A Strange Intersection: Lawn Mowing and IT

Most people disdain mowing their lawn and hire it out when they can afford it.?It’s a messy, time-consuming physical task with troublesome equipment to maintain.?But not me – I cherish the opportunity because it has an unexpected benefit for my job as a leader in IT. At this point, you probably think I am crazy, but let me explain.

I started mowing the lawn when I was in grade school and have always loved it.?I would push mow my grandmother’s yard for a few dollars and later learned to drive a small riding lawn mower to help my dad on the 13 acres we lived on just outside of town. Eventually we upgraded to a larger lawn mower with a 6-foot-wide cutting swath, and I would mow even more of the land. I was hooked and my very first paying summer job was maintaining the grounds surrounding a massive Western Auto distribution center.?This was a 40 hour per week task that involved push mowers, riding mowers, weed trimmers and even a full-size tractor with a mower attachment for the larger areas.?During college, I lived in apartments and didn’t have the opportunity to mow but I would always do so when I went home to visit.?Today, I live in a suburb with a much smaller yard – but the hour it takes me to mow and trim it is one of the most valuable hours of my week.

During these times, I found that I would think about all sorts of topics that had nothing to do with the blades of grass in front of me.?Often I would process the day's events or think about something that was coming up. It was a few years into my career in IT that I discovered a connection between mowing and increasing success in my professional work.?I learned that while I was mowing these thoughts would often shift to things going on at work. Sometimes it would be about a particular piece of code that was giving me trouble, sometimes it was about the best way to structure a solution.?As my career progressed, those thoughts changed too – focusing on organizational design, mentally creating a PowerPoint presentation to explain a complex situation or strategies for selling a project to executives.?Each time I finished mowing, everything around that troubling task would have clarity and I’d be able to quickly complete whatever next steps remained.

The task of mowing is quite organized in and of itself – a messy lawn made clean. Tools used repeatedly and with high familiarity. Straight lines reflecting a carefully done task.?Cleanly trimmed edges reflecting a job well done. The white noise of the engine shutting out the rest of the world. The realization was this – mowing provided me a captive moment of mindfulness and thoughtfulness, a kind of Zen.

A few of my colleagues know this strange practice of mine and I will sometimes call out in a conversation “I just need to mow and think about this.?I’ll get back to you.”?While it sounds strange, they know that I am conveying my need to take all of the input that I’ve received, deliberate and strategize and come back with a set of collected thoughts.

So why do I feel this is important to share??There are a couple of reasons at the forefront.

For one, in professional settings, there is an underlying expectation to provide an answer on the spot.?Sometimes the situation demands a quick response, such as a production issue, and that’s ok.?However, most often, the decisions we need to make do allow for some time in the process so why not take it? When doing this, it’s important to communicate why you are going to delay the decision and what you will be doing with the time you take.?Good leaders will understand and respect the fact that you are being careful about the decisions you make. As always, be mindful of the situation and use this prudently.

The second reason is that we get can too easily get caught up in the busyness of our lives, the constant input of an always-connected world and often don’t take the time for ourselves. When my daughter was in elementary school, she had a 3-wheel stand-up scooter that she would ride around the driveway.?Almost every evening after school, she would announce “I’m going out to scooter”.?And she’d do so – sometimes she’d sing little tunes, sometimes listen to music from her iPod and sometimes she was just quiet - but always moving.?She continued this into junior high and a little into high school until she got too big (and embarrassed) to keep doing it.?She didn’t recognize it at the time, but she was making and taking time for herself. These were her moments to collect her thoughts and create moments of calmness.

As working, responsible adults, we need this too.?These are the opportunities where we can process complex ideas, make business and personal decisions or just take time to let your mind go where it wants.

This is the opportunity that mowing provides for me and how I leverage it in both the IT world and my personal life.

What are your techniques??What do you do to organize thoughts?