give some thought to one of your most difficult challenges and see if you are truly out of “WaC.”
By consciously choosing to operate in your WaC area, you are building up another defense against the corporate beast. Your efforts are now concentrated both where you believe they are important and where they can truly make a difference. And you now have energy left over for nurturing your desire for a more satisfying life.
Exercise 4: Determining Your “Want and Can” Area
Learn How to Let Some Balls Drop
One of the biggest challenges in achieving Comfortable Chaos and controlling the corporate beast is to let some balls drop on the ground. Yes, we mean let them drop and possibly not ever pick them up again! This is a tough leap in thinking if you are a perfectionist or someone who is trying to manage beyond your “want and can” area. But even if you do not have these tendencies, it can feel like a failure when something you are juggling lands on the ground. Maybe it will help you if you think of the “item on the ground” as a perfectly acceptable solution. When something lands on the ground, take it as a sign that the ball needs some adjustment or possibly a new home. And be sure to contemplate whether some of the balls you are keeping in the air with great difficultly may also belong on the ground. Consider the following three strategies for letting some balls drop.
Eliminate it
You may have a ball that needs to be deflated and put on the shelf. These are the tasks that just plain need to go away. Scrutinize every one of your regular tasks and decide if it really needs doing. For example, do you really need to dust every week or iron certain clothes? At work, is there a report you are doing just because it has always been done? Look for any opportunity to stop doing something or to do it less frequently. Try it for a few weeks and see what happens. Chances are you, and the people you thought would be impacted, do not notice the change or can at least live with the change.
Redefine done
You may need to swap your ball for something smaller and lighter. For example, let’s say you have seven or eight voicemail messages. Two of the callers have requested specific information and the rest have asked that you call them back. You get the information needed for the two callers and start returning the calls. Three of the callers you were able to reach and the rest you got their voicemails and left messages. Are you done? For some people the answer is no — they don’t feel like their task is complete until they have actually talked with the person. This isn’t necessarily wrong, but it’s much more freeing to consider the task done for this point in time. Look for other situations where you can redefine “done.” Break the task into smaller pieces and revel in “done” for each step of the task.
Redefining done can also mean lowering your standards for certain tasks. For example, instead of only having one definition of a clean bathroom — the one that includes a thorough scrubbing of everything — adopt a “mini clean” definition and every other week do the mini clean. This should be a lower standard of clean that you can finish much faster and still declare “done.” It’s all in how you define it. And whenever you are getting too obsessive about bathrooms and closets, remember what Ann Richards, the former governor of Texas, said, “I don’t want them to put on my tombstone: She kept a very clean house.”
Delegate it
When you delegate, instead of dropping the ball, you are tossing it to someone else. There’s no need to feel guilty about doing this. If you are delegating to your children, you are helping them become more self-sufficient. If you are delegating at work, you may also be enabling someone to learn new skills.
So how do you know if a task is something you should delegate or do yourself? There are two simple strategies when evaluating your to-do list. The first one is to ask yourself, Which of these things can only I do? In other words, you are looking for the tasks that require your unique skills and knowledge, and it would take significant time to train someone else. All other tasks are fair game for delegation.
The second strategy is to look for the items on your list that have been there for two or three days or longer. These are the tasks that linger on your list and are not getting started or completed. Why is this happening? Often there is an underlying reason why you are not able to check them off. It could be that you don’t really value the task or you don’t like the task. It could also be a signal that you need more information or are unsure how to proceed. Whatever the reason, make these tasks candidates for delegation. Your true energy and passion is not behind them and someone else may be better suited for the job. If you are worried that it is an unpleasant task that no one really wants, see if you can swap it with someone else’s undesirable task.
One last thought on delegation: be mindful of the delegate’s situation. At work, check to see that the new task won’t cause the employee to drop other balls. Help the employee assess his or her responsibilities to see if he or she needs to drop, redefine, or delegate other tasks. At home, make sure your family members have the tools to do the job. Delegation may take an upfront time investment, but it can free up buckets of time down the road.
Create (and Keep) Your Boundaries
Boundaries are our own “lines in the sand” that help us keep other people and things from encroaching on our space. They also help us not to encroach on others. Boundaries are excellent tools for reigning in perfectionism and dealing with an imperfect world. When boundaries are lacking, everything can feel out of control. Having boundaries does not mean that you can’t occasionally take work home or let the lines between work and home blur a little. You just need to make sure that it is a conscious choice.
How do you know what your boundaries are? As you get to know and listen to yourself, your boundaries often emerge. Other times, you don’t know you have created a boundary until it feels wrong to step over it.
Sheila negotiated a situation with her employer to have flexible hours so that she could be home early enough to pick up her daughter from the bus stop after school. She got to work between 6:00 a.m. and 6:15 a.m. so that she would be able to leave by 2:45 p.m. She isn’t a morning person, but felt that getting up early was a worthwhile adjustment so she could be with her daughter after school. She also realized that late meetings or last-minute telephone calls would occasionally prevent her from leaving on time, so she worked out a back-up plan with her neighbor for those days. Things went pretty well for a month or two but then the back-up plan became the norm and her neighbor was picking up her daughter three or four days each week. Sheila started to feel angry and resentful about her early morning start when she wasn’t getting the payoff she had envisioned. These feelings made her realize that she had a boundary — she just hadn’t nailed it down. She now knew that having her neighbor pick up her daughter three to four days a week was too much and this shed light on where the line should be in order for her not to feel angry and resentful. She decided that her line in the sand was calling upon her neighbor a maximum of one day per week and a new boundary was born.
Sometimes other people help us define our boundaries. Beth remembers an incident that had a whopping impact on how she set her boundaries. She had agreed to meet her sister at a restaurant after work. Beth’s last meeting of the day at work was running long and she kept anxiously looking at her watch. A key internal customer was talking endlessly. Although it had been an impromptu meeting late in the day that she did not have to attend, Beth didn’t honor her own boundaries and get up and leave. Finally, the meeting ended and she
