters into the subordinate inbox. This greatly reduces the number of unread messages in my inbox, and puts all of these important but low priority messages in one place which I can get to when I have down time, rather than being distracted by having them show up in my workflow. I know some of you are saying, how about just unsubscribing from some? But I like having these come in and having the ability to scan them. I get a lot of useful information from them and I feel like they keep me informed. The benefit of this technique is I can be more deliberate about the amount of time I spend on them. Being more deliberate is something I am striving for. As a person with a lot of interests, I worry about becoming too diffuse. I see being diffuse as a value. But too diffuse is a flaw. You want to be the just right amount of diffuse - somewhere between interesting and open, but not quite caught by every shiny new thing. Striking that balance is complicated, but this seems to be working for me right now.
Speaking of diffuse - ever heard of wine cookies? As in cookies made with wine? No? Neither had I until this recipe popped up in one of my various feeds. I baked them yesterday and they were delicious - like chocolate clouds, not overly sweet.
Maybe they even had a touch of bitterness balanced by the cocoa. Really nicely balanced. I recommend. (regular chocolate chip in the back)
And now, on to the links!
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Read
What: TED Ideas, Why a company is not a family — and how companies can bond with their employees instead
Why: I have some tangential observations about work identity and sociality based on this article. I think we all want different things from work, and I think we all want different things from our workplace. Some people have a transactional relationship with their work - work is a way to pay the bills and to enable these people to do the things they really care about - which might be family or hobbies or church or whatever. For some people their work is integral to their identity - I know this is true for many physicians for example - their work defines who they are. I’ve interviewed close to 40 physicians for a leadership study I was working on and I would say 90% of them would tell you that being a physician is central to their identity. That’s not a statistically significant sample, but it’s pretty telling.
Separate from whether work is integrated into one’s identity is also the question of how one relates to the people one works with. Do you seek friendship and sociality with the people you work with? Or is socializing a distraction from your work and a time waster? I’ve read many articles by people who have loved the work-from-home experience forced on most organizations as a result of the pandemic because it allowed them to avoid what they perceived as the wasted time of workplace socialization. Other people who value workplace-based sociality feel disconnected. Sociality has two functions in the workplace in my opinion: first, it provides a lubricant for productivity; and second it provides an intrinsic reward for being part of a group. I definitely lean toward high-sociality in the workplace, so I have a bias in that direction. I see making social connections in the workplace rewarding in and of themselves - this is where I make most of my social contacts, I have relatively few other social contacts than work - so it’s either at work that I make social contacts or none at all. So there is that. But when you regard the people you work with as something more than just instrumental toward getting work done, getting work done is easier. Sociality creates trust bonds and ease of communication. But those relationships require time and maintenance, which for some people is a burden.
This is a 2x2 that I whipped up - it could definitely use some additional clever category names, especially for low/low and high/high. But I think you get the idea.
With regard to the specific idea of the article - work as family - this is not necessarily implied even in the high/high box.
Work is a voluntary relationship, unlike family. Work relationships all end. Some may last a very long time and may play important or not important parts of your life. You may identify with your profession and organization a lot or a little. But at some point everyone leaves the organization. It is normal and healthy and it should be treated as such. I like that the article suggests that departures from work organizations should be celebrated, assuming they are for the right reasons. It is not healthy to think of your relationship with your work organization as family. Work organizations do not have the same claims over an individual, regardless of whether you like or even love the people you work with. Work-based friendships can blur the lines at times, and that I think is actually a good thing, but there one needs to maintain that there is a hard stop where the organization cannot go beyond.
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What: Esquire, 'We Are the World': Inside Pop Music's Most Famous All-Nighter
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a32868751/we-are-the-world-history-interview/
Why: I was a freshman in high school in 1985. The people in this story, who made that song, were all of the people on the radio in my childhood. This is a fun read if you are a person of a certain age. But also fun to think about how to bring together so many creatives to produce something so quickly.
If you haven’t listened to it lately (or never heard of it), you can check it out on YouTube here:
My twenty something daughter came in the room while I was listening to it and said, “What is that?” I guess it hasn’t stood the test of time. But it brings back memories. Big hair, parachute pants, fingerless gloves…
(thanks to my wife for the pointer for this one)
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Watch
What: TED, Eduardo Briceño: How to get better at the things you care about (11 min)
https://www.ted.com/talks/eduardo_briceno_how_to_get_better_at_the_things_you_care_about
Why: Some advice about developing a learning practice.
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Listen
What: Health Leader Forge, Seoka Salstrom, PHD, Founder & Director, Hanover Center for Cognitive Behavioral Therapies (90 min)
https://healthleaderforge.blogspot.com/2022/02/seoka-salstrom-phd-founder-director.html
Why: My latest podcast interview is with Dr. Seoka Salstrom, Founder & Director of the Hanover Center for Cognitive Behavioral Therapies, in Hanover, NH. Seoka has a PhD in clinical psychology and specializes in evidence-based behavioral health interventions, with a special interest in anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders. In this podcast we discuss how she grew up in a house without electricity, how she found her way to psychology through a vision quest, her rigorous training in clinical psychology, and how she has founded not one but two successful practices, and finally what her long-term goals are in building a behavioral health practice in rural New Hampshire.
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What: The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan, John Mearsheimer On Handling Russia And China (71 min)
Why: Mearsheimer represents the “realist” school of foreign relations. What I appreciated about his approach is he gives a clear-eyed perspective from the other side - why is Russia threatening to invade Ukraine? Why is China bent on taking back Taiwan? He cuts through the rhetoric from “our” side and explains how our opposition sees the situation. I found this discussion highly illuminating concerning the real existential threats to America today.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next week!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Associate Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast:
http://healthleaderforge.org
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picaso