Page 46 - Make Work Great

Overtness About Task

to trample. Second, your strategy is destined to fail eventually; life
will intervene with other priorities, you’ll burn out, or someone whose
toes you stepped on in the past will return to even the score.
Creating value is a balancing act, perhaps the most important one
you perform. You must work not just to increase your output, but to
optimize your ratio of output to stress. That’s the critical ratio: out-
put divided by stress. You have to arrange your work life so that you
function as well as possible, while being (and appearing) as relaxed as

you can be. In doing so, you increase your level of influence on others,
improve your long-term career prospects, and add to the attractive-
ness of the patterns you’re demonstrating. In the process, you prob-
ably also improve your health.

Critical ratio: Output you produce
Stress you experience or create

Let’s not be naive. Things will never be perfect. There will always
be stress at work. That’s why you need to focus your attention both
on what you’re doing and on how you’re doing it; in other words, on
both parts of the output-stress ratio. Just a little focus goes a long
way. Remember, small achievable steps are what you’re after.
This isn’t nearly as diffi cult or open-ended as it might sound. To
begin, you just need to be overt—that is, transparent and obvious—
about six aspects of your work: purpose, impact, incentives, progress,
resources, and capability.
By practicing the six specifi c types of overtness, you will automati-
cally guide your attention toward improving your own output-stress
ratio.
As you read about the six types of overtness in the following sec-
tions, you may start to wonder with whom you’re supposed to be
overt. For now, we’ll make things easy: think only in terms of yourself.
Consider how you can become more explicit about each item in your
own mind, without worrying about anyone else. Later, we’ll return to
the question of sharing your newfound insights with others.

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