Smart and smooth transitions: How to change projects in the right way

              Universe is change, life is opinion - Marcus Aurelius

This post is about stopping one thing and starting another, and gaining from a work and life transition. At the end of last year I returned to my home base in Virginia after two weeks on the road. On this unusual work trip, I had the privilege of spending one week with strategic planners from humanitarian organizations working to help people affected by the ongoing political instability in the Central African Republic. After finishing up the work there I spent another week in Uzbekistan working on a system to  help schools prepare for natural disasters like floods and earthquakes that are common in Central Asia.  It was a perfect trip in many ways: challenging work with smart people, in adventurous places. I feel lucky to be able to build a life and make a living doing work like this. 

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But coming back from these intense work trips  has always been difficult for me and the family. Reintegration into the routines, tasks and projects of your standard life can be a shock, even after a short work trip of a few days. This discomfort comes from a combination of jet lag, the human discomfort with change, and taking on again the mental load that comes with your regular work and life load (food prep, managing the babysitters, getting the kids to school, homework).

Transitioning quickly and smoothly from one thing to another in normal life continues to be a difficult thing for me. It sounds easy, but it never is. How do you stop doing one thing and start another in the right way? 
The first task is to learn how to actually focus on what you are doing. Cal Newport’s Deep Work concept makes the case that unbroken attention is the true asset of the internet age where we now live and work. Even if we do improve at deep focus on one task to make the best possible work, we will have to change task eventually. Most of us have to travel or change projects or even jobs at some point. Most of us have to change our focus several times throughout the day. 

Changing focus from one thing to another has a cost. There is an inevitable disruption that happens during this transition. Your attention on one project ends and you refocus on the next thing. It disrupts our routine. There is inefficiency as we try to figure out how to work toward our goals, and keep our sights on what matters. 

Despite the obvious difficult parts, there is much value in the transition moment. There is a lot of valuable learning that happens when one thing stops and another begins. This can be the big transition between jobs or projects, or even just the moments when you switch from being ‘head down’ writing a document, to going into a set of meetings or phone calls.  Breaks in the routine form memories and learning that are potentially valuable. 
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This post shares useful ways that I have developed to ease my own transition between projects. This applies to my usual challenge of coming back from an international disaster response mission. It also is built around the many transitions that I do in one day - from writing, to meeting, to switching into kid and family mode at the end of the day.  These ideas equally apply to the changes that a family experiences between the summer when kids are off, to when kids start school. It can also be a transition from a parent who was primarily working in the home to a professional social sector job outside the home. 

The more smart and smooth we can be about any transition, the better our life and work can become. The concept I’m applying below is Antifragile - how to benefit from this change rather than suffer from the disruption. We want to set up mindsets, strategies and tactics that make the transition valuable to our life and work, while minimizing the downsides of distraction, waste, anxiety and disruption. 

Here are a few of the things that have been working for me in my social sector life and work: 

Mindset -  Look at it as an advantage, a chance to start fresh. Change is constant in our social sector lives and work. How can we change our perception and opinion of those changes to provide the best benefit for our careers, ourselves and our families? 

Reset your normal - Throw some of your junk away. Look again at your routine. Feel the joy of travel and return load of running normal family admin. Rethink the mental load of relating to your partner again, and to the kids again. 

Smart preparation - Treat it like a triathlon transition. Triathletes practice the change from swimming to running as part of the sport: prepare for and practice the change from one type of project to the next. Create a specific routine for what you follow when you switch from one thing to the next. 

Examine your fears -  For the things that are annoying to you as you transition: uncover the source of annoyance. It is probably fear. For me, fear of scarcity of time, ability to execute on my work while also being there for the family and partner. 

Family techniques - How to transition the kids when their routine changes. They miss me for a few days then adjust. Now they need to adjust back to having me around. Give your partner some time off too. Let him or her go away too and recharge, reset, renew.  

Loving the upsides of the change - Appreciating, remembering and writing down the benefits of a change from one thing to another helps maintain perspective on the positive big picture. A transition can refresh us, provide a new perspective, reset habits, reset relationships, and give you a chance to share your learning and adventures.  Once you get back home, depending on your specific situation you have a certain amount of commuting, cleaning up your space, procuring and prepping food, scheduling, coordinating babysitting, making school lunches. Comparing your life and setup to other people's across the world, for example: Uzbekistan and Central African Republic. This includes your own personal systems but also the political and economic systems that are in place. 

Bringing it all together
The transition from one project to another is a natural breaking point. By setting up smart mindsets, strategies and tactics we form these inevitable events into a positive situation that benefits us, and those that we serve with our Social Sector mission.

Adopting these approaches helps change the hard parts of changing focus into a situation that makes me see more clearly, reset routines, and reconnect with my friends, family and mission when back at home. 

What are your techniques for switching from one project to the next? How do you handle change in your social sector life and work? Post a comment on www.socialsectortitan.com under this article or email me back, I’d love to hear your approach. 

Happy Trails!