Getting things done

This is a post that I promised to a friend a few weeks ago and I’m rather embarrassed that it’s taken so long to show up on the page.

We were chatting about looking for work. I looked for work at the beginning of 2009, and it was an amazing, resounding success – I found a brilliant twelve-month contract at the height of the recession, and started working six weeks after I started looking. I still can’t believe how well it worked out.

This post is not about showing off, and it’s not about saying ‘if you do what I did then you too will find a job within six weeks’. Obviously there are lots of factors at play here. But I do think I got something right, because the way I did this was so different from how I’d have done it in the past. When I left LANDbank, it took me four and a half months to update my CV – this time round I did it in a weekend.

My friend and I were reflecting that job-hunting is psychologically difficult in more than one way. There’s an ego hit in being a job-hunter, and almost all of us have to cope with rejection at some point in the process, even if it’s for a job we didn’t really want. And there’s uncertainty – how long will this go on? Will I run out of money first? And there’s the solitude. For most people, it’s a lot harder to get stuff done on their own than working with others.

This is not completely dissimilar to doing a PhD. I use the lessons that I learned from my job-hunt in my life every day now. Okay, obviously that’s not true. Some days I mess around on the Internet instead. But when I need to get work done, I use them and they continue to pay off for me.

Take small steps, smaller than you would believe possible. This really works.

Here’s what I do left to myself. I make a to-do list for the day that includes the following: ‘read everything in the house that’s thesis-relevant’, ‘make notes about it’, ‘do all the housework’, ‘sort out my tax affairs for the next year’ and ‘broker a peace deal in the Middle East’. Then I do nothing. Then I double the length of the to-do list for the following day because I got nothing done.

Extraordinarily enough, this does not work.

I remember the first time I said to someone ‘I have a hundred items on my to-do list’ and she said ‘just do one today, and then stop’. Just do one today? What’s the point of that? If I just do one today and just do one tomorrow then I’ll never get out of this hole – I’ll end up picking up more actions than I can cross off. But she was right, and after another couple of days of taking no action, I took her advice. I did one thing and then I stopped. Somehow, everything else on the list got done quite quickly after that. Not the same day, but not a hundred days later either.

I don’t know how it works. But I have done it again and again, since then, and it continues to work, and when I’ve suggested it to people I coach, they’ve found that it works for them as well. I say to them ‘do a tenth of what you think you should do every day, and if that doesn’t work, do a twentieth’. It’s non-standard coaching advice, I think. But it works.

Do not do anything alone

I work with a buddy on everything. If I could clone him and give him to everyone who’s reading this, I would do so, because he is the best thing ever and the world could do with more of him. I am unimaginably more effective and productive because he is in my life. I call him if I’m procrastinating. I call him if I’m afraid. I call him if I’m bored. I call him if I’m lonely. I call him when I’ve just realised I’ve wasted half a day on the Internet. I call him if I’m angry. I call him if I don’t know what to do next. I ask him to read draft letters and documents to make sure I’m saying what I want to say. I call him to share failures and successes. He does the same with me.

I do not know how this works, but it is magic. I can get things done with him in my life that I could not begin to do on my own. If by some dreadful chance he disappeared from my life, I would look for another buddy instantly. When he’s on holiday and unavailable, I call other people. Sometimes I make five or six calls a day just to say ‘please help me with my work’. When I started the big contract after two years of not working, I was sending ten to twelve texts a day also. It wasn’t comfortable. I felt inadequate. But I got promoted.

Take amazingly good physical care of yourself

As a culture, we suck at self-care. We are great at self-indulgence, but that’s not the same thing. I’m not knocking self-indulgence – I don’t party much, but I’ve spent much of August reading Jilly Cooper novels. But at the end of self-indulgence, we tend to have less energy and not more. Self-care is about conserving and rebuilding energy.

Self-care is hard. It is, as I say, counter-cultural. Also it is very dull. It requires you to be present, which is hard. It requires self-sacrifice and attention to deferred gratification, which is hard. (Well, I find it hard. Patrick does it as easily as breathing. But I don’t recommend him as a role model. If you give him an Easter Egg in April, he’ll still have some left in June. I spend much of my life trying to be Patrick, and it never works. Things go much better when I try to be me instead.)

This is the first year I’ve been willing to pay conscious attention to self-care, and it is paying off beyond my wildest dreams. (Admittedly it turns out that my wildest dreams are in fact not that wild.) Because…

Here’s the deal

There is an ebb and flow to work. There is an ebb and flow to our bodies. If we start little, we can build up momentum and then suddenly do eight or ten job applications in a day. If we let ourselves rest, we will have energy when we need it. If we go easy on ourselves, getting stuff done can be easy. We can work with the grain instead of against it. If we treat ourselves well, we can feel well-treated. If we treat ourselves with love and respect, we can feel worthy of love and respect. If we let someone share the burden, we can feel supported. If we ask for help with the difficult stuff, we don’t have to do the difficult stuff alone.

This is different from how most people get things done. It’s different from how I’ve done things all my life. But it works for me, and it’s worked for everyone I’ve passed on to. If you have trouble getting stuff done, it might be worth a try.

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