There’s a lot of ways to make work less efficient, but none are as immediately unhelpful as doing someone else’s work.
When we stop our work to do someone else’s work, our work suffers. And frankly, the other person probably doesn’t even want us to carry their stick. I’m not talking about giving a person a helping hand when they ask for it. That’s fine, and it helps the company and yourself in a lot of ways, but chronically assisting so that the other person is hampered or worse yet, isn’t given the space to complete their own work, in their own way – sets us up for bad feelings all around. Let the other guy carry his stick. You go carry yours.
Today I caught myself sitting on the edge of the bed, holding my phone, wondering if I was going to spend a half-hour running or writing. By the time I came to my senses, the half-hour was gone. Tricky little brain. What happened? Back in the day… I mean BACK in the day…before cell phones, cars, and the wheel – prioritizing what we wanted was, well, easy. Food. Safety. Children. Today, we have choices every moment. Should we go for a run or write a blog post? Iron a shirt for work or check our cell phone? Play with our kids or achieve inbox zero? Here’s the deal: desires and choices have increased by the hundred-fold and we’re still using the same equipment to prioritize them – our brain. That brain depends on us to already know what we’re going to focus on so that it can act. Otherwise, it defaults to conserving energy – which makes sense – if getting your next meal takes all day. We needed energy management more than decision management back then. Today, broccoli comes in bags and fish come wrapped in paper. We better have a better decision-making plan, otherwise, our brain will have us in a recliner while our life passes by.
Today, I told myself that I can’t catch up. As soon as I thought that, my clever little brain went to work. “Can’t catch up,” it thought. “OK, got it. ” Boop beep boop… it came back with a confirmation number. “Confirmation 100, 231, 973.23 – You can’t catch up – true – you have 348 unread emails, there is 15 days worth of laundry to do, both dogs need their nails done…” boop beep “more data coming” boop “…additional confirmation – dishwasher needs emptying, you have four large projects at work, none of which are a slam dunk – roger that. More work is 99.9% likely to come while you are doing these tasks, therefore, you are, for sure, unable to catch up.” Whew! All is right with the world, my thinking is valid. Too bad I’m no better off.
We’re talking about confirmation bias here. Your brain is like a new employee that just wants to please you. It’s sure you’re right and it’ll work hard to prove it. With great power, comes great responsibility… manage that clerk wisely.
Brain: Beep, Boop…. “What?”
Your brain will double check this thought. After all, it’s going to take a little work to confirm this new theory.
Brain: “Hey, don’t you want me to prove that you can’t catch up? I have all that data right here.”
Don’t fall for that. Stay strong. Breathe in, breathe out. You got through yesterday, didn’t you? So…
You: “Brain, please confirm – I have everything I need to get the most important things done today.”
Here’s what my brain does…
Brain: “Well…. I’m not sure. What’s on the docket that’s important?” Boop beep boop “Ok, you have to finish your report, make progress on project #1 by..” boop beep…” talking to the project manager… and …. do one load of laundry so you don’t have to wear pajamas to work… and you have to feed the dogs – roger that. Yes! You do have everything you need to get the most important stuff done.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. Whew! Great. My brain comes back online.
Brain: “Hey, want me to toss in that laundry?”
“Yes,” I say, “hell yes.”
When’s the last time you introduced yourself at work without applying a label? Hi, I’m Amy. I’m in IT. I’m a manager. I’m a life coach. I’m a person who lost her indoor voice.
We all do it. When we think of who we are, we think of our roles in life. We think of our attributes, our situations, and our possessions. And we kinda think that those things… possessions, roles, attributes tell us something about who we are and who other people are. For sure, I know something about you if I find out you’re a Yankees fan. I mean, come on…. go Mets.
The problem with identifying our self with those roles, values & possessions is that those things all change. One day you’re little. The next day you’re old. You are still YOU though, aren’t you?
I have a car, the car gets wrecked. Still me.
I think a thought, I forget that thought. STILL ME. See that? You are not your thoughts. You’re not your job and you’re not the feelings you have. If you can change something and still be you, then you are not that thing.
Why does this matter? Because the minute we separate ourselves from all of that – we’re left with ourselves as whole, complete & utterly perfect. We’ve separated what matters from what’s window dressing. From here, we can truly risk anything, go anywhere and be anyone – knowing that who we are is enough.
Once we achieve a goal, we expect to land in Nirvana park. We open the gate and find, to our dismay, that the park isn’t built yet. It’s empty. The grass isn’t planted, the pathways aren’t laid out and there are no unicorns. Bummer.
