Value Synchronicity

Value Synchronicity

Value Synchronicity is the art of using technology to synchronize the values in all areas of your life, so that they work together. Value Synchronicity is taking responsibility for your life in all areas, and using technology to maximize the attainment of personal goals while meeting your financial, emotional and spiritual obligations to your family, your employer, yourself and your God, whatever you conceive him, her or it to be.

Technology has made it possible to coordinate our appointments, emails and contacts between several electronic tools, such as a personal computer and a Personal Digital Assistant or PDA. We call that synchronizing them. The popular term is "hot-syncing".

Technology has also made it possible to synchronize our values across all areas of our life. Perhaps someday that will be called "val-syncing."

Value Synchronicity involves choosing values that resonate with your inner being, the deepest part of you, where only truth exists, and then working to integrate those values into all areas of your life, adjusting as necessary to maintain an appropriate balance between the demands of your spiritual, emotional, social and physical needs.

Sometimes it is easier to recognize Value Synchronicity by examining what it is not. A father that does not do his best to provide financial, emotional and spiritual sustenance to his family is not practicing Value Synchronicity. Value Synchronicity is not being a workaholic, or a playaholic. Someone who is content to remain in their comfort zone and not attempt any changes despite being in an abusive relationship, whether with a friend, a romantic partner, a spouse, a religion, or an employer, is not practicing Value Synchronicity. (And yes, your employer, your religion and your friends can abuse you.)

I have tried my whole adult life to order my life based on my values, and to achieve work-life balance. However, the very term "work-life" balance suggests that our existence is compartmentalized into two parts: 1) our work, and 2) the rest of our life. By suggesting that we need to balance the two, the phrase "Work-life balance" contains an unspoken implication that, like a seesaw, when one receives more emphasis, the other receives less.

The technological advances that have occurred over the past few years have, I believe, changed all that. We are at the dawn of the Knowledge Age, and the tools available to us now that did not exist 20 years ago will change the way we work, live and play for centuries to come. Value Synchronicity is the art of learning how to use that technology to provide an integrated home, work and recreation life.

Just imagine - what if you never had to leave home to get your work done? What if you could do your work when it suits you, not when it suits a clock-punching supervisor? What if you could when and where you work best? What if you could figure out how to accomplish the work required in your job in 20 hours a week, instead of 40, and you got to use all those extra hours for yourself, instead of having your boss just pile more work on you as a reward for being efficient?

In the Industrial Age, we traded our time for a paycheck. That's where the term "punch a clock" was born. In the Knowledge Age, productivity will be rewarded, not just time on the job. Many companies still live in the Industrial Age. Some will live there for decades to come or even longer, until someone figures out how to replace their industrial age work with knowledge work. Robots on assembly lines are a good example of industrial age work being replaced with knowledge work. The person who designs and programs the robots is doing knowledge work.

It may take hundreds of years for every industrial age activity to be replaced with Knowledge work. However, you don't have to wait for that to happen to free yourself from the Industrial Age and take advantage of the Knowledge Age to achieve Value Synchronicity in your own life.

If you work at a progressive company such as Best Buy, who has transitioned its entire headquarters to a Results Only Work Environment (ROWE), you already have the option to work when and where you want, as long as you get your work done to standard, and on time.

Many, many companies could follow the example of Best Buy, and I believe over the coming decades they will. According to the book "Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It" Best Buy experienced a productivity gain of 37% and a decrease in voluntary turnover approaching 90% when they transitioned to the Knowledge Age and allowed their employees to start integrating their life and work more effectively.

Take the case of Trey, chronicled in "Why Work Sucks." His life in a ROWE involves waking up when the sun is too bright for him to sleep any longer. He checks his emails to make sure there are no pressing issues, gets breakfast (or lunch, depending on the time) or a goes for a workout. He spends the afternoon working in his living room, with the TV on in the background. If his work is not done by supper time, he'll do more at night.

Is he being lazy? Instead of being judged by how many hours he spends working, Trey is judged by whether he is getting his work done. He and the team he is on have gotten smarter about how they do their work. Where they used to produce 10 or 12 ilearning courses per month, they now produce as many as 43. Yet Trey only goes into the office before 10 am 2 or 3 times a month, when he has a meeting he needs to be at. His team is getting more done than is expected of them -- they are happy, their boss is happy, and the company they are working for is benefiting from their increased productivity.

Trey is able to organize his day the way he likes and travel when he wants. THAT is Value Synchronicity. THAT is the wave of the future. Some day all knowledge work will be done that way, because it will provide a competitive edge for the companies that do it that way. But, it will take years, perhaps decades, for cultural attitudes to change, until it is more common to equate value in an employment relationship with productivity instead of simply with presence.

I have to chuckle, for I was about to write "until it is more common to equate value in the workplace with productivity." The phrase "in the workplace" reflects our cultural heritage from the Industrial Age - it presumes that work is done at a designated place, the workplace, implying that work can't be done when you are not at that special place. For knowledge workers, that implication is no longer true, as Trey's story illustrates. And yet, our cultural heritage, our attitudes, even our language, reflect industrial age thinking, which is not surprising since we have lived with the Industrial Age for a hundred years or more.

So how do you achieve Value Synchronicity if you don't work for Best Buy, or some other progressive company that has instituted a ROWE? Or, if you are not a knowledge worker?

By becoming a knowledge worker in your spare time, and establishing multiple streams of income on the side that will eventually allow you to leave your industrial age job or your industrial age employer behind you in the Industrial Age, and enter fully into the Knowledge Age.

On this site I will tell you of books that will help you learn how to enter the Knowledge Age and achieve Value Synchronicity in your own life. I will review some of them. In true Value Synchronicity fashion, I will include links to Amazon.com so if you want to go there to buy the book, you can do it with a single click (saving you time) and I will get an affiliate commission (creating an income stream for me, based on Knowledge work. See how that works?)

To your Prosperity and Synchronicity.

Keith Hudson