Change This, and Everything Gets Easier

You yearn to be entrepreneurial, but work in a company that has five planning meetings for each actual meeting. Or perhaps you harbor a desire to be the most organized and dynamic member of your team, but you work in an office that looks like a football stadium just after 100,000 fans have dropped trash everywhere.

Remember this:

“Your environment always wins.”

As management coach Mary Legakis Engel told me. “The secret to getting what you want is to design an environment that supports it.”

I split my time between the suburbs of New York and a 7,000-foot high ski town that's also obsessed with biking. Just by changing my environment – going out west - I lose five pounds and adopt a healthier lifestyle. Just by going back east, I exercise less and gain a few extra pounds.

I’m the same person in different environments.

There are at least eight ways to shift your environment. You can change your:

• Geography
• Residence
• Job
• Physical workspace
• Organizational system
• Habits
• Friends
• Time management

If you are seeking increased productivity – and a bit more sanity – this last point may be the easiest and fastest shift you can make. Engel offers many ideas about taking control of your time, such as:

• Only allow yourself to check email three times a day.
• To quiet your environment, shut your door and/or turn off your phone.
• Replace free time with “me” time; block out chunks of time to do exactly whatyou want.

Changing your environment is a lot easier than changing individual habits, beliefs or attitudes. If you hang around with people who absolutely love to eat and drink, you are going to eat and drink too much. But if you hang around with people who like to get up at 5 a.m. and hike up a mountain before work, you won’t have to worry about dieting or going to the gym.

Long ago, I was thrust into a high pressure role in which I had to manage many vendors, marketing campaigns and media buys. My natural inclination is to be informal and not especially organized, but it only took me a week to realize that acting like that would cause near-instant failure. I quickly set up a formal filing and organizational system, and transformed my office from a casual workspace to something more like a command center.

In the three years that followed, all I had to do was adhere to the system I set up in week two.

If you fight your environment, one of two things will happen:

1. You will fail.
2. You will work harder – and suffer more – than is necessary.

For example, if you are a sensitive person who works with selfish Type A colleagues, you will never be happy and always be stressed out. Instead of finding better stress management techniques, you will be better off finding a new job in a more supportive organization. Even if it takes you a year or two to do this, it is the right move.

Your environment always wins.

Our world is flooded with self-help formulas, career guides, and productivity theories. A few of them actually work. But none of them work as fast or as well as this simple truth:

Change your environment, change your results.