We can shut the gate and start eating, or overworking, or drinking or go back to the position we left, or we can go through the gate and start creating the new future and identity we want.
This Identity building takes heart and courage. It calls on us to engage with uncertainty (which our brains do not like) and it requires our imagination.
Sometimes, we’re not up to all that, and that’s OK. Sometimes, we dawdle near the gate, opening and closing it, working up the courage to go through. That’s OK.
Sometimes, we head back to the couch for Netflix and Oreos – and that’s OK.
But sometimes, we go through the gate with a sense of curiosity and wonder. We find a small tree, lying flat with its roots wrapped in burlap and push it upright. We notice an overturned table and set it up. We hear the birds and feel the breeze on our face and wander further inside…
And start to build. Now we are, for the moment, divine.
I’m late for work – and that’s OK.
I’ve got more emails than I can answer today – and that’s OK.
My dog is sick – and that’s OK.
And it is. In one sense, when we find ourselves in a situation, confronted with the reality of something – be it trivial or life-changing, our resistance to it doesn’t help. And that’s OK, reminds us to accept what is while we look for what’s next. And that’s OK.
“Crate, crate, crate, crate, crate, crate, crate,” he said.
He knew that I knew how to crate train a dog.
He also knew that I didn’t want to do it.
He did me a great favor by not being willing to entertain my waffling, my desire to evade and escape the fact that if I wanted to own a dog that was safe at home, understood how to behave while I was at work and didn’t tear up my house or defecate inside, I needed to woman up and do the thing. The one thing. The thing that works.
So I did.
And it worked.
Planning your day, your life and your dreams works. We don’t want to do it. We want another way. We want to pretend it will all come together without it.
How do you get to your dreams?
Plan, plan, plan, plan, plan, plan, plan.
There’s a problem with that though – most of the time, you’re sending the information you have through a filter. Would you like to experience that filter right now? Here’s a little trick I picked up from “The Untethered Soul” by Michael A. Singer.
Close your eyes, then turn your head to the right – and open your eyes. Don’t think about what you are looking at, just absorb it all directly.
You see it all, don’t you? The walls, the colors, the textures.
Now, try to explain what you see to yourself. Notice how l..o..n..g that takes, notice how much less you can get into scope. That’s the filter.
When we interact with others during our workday, we “see” their actions through the filter. First, the person says or does something. That first observation of the other person is the true, unfiltered observation. That’s the fact. Then we start to apply our filter, explain what might be happening, guess what’s in someone else’s head. It get’s long…. it becomes dramatic and it’s all… made up. By our brains, to help us understand the world.
But your brain is very busy. The filter it applies to the situation will be the last one it used in context – and that can lead to some strange results.
So before you think you’re looking at two huge and very still monkeys, make sure you’re using the right filter. Make sure are dealing with what you know… not what you’re guessing.
We want to grab our habits by the middle and run off with them. Sorta like picking up a puppy. Habits are more like lemurs than puppies. If you’re going to grab this guy, you’re going to need a plan, dudette.
Habits are hard to wrangle. You need to make sure you know where the head is at. You need to watch out for the tail and you have to make sure you’re using the correct approach.
The start of a habit is the cue – you find another habit, or a time of day, or a situation that will be the launching point. When I get up, I’ll stretch. When I finish brushing my teeth, I’ll put on my running shoes. At noon, I’ll go for a walk. When someone asks me how I’m doing, I’ll take the opportunity to learn more about them.
The body of the habit is the action you want to take on the regular, such as stretching, exercise, or building your network daily.
The tail of the habit is where it all gets good. We need to seal our habits with a bit of serotonin, something to create a drive response the next time the cue occurs. So the tail is the beautiful part – when you give yourself a pat on the back – when you stop and recognize just why you picked up this habit in the first place.
As you apply this process, you’ll notice that the cue will begin to trigger a small “awareness” or spark. That’s the drive response, the dopamine hit, urging you to take the action, get to the middle so that you can feel the lovely tail again.
So if you really want that habit, give it a head and a long, luxurious tail.
One day, I attended a meeting that was full of people from all areas of IT. We were evaluating an expensive product that would be a large undertaking to launch.
A recently hired VP, whom I’d not previously met, walked into the room. The seats at the main table were full. I offered him my comfortable chair at the table, but he declined. He sat in a small, hard chair against the wall. During a break, when this man spoke to me, he used my first name. He had little to say in the meeting, yet he’d been paying full attention to what was happening in the room, not distracted by his own importance or the discomfort of the chair.
Over five years have gone by and I still recall that day. That’s how remarkable being fully present is.
