I’m not proud of this, but it’s true. Once in a while when there was an Excel® report I didn’t like doing, I just quit sending it in. I don’t recommend this practice as an advancement strategy, but it did free up a lot of time for things that were more fun.
Whether you’re a student, a freelancer, a homemaker or a corporate officer, you’re going to have days when you feel like you’re too busy mopping to shut off the water. It’s the creeping overwhelm of complexity. Looking back on my own years in corporate life, there’s one important question I wish I had asked myself a lot more often.
Why am I doing this?
For a few years I actually got paid to help my coworkers ask that question and it was one of the most rewarding career experiences I’ve ever had. Every time Tom Peters came out with another book, I devoured it from cover to cover. There was a time when having a “Quality Manager” like me in a senior leadership role was considered a differentiator. Now it’s an entry level expectation that every big corporation and solo-preneur out there is committed body and soul to creating a “wow” experience in every encounter.
It’s a worthy goal, but on a practical level, how do you really do that?
I found the answer in that scene in Groundhog Day where Bill Murray tells Andie MacDowell to “be the hat.” I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I had to settle for the Caddyshack clip where Chevy Chase says, “be the ball.” Whatever. It’s a comical way to think about a shift in perspective that can actually deliver profound results.
Whenever you look at a task you have to perform and feel that sense of overwhelm creeping up on you, sometimes it helps to be the ball – to actually move yourself to the point of view of the thing you’re working on. You don’t have to consider yourself a “business” person for this to work. It can apply to any personal task at hand too.
The answers to these questions can help you make some important decisions:
- Who is this for and what will they do with it when they get it from me?
- Who touches it before me and what happens to it before it gets here?
- What does this have to do with my central purpose here?
- How might my feelings change if I imagined myself as the object of this task?
If you’d like a fun kick start into this way of thinking, you can’t go wrong with The Other Side by artist Istvan Banyai. The images in this book will open up a way of seeing that could change the way you look at everything. In the technical world I worked in, being the ball meant actually following an object or document from point to point through an entire process. When was it really being improved? How long was it just sitting in somebody’s inbox doing nothing? How could we take the parts that didn’t add value out of the process by letting go of some of our rules and assumptions about how things are always done?
I wish I could give fair credit for this story, but I don’t recall where I picked it up. It might have been in one of those Tom Peters books or a corporate motivational film. Anyway, a shipping clerk at a big home improvement warehouse switched jobs with a receiving clerk at one of their flagship stores. After spending time in each other’s shoes, they were shocked to discover the number of things they did every day that not only didn’t add value, but often unwittingly sabotaged the person on the other end. The alternate point of view ended up having a transformational impact on how they used their time and energy.
Maybe “just ask why” is the new “just say no.”
There are things that have to be done because they’re important. That doesn’t mean that everything is important just because we’ve always done it – or just because a “boss” says we have to. A lot of our ideas about how hard or important things are have more to do with assumption than observation. I’m not advocating anarchy or sedition here. When somebody squawked about one of those Excel® reports, I got it done, but when they didn’t, it opened up a lot of time for things that mattered in my life.
Questions: How has seeing the other side made a difference in your life? Without falling out of integrity, is there a task you can drop from your life that would free you up for higher value things?