For the overcommitted, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. My wife practically had a nervous breakdown this Sunday trying to figure out what the next right step for her business is, a discussion which spilled over onto much of our scheduled workday on Monday. I had the same experience this morning, wanting to crash back out – though that may have been related to my loss of three days in this vacation. I thought I was going to be able to take the whole week off, but the way timing worked out I could only take off Tuesday. So when I woke up this morning, I found myself trying to figure out how to do three days’ worth of work in one half a day (since I go to writing group Tuesday evenings) and I wanted to just go back to bed. I eventually picked one thing, but even that’s something that I wasn’t sure I could get done.
That’s where “minus one” comes in.
“Minus one” is a strategy that goes hand in hand with, but is opposite from, “work just a little bit harder than you want to”. Where “harder than you want to” often gets you 10x the reward in 0.1x the time – because our monkey brains often want to quit just before we are about to have a breakthrough – “minus one” handles the opposite monkey instinct, biting off more than we can chew.
So, when you have a dozen things to do, or even just a few, deliberately choose to tackle one less of them than you want to. If you planned to do an working afternoon, a nice dinner, and a movie with your wife, just take on two of those. (We did the working afternoon and the nice dinner). If you planned to tackle cleaning and writing, just do the writing. Even in the writing, I’d plans to drive to a different place for lunch, then to hit a nice coffeehouse to work. I dropped that and went to the Aqui near my house. That’s part of a rut (and I need to write a defense of ruts) but it immediately bought me something like thirty minutes of travel time, and positioned me well to take care of a lot of other business.
“Minus one” is a key thing to take on when you’re overwhelmed. It relaxes you and lets you focus. Humans are consistent underestimators – I saw one study that suggested that both optimists AND pessimists underestimate how long it takes to get things done. You can’t not underestimate – you won’t ever get ANYTHING if you’re honest with yourself about how long it takes, especially if other humans with their monkey brains are involved – so you need tricks to keep you moving.
I use “minus one”. If you feel overcommitted and overwhelmed, you might see how it works for you.
-the Centaur