It’s also true that we need to set goals and plan, to think of what to next and how to assist our teams and serve our company. The key is to make sure we keep both of these things, being here and getting there – in harmony. At work, we need to be here & there.
This concept is much better expressed in this book: Awake at Work: 35 Practical Buddhist Principles for Discovering Clarity and Balance in the Midst of Work’s Chaos, by Michael Carroll
For instance, I know that I’m never going to punch a co-worker. It’s like, a policy. Even if our HR department decided that full-blown fisticuffs at work were going to be A-OK – I know, I’m still never going to punch anyone. After all, I made it through 8th-grade gym without resorting to violence – I’m pretty well solid for work.
When you already know what you want to do, make it a policy. You never have to rethink, waste brain cycles or agonize again. Here are some of mine:
– I don’t fill out surveys
– I don’t point fingers at other teams
– I don’t get offended
– I never hesitate to speak from the heart when offering praise
– I always vote in favor of pets at work
– Biology rules – no forced marches, no working thirsty
– People first, then money, then things
– I’m 100% as worthy as everyone else
– Boots on the trail before you bail
– Never leave a hiker behind
Can you see how these policies save me time? If I know I’ll never leave a hiker behind, then I always pack a bivy, protein bars, and a cell phone charger. Done and Done.
Stuff is broken at work. It’s broken at my day job, it’s broken at my personal business. Stuff is broken at your place too.
How do I know? Nothing is perfect. And that includes work.
If you’re working, then situations, people, policies and processes are in flux. When things are in flux, some of it is just plain no good.
Here’s the deal – killing yourself to make it all look like it’s functional doesn’t help. A car with a cracked bearing is not a sustainable system. Turning up the radio and being willing to drive to Oklahoma in it doesn’t make anything better.
When we do other people’s work, when we say we’re following a broken policy and then we do something else or when we work eighty hours to do in a week what is flat out not reasonable, we’re just kicking the can down the road. Tough news to hear, I know. I’ve kicked many cans. I kicked one yesterday.
So tonight, I’m going to raise a toast to our 18th President:
“I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.” – Ulysses S. Grant
Bottoms up, folks.
Here’s what we say – “She’s driving me crazy.” “He’s making me angry.” “I’m trying to make her happy and she’s never satisfied.”
Here’s the truth – “When I think that she’s unreasonable, it makes me crazy.” “When I think he doesn’t respect me, I get angry.” “I can’t control how she feels, so I can’t make her happy or satisfied.”
When we attribute our feelings to circumstances or other people, then we’ve just handed our game controller to someone else, usually the last person on the planet we’d want running the emotional show. In an absolute double whammy, we also stop actively managing our own feelings.
Even if it was true that someone else could control our feelings, believing that is a dead end. It leaves us with nowhere to go.
Always know who’s in control of your feelings. I’ll give you a hint: it’s not your co-worker.
Here’s what we do, we start where we are and we wind up in Albuquerque, which would be fine, except we were wishing for Canada.
Working backward is more than just beginning with the end in mind (thank you, Stephen Covey), it’s literally working back from the end. First, define your results. What the heck do you want? And make sure you’re looking at your results – not someone else’s. Lining this up is critical. It can literally be all you need to move from daily misery to loving your job.
We tell ourselves we want our boss to be better at managing the influx of work. You might as well wish to visit the land of misfit toys. Come on. You got no control over that. Try this instead – I want to walk out of work each day knowing I crushed it, no matter what happened. Now, that? That’s something you can sink your teeth into. So work backward from that, my friend You know what you have to do to get that result. Write the action steps down. Now you got some traction, buddy. Next, how do you have to feel to do that stuff you do so well? You know it. High five.
Simple as pie… ask yourself what you have to be thinking about your current situation to get yourself that feeling. Now that? That’s a road map to success.
We notice it when work piles up. We notice a four car pile up. We notice a pile of laundry, and it kinda bothers us. Or it REALLY bothers us. And then, we pay more attention to that pile up than before.
What piles up, we notice.
If you want to notice the good things in life as much as you notice the piles of work and laundry, then you have to create some great pile ups for yourself.
Be a collector of good memories. Be a noticer of happiness, pay attention to all the things you are grateful for. Stock pile your compliments and catalog your successes.
Make HUGE piles of these things.
We notice things that pile up. True dat.
My own spiritual tradition asks me to reflect daily on the following facts: I am of the nature to have ill health, I am of the nature to die, it is the nature of all things to change. Everyone I love and every thing I hold dear will be taken from me.
Now what?
