An excerpt from my dialogue with Paul McAleer on our podcast Designing Yourself, Episode #18: Under Pressure (originally aired July 24, 2014), with minimal editing for readability.
I require deadlines. When I don’t have deadlines, and things are open-ended, they just don’t get done. When someone makes a request of me, even something totally benign like making an introduction, either I ask them when they need it by and have them create that deadline, or, more often than not, I say I’ll have it by tomorrow morning.
If I don’t set that for myself, even if they don’t need it by tomorrow morning, it’s never going to happen. Deadlines are essential to my productivity and to my effectiveness in everything that I do. I thrive with deadlines.
I also thrive, to a certain extent, with stress. I cannot operate stress-free. When I am stress-free, it’s wonderful. I’m happy. I’m having a good time. But I am not getting anything done. And that’s OK because the purpose of my life isn’t always to get things done. The purpose of my life is to be happy. But that’s a newfound purpose. That was not a statement that I would have made two years ago.
I’m now in a phase of my life where I don’t feel as if I owe anything to anyone. That’s something I’m working on, but I’m trying very hard to not feel as if my worth comes from getting things done. However, I make money by getting things done. And if I never got things done, I wouldn’t make a living and I wouldn’t have a lot of the things in my life that I have now that I really value.
So getting things done is essential. And for me, I have to have some amount of stress in order to catalyze my action. Otherwise I’m just loafing around. I am really good at doing nothing. I am really good at watching TV. I’m really good at going to the beach, putting my feet in the sand and staying out of the ocean. I’m really good at going out to restaurants and eating. I’m really good at exploring the city, taking long walks. I am so good at not doing anything. And I rarely get bored. And I rarely feel stressed or feel anything negative at all except for when I then look at the bank account and realize, hmm, I haven’t exactly been trying to work much lately.
So that stress propels me forward, and it keeps me productive and active. However, when I’m coming too close to the deadline and now realizing that the amount of effort required to do this to my standard is more than the amount of time I have left before the deadline, panic sets in.
I need to have enough stress to get me going and get me productive, but not so much stress that I am having a total meltdown and I become completely unproductive, because I realize that now that I have such a limited amount of time to get the thing done I am going to be compromising on quality that I value in what I deliver to others.
And that was a space that I lived in for a very long time. I would say the first 3-4 years of running my business, I was in that space of, holy shit, deadline is approaching and I am now going to have to compromise on quality of my work as a result of it.
It wasn’t because I was going around slacking off and doing whatever the hell I felt like. It was because I had so many other obligations that by the time the deadline for the present obligation came, it was too late. And that was because I was allowing deadlines to be set that were completely inappropriate for the workload that I had, and I was in a sense manufacturing stress that never needed to be created in the first place had I just better set expectations with my clients and with myself of what I was capable of achieving.
I learned that bad practice of letting other people set the deadlines and basically just accepting whatever anybody else asked in my very first full-time job. I was really quick at getting things done, and people noticed that. So they started asking if it could get done sooner and sooner. They had originally said a week, and I didn’t need a week, so I was handing things in in advance. And they were like, oh, she only needs four days. Then I was getting it done in three days. And then they were like, oh, I guess she only needs three days. Then I was getting it done in two days. Then I started to get super-stressed out because people were putting really challenging deadlines on me.
My manager at the time said, think about it. You set those expectations. Next time that you have a weeklong deadline and it takes you three days to get it done, don’t give it to them until the end of the week because you are going to put yourself in a situation where people think they can ask for less and less and less time and you’re still going to deliver.
And because I was so obsessed with delivering high quality and exceeding people’s expectations, I was pulling all-nighters. I was eating shitty food. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t taking care of myself. And I was totally burning myself out. I was so used to that, it became a habit. I carried that into my business when I went independent.
When I realized I was stressing myself out to the point of sickness and I wasn’t delivering at the level of quality that I expect of myself, I realized I had taught others what to expect of me.
It becomes a vicious cycle or it becomes a virtuous cycle. I really think the choice is yours.
An excerpt from my dialogue with Paul McAleer on our podcast Designing Yourself, Episode #18: Under Pressure (originally aired July 24, 2014), with minimal editing for readability.
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