Dr Magdalena Bak-Maier shares how organisational coaches and their clients are using her Grid™ work-life balance and productivity tool to achieve results in balance with life
Working hard and being well-known in the field of performance coaching across the world, I am no stranger to high-intensity work that can result in burnout.
On the flip side, as Daniel Kahneman, research psychologist and author of Thinking Fast and Slow, shows through thinking errors and habitual behaviours, even the most efficient people can get caught up in bad decisions.
As a trained neuroscientist and coach, I invented the Grid™ to help me visually manage my life and stay productive on a sustainable basis after noticing that my thinking was often skewed towards decisions that eroded my health and wellbeing. The same was true for many people I worked with as an internal, and later an external, coach.
The Grid’s key goal is to help people establish work-life ‘alchemy’ based on an idea that fulfilling lives and careers thrive in balance. They occur when we can keep focus on and attend to four key domains: life, self-care, work and career.
In developing the Grid, I merged neuroscience insights with positive psychology, leadership development, art therapy and humanistic sensibility based on empirical observations of what worked in my one-to-one practice.
Since publishing the tool in 2015 as a book, the Grid has been taken up and used by many academic institutions, where I’ve been invited to teach it, and is reaching a wide spectrum of professionals across different sectors, roles, ages and countries. It was recently adopted by the coaching academy at Network Rail to support its HR strategy.
What is it?
The Grid™ is a visual planning tool based on a simple idea of a 2 x 2 matrix that divides everything you do into four domains: 1. Life, 2. Self-care, 3. Work/business and 4. Career.
It is designed to help people balance life and work and become holistically productive. Using this general framework, the user or client can construct a yearly, monthly and even daily Grid that allows work to be clarified, clustered, broken down into doable chunks and tracked with colour all in one place. This means that the person is able to create results in balance with life instead of at the expense of it.
How it works
A person starts by building a 2 x 2 Grid canvas (Figure 1 below) dividing all activity into four quadrants representing the four domains (Life, Self-care, Work, Career). The horizontal and vertical lines help designate important boundaries around where focus shifts from work to life (horizontal line) and what activities demand energy and which restore it (vertical line).
The person can construct a Grid on a piece of paper, on an iPad or their computer for a specific time period; this could be a year, six months, a month, a week or even a crucial day. The Grid recognises that self-care (quadrant 2) and career management (quadrant 4) represent critical and often overlooked domains when it comes to getting results, and staying creative and happy.
By taking a holistic approach to productivity, the Grid helps people achieve results through overall balance instead of by deadlines. It does this by helping users develop a diagram of their overall commitments and uses energy and task matching to help the person make best use of time against their complete agenda.
All activities are allocated to the four quadrants, grouping and clustering each specific task under themes called ‘homebases’.
One of the distinct features of the Grid is training the user to break all effort into tasks – a single sitting activity – so that whenever work is done, at the end of this, one can highlight that piece of work as completed. By matching tasks with energy and using time in a far more efficient manner, this creates an upward spiral, more efficient work flow and allows the person to attend to their complete life (see Figure 2 below).
Apart from a few basic guidelines and putting a big emphasis on the tool being visual and a constant aid, the Grid construction offers users high levels of creative freedom. This allows all Grids to fit different personalities, creative preferences, devices and circumstances, ensuring everyone can benefit equally.
So, for example, while an engineer may create a Grid on an Excel spreadsheet and a graphic artist construct a Grid using their iPad Procreate drawing app or a MindMapping tool, a nurse may draw one in their paper diary.
Key neuroscience elements the Grid draw on are clarity, order, focus, energy surfing and task completion, as these have been shown to aid performance and boost motivation. The Grid is an incredibly powerful coaching aid for clients who want to improve their productivity, wellbeing and overall satisfaction.
What makes it different?
The Grid is highly original, approaching productivity from a holistic and creative perspective over deadline driven task management tools. First, the Grid recognises that today’s lives are often skewed towards making people trade off activities that are restorative only to dampen creativity and grind performance to a halt. To offset this, the Grid forces the user to consider what results they want to create across their total life. It is a life management system.
The Grid is also a productivity tool merging the best aspects of a short and focused to-do list, with an ordering system that lists generally lack, a specific timescale that is user defined, and creativity and freedom that helps the user enjoy making and using the Grid on a regular basis.
Completion of work is emphasised by focusing on clarifying key work, task chunking and regular motivation boosts that come from a process of celebrating each task as it is completed.
Instead of working on a strict plan or to a deadline, the Grid guides people to work on tasks using inspiration, flow and energy. As energy levels are in constant flux, the Grid recognises that trying to do something one is not quite ready for undermines results, demotivates and tires – while working to realise one’s vision inspires. To achieve this, the Grid helps the person clarify their responsibility and agenda, and then fulfil it in a way that fits them best.