So don’t push this aside. Sit down, pour yourself a cup of tea or coffee, or a glass of wine. Write down each and every thing you would do with your last 24 hours on earth if they started right now. Really do it. We’ll wait.
What you wrote? That is a declaration of your core values.
You want to know what’s important? Read that page.
You want to know what you should be doing with your time? Read that page.
Namaste, baby.
Peace.
You are your own employment agency. You get yourself a customer, and you supply labor to that customer. If you don’t like what you’re doing – tell your boss. Tell you. If you’re not happy, tell your boss. Tell her you want more work life balance, tell her you want a raise. Tell her, for pity’s sake, that you want an atta-girl. I mean really, would it be so hard for her to give you one?
Look at your boss. She has so much power over you. She decides the fate of your very livelihood.
Hey, tell her you want better chow in your lunch bucket, and an afternoon walk. Go for the moon, after all, she’s the boss of you – she has the power. All she has to do, is make it her priority.
Think of how much better an employee you’ll be when your boss listens to you.
I’m not the boss of you – and neither is anyone else.
The fact is, we can’t control the results other people get. I can’t make you have a good experience coaching with me. My husband can’t make me get to bed on time. I, for sure, can’t make him empty the dishwasher and I can’t make my daughter-in-law take more time for herself. I can’t make the people on my team take the opportunities I find for them, and I can’t control how hard or how long they are willing to work, nor what their goals in life are. Neither can you.
That doesn’t mean we can’t provide resources, opportunities, and training. We can, but the other truth is, their success doesn’t depend on us. Think about how many times you’ve learned a skill without your employer sending you to training. Think about how many times you’ve found your own opportunities and donated your own resources to accomplish things at work. People succeed and fail, grow and stumble, regain their feet or lie down and cry for a bit, regardless of what we want or do. Sometimes, they rise up in spite of us or fall down despite our help.
The more interesting question is – What results do YOU want?
The problem with this is, when we try to look into the future to figure out what we want out of life, that list doesn’t leave us much to go on. You gotta pick happy or bust, right? But what about inspired? Don’t you want to feel that? If you head to work on Monday, wanting to feel inspired, how is that different than feeling happy? Is it part of happy?
What about masterful? That’s a whole different animal riding the elevator to your office if you’re aiming for masterful. Motivated? Carefree? Creative?
What if you decided to feel accomplished today? What might you be thinking on the way to work if that was the feeling you sought?
Feel me? When you have a better vocabulary for emotions, you get a richer picture of your future.
I spent a morning reading through a long list of words that describe emotions. I underlined every one that appealed to me. Then I analyzed them. I noticed patterns, clusters.
For example, abundant, assured, at ease, authentic, centered, genuine and relaxed all seemed in alignment. For me, I call this grouping “Marvelous”. I have a very clear picture now of how marvelous feels and I’ve made that my “go-to” emotion. I notice how I stand when I feel marvelous, how my face feels and the way my vision is. I feel relaxed and competent. I love feeling like this and I practice it often.
How about this group: awesome, energetic, enthusiastic, inspired, invincible, jubilant and triumphant. For me that all rolls up to exuberance. Now I know, if I want to go into work and just crush the day, exuberance is my friend.
What about you? How many words do you have to describe the subtleties of emotion? How do you want to feel? Don’t say fine.
But – didn’t you have problems when you were younger? I did.
I had to learn to use an alarm clock, to get myself ready, to leave the house on time, shut the door behind me and catch the bus if I wanted to make it through second grade.
When I got older, I had to get home on time to watch my brother. I couldn’t get detention, I couldn’t miss the bus. I had to get home on time, daily.
Once I mastered that, I had to get a car. Then I had to figure out how to know when to put gas in it, because the gas gauge didn’t work Many nights, I literally coasted home.
See what I mean? Once you solve one problem, overcome one hurdle, another one comes up. If you hit the lottery – problems. You get a major new client – problems.
If you’re alive, you have problems. What you think about them is up to you.
Me? I say – Congratulations girl, you solved one. Go find another.
I mean, come on, what’s in it for you?
We all have reasons for why we work where we do, but we lose sight of them in the day to day hustle of just getting stuff done. When we forget why we’re at work, we invite dissatisfaction. We invite discouragement.
At some point, you applied for, interviewed for or stumbled into your current position, and you did it for some very good reasons. What were those reasons? Take a moment to think about the answer to that question. Remember why you wanted this job. At some point, I hope you were excited to be hired at your company.
We do not have to work at our current jobs. We can quit. We can stop paying our bills, we can look for other work. But for most of us, we want to be there. We want to pay our bills, we want our current jobs.
