Is it possible to get things done by doing fewer things? Yes, but you need to make a mental shift involving your own expectations of yourself…
I came down with a bug of some kind five days ago. A friend who had something similar tells me it takes a week to recover.
In the meanwhile, I feel tired and achy and unable to think clearly, a state of being that is anxiety-producing if you run your own business.
It is just as well I now have a new way of thinking about work and time and productivity, a way which means I am not fretting about all the things I “should” be doing, and that I am not in fact doing.
Why I am not fretting
This new way of thinking is called (in my head): WWIT (or “what would it take”). The longer version is this: “What would it mean to be done for the day?”
The concept came up in an email newsletter I get from author Oliver Burkeman called The Imperfectionist.
I recommend, strongly, that you read the whole thing here. The concept is simple (but better understood when you read it in context):
What you realise, the moment you ask ‘what would it mean to be done for the day?’, is that the answer can’t possibly involve doing all the things that need doing – even though that’s the subconscious goal with which many of us approach life, driving ourselves crazy in the process. If there are a thousand things that need doing, you’re going to need to arrive at some definition of “finished” that doesn’t encompass them all.
The practical application is that you figure out what you can reasonably expect from yourself on any given day and then put only that on your list. If, as Burkeman suggests, you are caring for a three-year-old at the same time as trying to write a departmental review, the thing that will give in the end is the departmental review, whatever you may have expected of yourself.
It’s about your nervous system
Burkeman recommends a video by psychotherapist David Maloney, which I watched and also recommend:
The essential point of the video is this: your thinking brain has a bunch of things it wants to get done. Your nervous system has only one goal: safety. Maloney says (quoted with the help of the YouTube transcript): “When we’re moving towards these higher level goals… we’re basically learning how to get the nervous system to feel safe enough in order to comply with those requests to take action on those goals.”
And if you never feel finished, your nervous system never gets a signal that it can rest. And that way, the last year has taught me, lies burnout.
What I did
I read the email and watched the video while I was supposed to be doing my planning for the following week (yes, I too get distracted), and felt as though a very bright light had been switched on in my head.
I copied the entire text of the newsletter into Word, and made this list of guiding questions, which I now have pasted in bold into my planning spreadsheet:
What would it mean to be done for the day?
What would it mean to be done for the week?
What would it mean to be done for the weekend?
What would it mean to be done for the month?
CRUCIALLY (and this a Burkeman sentence): What it would take to allow yourself to feel done; what you might reasonably expect of yourself today, given your actual situation and limitations, regardless of what might by some other definition “need” doing.
In that very planning session I more than halved the list of things I thought I was going to get done the following week. And you guessed it – I still didn’t get everything done. But I did walk away from my desk every day with a feeling that I had accomplished things.
I then did the same in my planning for the next week, pruning and cutting away – and then I got sick.
And every morning I’ve been looking through my headache at my already pared-down list and thinking: What would it mean to be finished today? A list that had four or five good chunks of work got cut to:
- Check email and social media
- Write the first draft of a blog post
- Send off one piece of writing for a client
And I did get those done, and retired to the couch with a book and a box of tissues mid-morning, feeling less anxious than I usually would about looming deadlines.
Can you apply this in your life?
I’m aware that the luxury of control over your to-do list is not something everyone has. Self-employed people like me can, to greater or lesser degrees, choose how much to do on any given day (if we start to deal with our expectations of ourselves, of course).
But for the parents of small children, or people doing full-time caring, even the concept of making a to do list may be a bridge too far. An idea I found in another newsletter I get, from Pooja Lakshmin may be helpful: that of the Minimum Standard of Care.
Quoting author Eve Rodsky, Dr Lakshmin says the Minimum Standard of Care refers to the process of deciding and naming when a task is done. She uses the example of cleaning your room. You decide that cleaning your room means making the bed and putting your clothes away, and then when you have done that, your room is clean (even if the floor needs mopping and the bin needs emptying).
The minimum standard of care might also be helpful to people with full-time jobs and a toxic-boss-generated list of tasks. There might be no wriggle-room about the end-of-the-week deadline, but can you settle for doing the bare minimum in staying on top of email, for instance? Does a clean email inbox mean you looked at and answered 100 emails? Or does it mean you set up filters so you can find the important ones and answer only those?
In all these scenarios, of course, it’s not the enormity of the task at hand. It’s the standard you hold yourself to that needs to be seen through the prism of kindness and pragmatism.
I give you my best dinner party trick as a guiding star (and I do wish I could remember where I first read about this). An hour before the guests arrive, set the table properly. That is all that is required. The guests won’t care that the kitchen is a mess and that you have a stain on your jeans. The sight of a table with glasses and plates and cutlery will make them believe that all is well, and that there will be food.
And because you have relaxed about the state of the kitchen, and not spent time faffing around finding clean clothes, you will in fact get on with the food, and everyone will have a good time.
I know this is not exactly the same as cutting back on your to-do list and feeling finished at the end of the day. But it’s the mindset that counts: do the thing that it truly important (think about your guests) rather than the anxious-making list of things that “need” to be done.
What works for you?
READ MORE
End-of-year burnout and what to do about it | Safe Hands
The small business year ahead: Adventure – and fear
Inner work: Strange and lovely journeys | Safe Hands
Learning the power of gratitude | Safe Hands
Main picture: Juan Gomez, Unsplash
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