SDS 030: Compartmentalization

Can you imagine that we are already at episode number 30? I’m so excited about this. A few more episodes and we’ll be at 50, and then a few more, we’ll be at 100. Lots of interesting things to come, lots of interesting guests in the plans, so thank you very much for being here for 30 episodes, or less, you’ve joined recently, but welcome nevertheless.

And today we’re talking about compartmentalization. So what is compartmentalization and how can it help you in your career?

The first time I heard about this term was from Ryan Blair in his book “Rock Bottom to Rock Star”. It’s quite a good book if you’re looking to start a business, or to start a venture, and he’s got some great tips for entrepreneurs there. But at the same time, this compartmentalization concept can be applied by anybody. What is compartmentalization? Well it is a way to deal with stress and a way to deal with lots and lots of things bombarded at you. And probably a lot of us find ourselves in these situations when we have lots of projects going on at work and we need to focus on one and then on the other, and then we need to get all of these different things done, and then moreover we come home, we want to spend time with our families or our loved ones, and then we might have also a hobby, a sport that we enjoy, and lots of other things that are going on in our lives, and it just feels so overwhelming, and how do you deal with this?

Well Ryan Blair is a multimillionaire and he runs a huge company with millions of dollars in sales, and he has hundreds of employees, and as you can imagine, he also goes through these things, but even more exaggerated than we are, but he finds ways to deal with them. And the way he does it is through compartmentalization. Basically what he says is, if you have lots of things in your life, first of all you have to decide which are the important ones. Which are the ones that you actually want to focus on, and which are the ones that don’t deserve your attention.

And then the ones that are important, you have to create a psychological compartment for each one of them. And the way to imagine it is like a room. Or like a house. You walk into house and it’s got many rooms, and each of the problems has its own room. And you can only think about that problem when you’re in the room of that problem. So you walk into the room, you have a timer there, you can only spend whatever amount of time you’ve dedicated to that problem, for instance an hour today, maybe two hours. The timer is ticking and you have that one hour to solve a problem. And the problem you can imagine it as a whiteboard. So you’re solving this problem on the whiteboard. And as soon as the time’s up, or before the time’s up, you see that you’ve made progress, all you have to do is not exactly — you don’t have to solve the problem, you just have to make positive progress, move forward with the solution.

As soon as you see that you’ve made substantial progress, or the timer’s up you have to leave the room and close the door. And you cannot think about that problem any more, you have to move on to the next one. And so on. And that’s how he structured his day for years and years, and probably still does. And that helped him deal with lots of different things that were going on in his life, and if you want to learn more, you can pick up the book, or if you want to learn specifically about this issue, he has an article on Forbes which is called “Five Steps of Compartmentalization: The Secret Behind Successful Entrepreneurs,” so have a look at that, and he explains all of the things that he was dealing with and how compartmentalization helped him go through that.

So I’ve tried this. I won’t say that I’m a master of this, I still find myself thinking about work afterwards when I’m doing the things I love to do or doing some hobbies or spending time with family, I still find myself thinking of my work, but it takes practice and as you get better at it, I can see the positive benefits of when I am consciously applying this method of reducing my stress, reducing the feeling of overwhelm. So I highly recommend to check out this method and maybe check out the article on Forbes if you’d like to learn more about it, and hopefully it’ll help you in your careers and help you better focus on the things that are important and not get overwhelmed and actually enjoy the journey, enjoy your career, enjoy the times when you’re not at work as well.

So there we go. Hope you enjoyed this episode, and I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, happy analyzing.