Originally appeared on: https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/qdtarchive/how-to-avoid-taking-on-too-much-work/
March 29, 2010
Make sure your idea of a day’s work is realistic.
Bernice is ambitious. Her goal is to be CEO (Chief Enlightenment Officer) of the company by the time she’s older. She thinks the way to do it is by making everyone happy. She makes people happy by doing things for them. No project is too big for her go-get-‘em attitude. Unfortunately, she overcommits, and she’s stressed about it.
How to Avoid Taking On Too Much
Bernice’s plight is common. Even for those of us who aren’t very ambitious, it’s easy to say “Yes” when someone asks us to do something. Be in charge of arranging the holiday party for the office? Sure! Arrange for all 219 branch managers to attend? Sure. Seat them and their husbands, wives, significant others, or polyamorous family units so each person is next to one person they know, and one person they don’t know, but who has a common interest. Er, that sounds like a lot of … Yeah, okay. And make sure each dessert is … you get the picture: stress-fest a la mode.
Do You Take On Too Much?
Sometimes, the problem is that we can’t say “No.” You can beat that problem in**the Get-it-Done Guy episode on how to say “No.” Sometimes, though, the problem is that we genuinely mean “Yes,” because we foolishly believe that taking on an extra 15-hour-a-day project in addition to our existing 19-hour-a-day project is perfectly feasible, as long as we really buckle down and give it the old college try. What they never tell you is that the “old college” was a college in England for rich kids who all had servants they could order to do their extra homework.
Why Being an Overachiever is Bad
I fall victim to this overly-optimistic thinking all the time. My coach Michael Neill, author of the book SuperCoach, once asked me, “Are you a high achiever?” I proudly puffed up my chest, sucked in my abs, and flexed my bicep. “Yes,” I replied, in my best manly-man voice. “Oh! That’s the problem,” he exclaimed. Overachieving is a problem? That sure burst my bubble. My bicep flopped back down to the underside of my arm, where it usually lives. My abs followed closely behind.
He explained that many of us hold ourselves to unrealistically high standards. We believe we can do far more than we can, we overcommit, and then we stress out when we can’t get everything done. He recommended I hold myself to a new standard: have an average day. Don’t be a supergeek. Don’t be overachiever-boy. Just be average.
It’s OK to be Average
Having an average day over and over can lead to above-average results!
Average ain’t so bad. I do a lot of writing. I like to imagine I can write ten pages a day. For me, that’s a good day. I regularly push myself that hard, and I regularly fall very, very short of that goal. What would be average? Writing two pages a day. Two pages a day would be average. That doesn’t sound like much. And yet … I write only two pages a week *of podcast scripts, and I’ve written over 120,000 words of finished scripts in two years. That’s the equivalent of a 300-page printed book! If I’d written two pages a *day, I would have written three books in those two years. Average days add up over time.
How to Set Realistic Goals
Let’s put this to work. Choose something you’re overcommitted on, even if the commitment is just to yourself. Something you’ll do today: making sales calls, filing reports, or knitting exciting underwear. Maybe you’ve decided you secretly want a job performing with the circus, so you’re quietly sending out resumes, hoping for an interview as an elephant juggler. Notice your mental fantasy about how much you can get done in a day. “I can send out 250 resumes a day. Not a problem.” Get real. Ask what an average day of elephant juggler resume sending would be. Maybe sending out five resumes and researching for an hour to find more circuses in need.
Now multiply that by five to get an idea how much you’d get done in a week. Five resumes a day would mean 25 resumes a week. Multiply by 4 to discover how much you’d do in a month. Five resumes a day would be 100 resumes a month, or 600 resumes in six months, along with more than two full work-week’s of research. That could add up to a *lot *of elephant juggling.
You can do this with several different ongoing responsibilities. You’ll discover that having an average day over and over can lead to well above-average results.
And now if you’ll excuse me, my biceps are crying out for attention. If I visit the gym three times a week and do two sets of ten hammer curls, that’s 60 hammer curls a week. Manly man physique, here comes Stever!
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
RESOURCES:
/relationships/professional/saying-no-to-difficult-requests – “How to say No” episode.
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Visit the Supercoach book website – Michael Neill’s book, Supercoach
Visit the interview with Michael Neill on Steve Robbins’ website
Conrad Awards – Vote for your favorite high school project team
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the Get-it-Done Guy podcast, an iTunes top-10 business podcast, from 2007 to 2020. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a degree in Computer Science from MIT.
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