Mitch: Day 2 - On Commitments

Day 2: Evaluate your commitments. Look at everything you've got going on in your life. Everything, from work to home to civic to kids' activities to hobbies to side businesses to other projects. Think about which of these really gives you value, which ones you love doing. Which of these are in line with the 4-5 most important things you listed above? Drop those that aren't in line with those things.

We all spent yesterday listing out what we would spend our time and energy focusing in an ideal world. So Day 2 should be a piece of cake, right? Actually, for most of us I imagine it's a struggle. Because the reality is that we find ourselves so inundated with obligations because we truly find them all to be important. We wouldn't accept them in the first place if we didn't think they were for one reason or another.

For example, a few months back I found myself in an impossible situation at work. We were in the middle of a massive project, and our team was just beginning to ride up against crunch time. At the time we knew that we only had 30 days to complete a mountain of work and none of us believed that we stood a chance at actually accomplishing it. Most of us were so overloaded with competing priorities that we were finding it difficult to make any headway on any work at all. Our management staff had begun bringing on outside contractors to help us with the work, which was a huge relief.

For myself, I found that I had four major tasks to accomplish:

Task 1 - Always urgent, sometimes important and always unpredictable

Task 2 - Always urgent but less urgent than Task 1, always important

Task 3 - Somewhat urgent, but very important

Task 4 - Not urgent, very important

Since the start of this project Task 4 had been an area I was excited to work on. Unfortunately, as it was easily the lowest priority item, I could never find time to work on it.

In the midst of all this, the company I work for required us to use up the rest of our vacation time from the previous year, despite it being an incredibly busy season, and so I took off for two weeks to adopt a couple kittens and visit my dear friends in Chicago. At the end of it all I was relaxed, focused, and ready to get back and use my new found energy to burn through Tasks 1-3 in order to finally get some time in on my pet project.

Sadly, this was not to be the case.

Now, I love my co-workers. We truly are a team and they're many of the most wonderful people I've ever had the chance to work with. They're the kind of people that look out for each other and help out whenever they can. So during my vacation, knowing how burdened I'd been, they brought in a new contractor who just so happened to specialize in my pet project. This was intentional. They knew that I hadn't been able to get to it and didn't want me to have to worry about it anymore. What they didn't know was how important it was to me. So the reaction I had was certainly not one that they expected.

For one, I felt betrayed for having something that was so important to me taken away by the people I trusted and cared for most. On top of that I was jealous because some new guy just waltzes in and gets gifted with the time to work on the one thing I had been trying for MONTHS to get to, and it seemed cruelly unfair. And finally I felt guilty. Guilty because I had been assigned this project and here they were bringing in this guy to take it over because I couldn't do my damn job well enough to make any progress on it. But really it had nothing to do with any of that.

My friends were making the best decision they could without me there to consult, and genuinely tried to do the right thing on my behalf so I can't fault them. Our contractor was simply paid to do a job and my project happened to be the job he was brought on to do. And honestly, I was overworked, I couldn't get to Task 4 because I had too much on my plate, not because I couldn't hack it.

The reality is that I didn't get to work on that project because I actively chose not to make what mattered most to me a priority in the first place. That simple choice not to be true to my values got me all twisted up inside. I needed a reason to not have to accept the fact that I made the decision to lose that project. So I made up a number of them to preserve my place as the tragic antihero of my own life. I used those false reasons to turn against my friends, against our contractor and against myself so that I could play the martyr and somehow justify my loss through it.

But that still doesn't answer the question of why I didn't just focus on that project in the first place. What was stopping me? It isn't like I put off the task because of some deep seated desire to create misery for myself and people I care about. I put it off because I saw why the other tasks were more important to the organization than the one I cared about. And because I value having a job, I've made a commitment to my organization to value their commitments and take them on as my own. In this case, what the organization wanted and what I wanted were at odds, and the choice I made was to put the organization first because it seemed like the right thing to do.

This happens any time we make a commitment to an organization, a person or even an idea. We marry ourselves to their values. In our ideal world, we find ourselves married to others whose values are in line with our own. In that scenario we can focus on the things that matter most to us within a support system that encourages and provides for us in a way far greater than we could possibly do for ourselves. Too often, though, the reality is that we marry ourselves to jobs, friends, lovers, and belief systems that put us at odds with the things most important to us. Before long we find ourselves forced to start making choices between what we want and the desires of those we've committed ourselves to. In general we make the rational decision that the benefits we gain from having any kind of support network is worth more than the small piece of ourselves that we just gave up.

