This post is written for a friend who has had a medical event….and I think it’s because he puts a lot of pressure on himself, holds himself to impossibly high standards, and is working ALL THE TIME. Here’s some lessons learned on the socially acceptable behavior that hurts you….working too much.
People have asked me what made me successful in my various roles. It took me awhile to figure this out so I’m telling you now: do LESS.
People always assume you have to do more, work harder, put in more hours. “Do more”, “Just do it”…..we get bombarded with these messages all the time. Except…that’s not actually right.
What you want is to do enough to do the job well, no more, no less. Everyone knows about the law of diminishing returns….more and more effort, less benefit. There’s an optimal point. That’s what you really want. So here are some things that have helped me.
- Be brutal about prioritizing: I don’t go to meetings where I’m not necessary. You get invited to lots of meetings…but do they really need you? If I’m not a critical person, I don’t go. I ask myself the question: “Will my participation fundamentally change the outcome of what we’re trying to get done?“. If the answer’s no, I don’t go. (You know when you have to go)
- I block my calendar: yup, senior people do this. We block out Friday afternoons (“Really, you wait till the end of the week to need to see me?”), I block at least a half hour for lunch (“You don’t want to ask me for something when I’m hungry”), I block out half hours so I can do email and actual work because if I book meetings back to back….guess what? I have to do work at night….which is frustrating because everyone’s offline…and I’m basically talking to myself.
- I focus on efficiency: who do I need in a meeting to get things done? What do we need to move the ball forward? What meetings can I cancel? Is there stuff we can figure out offline so that when we meet, we have something to review? We feel so disconnected now that Zoom meetings take the place of social interaction which is great, but not all that productive.
- No work on the weekends: you can look on Sunday night to see what is coming at you Monday morning or during the week, but you can’t work on the weekends unless it’s an extraordinary circumstance. Sorry. No.
- Work smarter, not harder. I often say I’m the laziest person ever…if someone has a deck we can repurpose, a template we can use, anything that gives us a head start, I’m all for it. Nothing is worse than starting from a blank sheet of paper…I know we’re in for a long haul and it’s unnecessary. First of all, most problems/challenges/issues have happened before. Someone’s figured it out. Find the best version of the response and take it to the next level.
I had a professor who assigned a paper…and of course, we all asked how long the paper had to be. His response was “as long as a piece of string to tie up the package neatly.” We all looked at each other…huh? His point was that he didn’t care about the length of the paper, he cared about the content. A beautifully written paper of 5 pages could get an A. A bad paper that was 30 pages long would get a D. It was brilliant.