How to avoid overcommitment and get more enjoyment out of life
Courtesy / Marshall Communications
Ann Leamon, left, and Nancy Marshall
A strong personal brand means you have a large network of people who want to hear your advice, be in your presence, get your stamp of approval and spend time with you.
By sharing what you’ve learned in your life and your career, you feel helpful and useful. The process builds on itself: a broader network creates more demand for your presence and involvement — to the point where the requests pour in to serve on boards and to contribute your unique perspective to help solve a host of challenges. The ultimate is when people ask to buy you a cup of coffee so they can ask you for advice.
Initially, it’s flattering and can be profitable. After all, being busy is perceived by our society as a virtue. It signals our importance. “I’m just swamped!” is a time-honored response to the standard “How are you?” query. But eventually, being over-busy takes a toll on your spirit, your family, and your health. It can degrade your performance, the very reason you’re in such demand.
In Ann’s industry, over-committed venture capitalists are known to engage in “drive-by board meetings” where they wave at the company’s building on their way to the next event — not an approach that adds value. In Nancy’s industry, people take on too many clients to the point when they cannot do an adequate job for any of them, and they snap at their family members because the stress takes a toll on their spirit.
In fact, over-commitment denies you the pleasures of life. You’re always behind, late, unprepared. You become a “human-doing” rather than a human being. And “being” is critical for the deep reflection that allows us to ponder, to connect ideas in new ways, to solve problems.
We need to be as much as we need to do.
And honestly, that’s hard. No one gets awards for being. We’ve all taken classes on time management, which teaches us everything about how to get things done. They don’t teach the most important thing: how to spend our time in the most fruitful way possible. We must build our lives intentionally. We spend money with care and precision; we should bring the same attention to how we spend our time.
Both time and money are scarce resources. Time is scarcer than money — one can earn more money, but everyone, whether an infant or Elon Musk, gets only 24 hours in a day. There’s a reason we talk about “spending” time: an hour we give to one pursuit is one not available to another.
Therefore, we must ensure we’re putting that time to its best use. And the best use of your time at a given moment, say, serving on your twelfth board, may not be the best use of that time at another, say, spending an afternoon with friends. We need to budget our time. That’s hard, but we can give you some tips.
- Ask yourself, “What do I love to do?” Identify what you love to do, what brings you joy, what rejuvenates you. When Ann started feeling discontented with her time commitments, she thought about what she loved to do, and realized it was reading for pleasure. When Nancy felt that way, she committed to going to classes at Pure Barre where she gets to socialize and exercise all in one place!
- Then ask, “When did you last do it?” If you regularly do it but have just been in a busy period — tax time — it’s just a matter of slogging through. More often, your thing of joy has been ignored for ages. Ann hadn’t sat down with a book and just read for months. There were things to do, from bathing the dog to editing a book for a client, to board work. It was all important.
- Schedule it into your life. We’re advised to schedule our exercise time like a meeting. Ann realized she needed to schedule her reading time: she would read at 2 p.m. for an hour.
- Say "No" to things that would absorb that time. This is the difficult part. To protect this time that replenishes you, whether reading or walking or meditating or watching TV with your family, you must say ‘No’ to the things that would infringe upon your time. We’re conditioned not to say no, to feel guilty when we say no, to feel that we need to have an excuse to say no. But no, that two-letter Anglo-Saxon word, is a complete sentence. You don’t need to say anything else, although you can soften it with “I’m sorry.” Alternatively, you can use “That just don’t work for me.” No one can argue with that.
As we go into the fall with its renewed focus on work, school, and various meetings, hold this closely. We only get this one life, which has only 24 hours in a day. Budget your time to ensure that you are getting the most joy from that life, that you’re balancing all the demands placed on you, and, most of all, that you have a chance to do what you most love. Those pursuits will recharge you, positioning you to bring your best to your work and your community.
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