Run a Work Process Experiment
One of my favorite things to do with clients in a coaching setting is to sit down and look together at how it goes when they approach their work.
Particularly if avoidance or procrastination are influencing your work or life reality right now, it can be so powerful to bring a specific example of something you’re avoiding into a Work Process Experiment with another set of eyes.
The process itself is simple. When I’m working with a client, we carve out time, we sit down, and they go to do the thing.
What comes up when you do?
What does it feel like?
What happens in the mind?
What happens in the breath?
What goes on in the body?
Sometimes, in trying to uncrush ourselves from backlog or overwhelm, our inner strategists get busy and try to PLAN our way out of our situations.
Stepping into a Work Process Experiment addresses the experience layer of this situation, not the theory of the reality, but the actual, lived reality.
Trying to check your email (that feels terrible) with the presence and support of someone who’s on your team and who’s got your back is a new kind of experience.
Seeing something horrible in your inbox feels different when someone else is there with you, holding space for you to watch you - not just try to force the thing.
When we do this process in realtime, it takes as little as 20 minutes (maybe even less). We play with tools from the Prototype Thinking user testing playbook, including saying “Pause” and “Resume” as though we’re actors on a movie set. Either one of us can “pause” the experiment to chat about what’s coming up, to notice what’s happening in the moment, and to share insights with one another.
Reflecting on your work practice, in the moment, specifically when stress and avoidance have you by the guts, shows a whole new view of what’s possible.
I like to invite folks to write down their "Plan” for responding to procrastination in the experiment BEFORE they begin.
Then, when your eyes hit the inbox, the plan has a way of sometimes falling out the window.
Rather than this being a problem, this is actually the first step in the stage of life-building I like to think of as “Play.”
With “Pause” and “Resume” powers at play, we then get to rerun the work process experiment as many times as we like to, making tiny micro-shifts the focus of our observations. We’re not reinventing the world. We’re not solving all procrastination forever. We’re not cheating death or shortcutting our way through.
We’re using lived experience, real emotions and actions, to invent a process that works better for you specifically, when YOU encounter the lived reality of friction.
Because there are two of us, we’ve got two brains on hand to not just explore what’s going on, but to also synthesize together the new versions of the experiment you’re designing.
Once we call it, even after just 15 minutes, you’ve got a prototype in hand you can take back into your working process.
Will it survive the realities of your working environment forever?
Will it work perfectly well without a flaw in all kinds of work situations?
Probably not, at this stage - after all, our initial environment for experimenting included two brains and two bodies, with a mission to make something up!
But in the week (or even the half hour) that follows the Work Process Experiment, you get to take your learnings and our latest iteration into real life, without me present.
You get to test it on different workflows.
You get to test it when the baby’s screaming, or when your spouse or sibling is crossing through your space to walk outside.
And having played around with those tools of “Pause” and “Resume,” you can start iterating on the really simple three-step breadcrumb trail you made for yourself in our original session.
Maybe your process will differ when you tackle a piece of light work, like email, or super-deep, creative in-the-flow work, like a strategic project or life plan you’ve been wanting to invest in.
But, there’s no rule for how many great ways you can have to interact with the work you need to do in your life!
Each of these can become its own iterative experiment, part Plan, and part Play.
When we meet again, we get to revisit how it’s been going. The coolest thing is that when we play around with real, lived, recurring experience, you actually don’t have to track and remember everything that happened. We can literally just call up something else that you’ve been stopped by, in procrastination or avoidance, and see what happens this time. Sometimes you may not even realize how old discoveries quickly leapt into your obvious, practiced reality.
And sometimes the same old hangup friends will re-emerge. :)
By playing around with a Work Process Study, I find that clients (and I!) gain the opportunity to get out of our heads, gain from planning but also keep it in its right role, and get one small thing out of the way even in the process of a coaching session. We set off a learning, reflection, mindfulness and adaptation process that becomes a new game our brain can play, besides “keep us safe from this horrible email inbox no matter what.”
We bring curiosity back to the process of our work and procrastination, giving up what can feel crushing: that analysis of our results.
Next time you’re stuck on a project, try running this process on your own. Or, if you’d like to try it with a partner on board, schedule a coaching session! Bring something you’re stuck on, and we can get right down to work!