Don’t let your brain tell you that you are a victim of circumstances. Know why you’re there.
Or at least, my brain thought there was a tiger. What really happened is that I misunderstood something. I thought our team needed to do one thing, but in truth, we were supposed to do something else. But that’s not what caused the trouble for me.
Trouble came when I let myself believe and behave as if that mistake was as dangerous to me as a tiger.
Our brains don’t differentiate between a tiger that can kill us and a social faux pas that could get us tossed off our social island. For most of our history, the two things amounted to the same result. Death.
So when I goofed up, I got scared. I treated a paper tiger as if it were a real tiger and overreacted. Not good. I got called out on my actions. Deserved.
When at work, I remind myself – these issues are paper tigers. They can’t kill me, but jumping out a window to escape them, just might.
You have thoughts, but you don’t have to believe them.
When I first deeply understood that my brain was just handing me the easiest thought it could grab, I remember exactly where I was. I’d been believing myself for so long – reacting to my thoughts and acting on them as if they were the one true law, that figuring out thoughts might just be random, or the equivalent of mental junk food, made me feel like the butt of the biggest joke ever. EVER.
I was so angry that I literally didn’t think for twenty minutes. I was a practicing meditator but I’d never had my thoughts just stop like that. My inner observer, what I call Big Mind, just noticed that I had no thoughts.
I was able to walk home, put away the dog’s leash, get into the shower, dress for work, all with “no thoughts”. No self-referential thinking, no inner chatter. Just silence. The effect of that twenty minutes on me was profound.
I no longer believe the first thing my brain hands me – and that? Is a darn good thing.
The past isn’t good or bad. It just is.
What I said yesterday, is over.
I can apologize for it but I don’t get a do-over.
The hand we were dealt, is just that. The starting place for today. Family members have illnesses. Some of my dreams did not come true. The lifespan of a dog is not the same as that of a human. Accidents, misfortune, joy, and triumph all brought us to today.
The place you find yourself now is where your work is. Now is where you are.
When I wish that things didn’t happen as they did, when I imagine what will befall me tomorrow, I lose my opportunity to take the only action I can – here in the now.
The past is just a circumstance. There is nothing for me to do in the past. All my work is here, in the now.
Customers would call with some crazy requests.
“Lakeview Deli, how can I help you?” We’d say.
“Hi, um, we’re having twenty guests for dinner in a half-hour and we forgot to hire a caterer. Can you send over a cold cut platter, salads and bread for twenty people and deliver it by six pm? And by the way, we’re about thirty minutes away. “
We’d answer politely and decline, regretfully.
But after we hung up, we’d pantomime holding the phone and say “What? Haha! No.” And we’d laugh, because saying no, without apology, felt good.
Learning to say no, without drama or apology, without resentment or guilt, is one of the key skills we need in life. Not every request that is made of us needs to become our priority. We’re allowed to have our own priorities.
How do you get good at saying no? You practice. Try it. Tomorrow, say no to three things at work, without apologizing. And then give yourself a little pat on the back. “What? Haha! No.”
Most of the time, we make decisions by asking ourselves what is the worst thing that can happen for each choice. It’s absolutely good to know the answers to that because if we didn’t understand negative consequences, we might make some pretty awful choices.
What we don’t do, is ask ourselves what is the best case that can come from a decision. Asking that question is important because we don’t only want to decide to take the action that mitigates the worst case. We want to also make sure we don’t miss out on the opportunity to achieve the best case outcome.
Notice that when we imagine the worst case, it’s easy to imagine the very dramatic, worst of the worst. Notice that you have to keep prodding at yourself to get your mind to offer up the very dramatic best case. Good to know.
Sometimes I read books of Zen stories. There’s always some old wise man saying something inscrutable like “Wash the dish, don’t wash the dish – same thing.”
“No way,” I think. “It’s not the same thing at all.” And then I puzzle over it, turn the idea over and over. What could be meant by that?
Life is a mixed bag. A lot of the time you’re going to have problems. If you wash the dish, you’ll have to do the work and then put it away. If you don’t wash the dish, you’ll have no clean dish to use. No matter what choice you make, challenges will come.
We prevaricate and procrastinate because we think there’s some better choice, that there’s a way to win and a way to lose. We stand in the grocery aisle and goggle at hundreds of colorful boxes, unable to choose one and move on. We see the decision as an end-point when in reality it’s just one point among millions in the long lines of our lives.
A choice is just the entry point to the new challenges ahead.
Wash the dish, don’t wash the dish.
Same thing.