The Evolving Worker

In this post I’ll outline two techniques to track your feelings and what you have achieved at the end of the day.

Feelings are often overlooked by most of us – sometimes because we have learned that listening to them is interpreted as a sign of weakness.

Some communications techniques such as Nonviolent Communication teach us the contrary: feelings are a powerful sensor. They give you a wealth of informations about what you need.

Here come two simple tools to take more attention about how you feel at the end of the day.

The Niko-niko calendar

The Niko-niko calendar is a simple calendar you can use to track the mood of the day, weither you work alone or as a team. Here is how it works:

• each person has one row on the calendar
• at the end of the day, each person reports his/heer mood on the matching row
• the mood is represented by a face mark: it can be a smiley (good mood, happy), a neutral face (ordinary) or a sad face (bad mood, not happy)

You can either draw the face mark, or use colored pasties to represent the mood. It works best when the calendar is on the wall. While it’s a very simple technique, I’ve seen it work very well for my own uses – it can be used to detect that people (including yourself) are feeling bad and that some issues should be worked out, for instance. While it is not strictly speaking a communication technique, it can complement communication techniques to get a subjective but non ambiguous reflection of the state of mind of everyone.

To my knowledge, this calendar has been invented by Akira Sakata. You can read more about this technique here.

“Plusses and minusses”

It’s a very common pattern to see people in a team feel bad at the end of the day, despite the fact that great things have been achieved sooner in the same day. To overcome this, you can use the “plusses and minusses”.

It is again a very simple technique: at the end of the day, alone, or as a team – or with your husband/wife, go back mentally through the day to see what events happened, what you achieved, what brought you positive feelings and negative feelings. Write them down if you wish.

By doing so, you will most likely discover that good things happened at some point of the day, but somehow you forgot about them. You will also get a better understanding of which situations bring you feelings you don’t like and which situations bring you feelings you love. This way you will be able to drive your activities toward a better satisfaction for the next days – decide to change a specific practice in your job, for instance.

Because we’re not trained to recognize feelings, you can refer to this helpful list of feelings on the Nonviolent Communication website.

If you see that this technique works well for you, you can consider using it on longer period as well. For instance, you can do a retrospective at each end of month, to get a better understanding of what worked well for you, and what brought you pleasure. At the end, you get a better understanding of what is useful to you to feel good.