I think we’ve cured boredom.

You wake up with an app that tracks your sleep. You respond to all the text messages you received during the night. You get an email notification while texting. You pour some juice and do a web search for “reconstituted concentrate” to see if your juice is really 100%. You track your breakfast in a nutrition app. You get a Twitter notification (swipe it aside, you’ll look at it later). You read the news using an app that selects stories based on your interests. A Facebook notification interrupts you. Before you leave for work you check your step count so far this morning, and look to see how you compare to your friends. You check the weather app and decide to bring an umbrella. You listen to that new song on your streaming music app and tweet about it. You Instagram the sunrise. You get another notification but ignore it. Your boss sends you a text asking you to pick something up from the printer/copy center. In line, you buy tickets to a concert this weekend. On your way to the office, a local coffee shop sends you a message using a location-based restaurant app promoting their seasonal drink that happens to be on special. You buy a coffee and pay for it by scanning your phone. In the elevator you Yelp a review. Good morning.

We are, for better or worse, connected (and distracted). And as our lives become more fluid, the line between work and personal life becomes more gray. The 9-5 job is becoming a thing of the past; most people I know are expected to be available “on call” 24/7, meaning they are able to answer an email after work and reply to a work related text message when they wake up.

More and more companies are working in environments like the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE), using strategies like Hot Desking to save money, increase mobility, and give employees the freedom to choose when, where, and how they want to work. We are more connected at the cost (or benefit) of having the freedom to manage our own schedules. With this, the most important skill for new entrance to the workforce becomes learning how to manage oneself.

It’s a blessing (until it’s a burden)

I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life. – Amy Hemple, from her short story, The Harvest

On a daily basis, I see my millennial friends suffering from poor self-management. These are the types of people who:

have been living under a cloud of stress for so long they think being stressed is “normal”;

underestimate how long a project will take so they are always scrambling to tie up lose ends while the next project’s deadline looms in the background like a thundercloud approaching shore; and

say “yes”, or more likely, do not say “no”, to a project when they are already double booked for meetings because they think saying “no” will hurt their reputation in the company.

The goal of any company is to have happy, healthy, and productive employees—and I think my millennial friends would agree. Too often our schedules and to-do lists get the best of us; managing ourselves in a world of constant distractions, notifications, and social media obligations leave most of us scrambling, tying up loose ends and finishing the ends of sentences.

Over the last few weeks, I have been thinking about this problem. I started observing my own behavior and then branched out to my peers to see what they have found to work for them; I then moved on to what has been tried and tested by my mentors; and, finally, I looked at what my heroes (alive and dead) have written about and lectured on. With all of this considered, I formed what I am calling the SEI Dock Model for Self-Management.

This model rests on the theory that sustainable change comes from a lifestyle change, not a one-time cycle. Just as a diet can help you slim down in the short-term, if you want to maintain your results, you have to keep making healthy choices.

Each week, for the next five weeks, I will be sharing a new installment to this self-management model. My hope is that it will encourage you to think differently about how you structure your day.

Let’s begin!

The Structure