To track progress, the Grid uses colour and highlighting so that what is initially a black and white map, gains progressively more colour, thus helping highlight what is getting overlooked.
Gridding – using Grids to support productivity – develops leadership and resilience. The Grid’s design starts with the user having agency and inviting him/her to construct the Grid they want to have and can achieve. It then develops responsibility and self-leadership by supporting the realisation of results revealing continuous progress. This way the person develops factual insight into what works and doesn’t work in practice and for them.
The user’s experience
We support anyone motivated to discover, unlock and realise their potential. We do this professionally, mindfully and with kindness. We do this as an internal coaching service over and above our contracted roles.
The ‘over and above’ aspect and our strategy to be professional, develop our capability and ethical maturity, led me to a tool that could help maintain or enhance the wellbeing of our team and performance.
It needed to be simple to use, visual and able to integrate the things that typically led to anxiety, stress and conflict, for example, work and life balance, things that you need to do versus things you (often unconsciously) want to do, the activities that give you energy versus those that deplete it. Therefore, it needed to be holistic, allow us to distinguish the wood from the trees and both hold our attention and bring attention.
I introduced the Grid to the team via a masterclass on holistic productivity. We used a mix of activities that included mindfulness, TED talks on self-compassion and motivation, productivity hacking, coaching and a heart/mind fusion exercise. The Grid was integral to the process of bringing thinking and discovering wisdom together into one place.
From both a coaching and humanistic perspective the Grid allowed us to integrate heart, mind and spirit. It showed us the way and at the same time mapped our progress, which is truly motivational. It transpired that it is also a fantastic map for use in supervision, encouraging reflective practice and leading to a kind, compassionate way of being.
- Ivan Beaumont is an internal academy coach at Network Rail
The client’s experience
Ivan Beaumont, my coach at Network Rail, recommended that I read The Get Productive Grid (M Bak-Maier, 2015). I’ve now completed the book and the three-month review. Overall, I’ve really enjoyed using the Grid system.
It is deceptively simple as a concept and I think it’s only when you put it into practice that you realise how powerful it is as an approach.
It’s allowed me to ‘give myself permission’ to do things. What I love is finding those slots of 10 or 15 minutes when I don’t want to start something new, but I’m not quite sure what to do. I look at the Grid and identify a task I can complete which is usually a step towards a bigger goal.
It gives a sense of satisfaction in a way that I don’t have to give a lot of time to, but allows me to continue moving forward on multiple fronts.
Another thing I’ve really appreciated is the principle of breaking down bigger goals into their constituent parts. For example, on my first grid there were two boxes which resolutely didn’t change status – I wasn’t doing them. After a while I took a closer look and ended up breaking the individual tasks into six or seven component parts each. I was then able to complete the activity by tackling each of the components one by one.
One of my main successes, from that learning, was the recruitment of an individual into our team. This is something that would normally have taken me a long time as I wouldn’t have prioritised the activity. However, because I had broken it down into easy to complete steps I had the whole thing done, from start to offer, within two weeks. I’ve never done this before and was amazed at how quickly this helped me to do something that could otherwise have dragged on beyond a month/six weeks.
I’ve chosen not to create the Grids physically as I’m reasonably mobile and I know any piece of paper would become dog-eared with use. The software I use is a mind-mapping app. The app gives me flexibility in terms of its functionality, one of which is that the map exists in an ever-expandable universe. It also provides creative options in terms of how to colour/mark/flag each box.
- Jeremy Bullock is a programme manager at Network Rail
Pros and Cons
Upside
- It is often easy to assume we’re far more balanced and achieving than we really are. The Grid provides actual evidence about how things are so that coaching can be well-targeted and re-balancing actions identified.
- Whether done alone or with a coach, the Grid raises self-awareness and also helps the client clarify what they want out of life, work, their career and how they need to feel to do their best.
- Grid assisted work and coaching helps people integrate often separate domains into one whole and also helps the client integrate within connecting aspirations, goals and desires with action.
- Because of its flexibility, the Grid can be easily adapted to different clients, circumstances, team coaching and even performance management.
Downside
- Because the Grid is deceptively simple it can be easy to dismiss.
- Because of the time needed to construct the Grid in the first place, some people may not want to invest this time and can’t discover the Grid in action.
- People who try it but don’t follow the few basic rules may not get the desired results, which is why they may need Grid coaching to help support those new to this tool and process.
- Dr Magdalena Bak-Maier is the inventor of the Grid™ and author of The Get Productive Grid. For Grid coach training and other workshops visit:
- www.maketimecount.com
- She will be offering a Coaching at Work masterclass on helping your clients and yourself be effective, build results and stay resilient with the Grid. Details to be announced.
Figure 1: The four quadrants of The GridTM
Figure 2: An example of a monthly Grid
