![\"20160119_133721.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/20160119_133721.jpg\")
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For the overcommitted, it\u2019s 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\u2019 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\u2019s something that I wasn\u2019t sure I could get done.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s where \u201cminus one\u201d comes in.<\/p>\n
\u201cMinus one\u201d is a strategy that goes hand in hand with, but is opposite from, \u201cwork just a little bit harder than you want to\u201d. Where \u201charder than you want to\u201d 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 – \u201cminus one\u201d handles the opposite monkey instinct, biting off more than we can chew.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMinus one\u201d is a key thing to take on when you\u2019re 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\u2019t not underestimate – you won\u2019t ever get ANYTHING if you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
I use \u201cminus one\u201d. If you feel overcommitted and overwhelmed, you might see how it works for you.<\/p>\n
-the Centaur<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the overcommitted, it\u2019s 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,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,147],"class_list":["post-2968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-we-call-it-living","tag-wrangling-bits-and-people","ratio-2-1","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2968\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}