But, over time, we take on more and more of their "important" commitments until we find that we've no time left for ourselves. We're in a quagmire, feeling betrayed at the lack of support of the people, organizations and belief systems most central to our lives, jealous of the people living the lives we wish we could lead, and guiltily perceiving ourselves as selfish, lazy, or simply not capable enough to do the things we wish we could be doing.

So when we're forced to make the difficult choice of what commitments to keep, and which to let go, don't get hung up on the idea of importance. In fact, for every commitment that you see as being important, take a deep breath, clear your mind, step back and ask yourself who it's important to and why. If you can't answer this by saying that it's important to YOU because it supports YOUR values, then cut it from the list.

As difficult as it may be to cut some of these things from your life, remember that you're making a covenant with yourself today to believe in, support, and focus on the things you love, the things that you're most passionate about. Sometimes this can be a lonely experience if it means saying goodbye to places, people and things that have become comfortable to you despite the conflicts they create in your life. But a strange thing happens that's not unlike buying a new car or, for us gamers, not unlike rolling a new character you think looks cool and unique in some online game. It never fails that as soon as you get out on the road you see people all over the place driving your same make, model, and color of car. And in the game suddenly every other player you come across seems to have the same race, class, and hairstyle as your character. And it's all because our minds are trained to look for things that resonate with the things we value.

When you put the desires of others above your own, you're of course going to find all kinds of people who are more than willing to burden you with the things that are important to them and you're probably going to take them on. But when you live the life you want to live and put the things that matter most to you first, you'll find yourself more and more surrounded by people and situations that mirror your values and that will support you on the journey that you've chosen to take.

For my personal journey on this item, over the years I've largely been able to cull the things I do down to be fairly in line with my values. But that doesn't mean my life doesn't need some re-prioritization! The recent discovery for me that much of my exhaustion is very likely caused from over stimulation means that I need to very seriously commit to making sure I get honest, quiet time for reflection. So even though I spend my time focusing on the things I care about, I err in trying and cram in as many of those things as possible in far too short of a time span. As a result I simply get overwhelmed and don't enjoy ANY of it because I stress myself out from wanting to do it ALL and over stimulating myself even more. So you'll see this as the big theme of my culling exercise.

Work:

Team Leader & Intra/Inter-Departmental Liason - While not my actual title or position, I often fill this role by running meetings and coordinating work assignments. I tremendously enjoy it because I feel like I'm helping people understand topics and focus their work on the projects that matter to them. Could definitely benefit from being more focused in meetings by giving myself more time for quiet reflection.

Problem Solver - Figuring out creative ways to solve issues ties into my desire to learn and grow in knowledge and wisdom, which lets me discover new and better approaches to situations. More than anything this could benefit from quiet reflection and the focus gained from that.

Social:

Son - I meet my mom for lunch weekly because having a good relationship with her is really important to me, but could definitely center myself more and be more present during it.

Friend - As I mentioned yesterday, I meet with friends pretty regularly, and I've really put a strong emphasis on building and maintaining relationships with the friendships with those who complement my values and challenge me to develop better understandings of them. Tragically I'm usually so caught up in a whirlwind of stimulus from the day that I'm probably, at most, only ever about 10% present. Quiet reflection wins here too.

Civic:

Good Citizen - Another thing I'm passionate about is helping total strangers. I have a strong belief that our society lacks so much trust in strangers because the most exposure we get to actually interacting with them comes from slasher flicks and urban legends. So whenever I can I try to just do something nice for people I don't even know in the hopes that they'll be willing to do the same for someone else. The biggest thing that gets in the way is mental exhaustion, which I'm hoping I can resolve through effective quiet time.

Hobbies:

Video Games/Playing Music/Discovering and Listening to Live & Recorded Music/

Reading/Watching Television Shows & Movies/Writing - As much as I would prefer to focus on productive time with these hobbies, usually I'm so exhausted that they become escapes. For example, I find myself putting way too many hours into playing an MMO called Rift because it's totally mindless for me, and should be relaxing, but isn't. I throw music on while I'm playing, bombarding myself with stuff I love, but overstimulating myself past the point of enjoying it. Then I finally settle down to read and end up just glossing over the pages, taking in only a small portion of the content, because my brain is in overload. Again, without putting energy into the number 1 most important value on my list, the other things begin to fall apart.

Home:

Kittens/Laundry/Food/Plants/Cleaning/Sleep - All of these, the latter most ironically, get sacrificed as well from wanting nothing more to just relax, which is attempted through hobbies, which fails because I'm not doing what's most important for me to do. And everything else suffers for it in the end.

That's it for today! Thanks again, everyone, for making the time to check in.

- Mitch