Two lists you should look at every morning

Two lists you should look at every morning

I get a lot out of Peter Bregman’s work – his Harvard Business Review posts are always excellent, and this is one of his best. A copy of his book, 18 Minutes, recently arrived, and I am looking forward it!

Margin, Part 2: Tina runs out

Let’s call her . . . Tina. She isn’t really real,  although everything she goes through in this post is. And maybe what’s real for Tina is real for you, too.

Tina is bright, has produced some exceptional work, some of it work that she actually dreamed she would be doing some day. And she did it, and did it well. Right up until the time she couldn’t do it anymore.

Tina has been ignoring margin.

Margin exists at the edges of things. It is the space between things that enables us to differentiate between one thing, one person, one appointment, one day and the next one.

Margin isn’t often valued because we don’t get paid for creating space. Tina gets paid for creating the stuff that fills space. Projects, appointments, meetings, emails, phone calls. The more space she can fill, the better it looks on paper and on her paycheck. And the more praise she got from management.

For a while.

Because when we value filling space, we can easy value overfilling space. If full is good, shouldn’t overfull be great?

Tina is too honest to just look busy. She wants to actually be busy, and produce, and fill, and overfill, and she does. Until whatever it is she’s been overproducing begins to spill over into other things she needs to do or even has to do.

Overproducing leads to other things that begin with “over.” Overthinking. Overtime. Overworked. Overstressed.

And then she begins to produce less remarkable stuff. It’s subtle at first. No one else really notices it, because it is still very good work, well above average. So she puts in more hours. And produces even less that is remarkable, then less that is excellent, then less that is great, then less that is even good.

Management calls Tina in and has “the talk” with her about how her work just seems to be missing something that it used to have. So she gets encouraged to work harder, concentrate harder, focus harder, commit harder . . . and she does.

Because Tina has been one of the best producers in the company, everyone thinks that the “something” that she’s missing is something that she can find inside herself again. She thinks that’s it, too. What else could it be?

So she looks. She looks hard. The harder she looks, the more bothered, then frustrated, then scared she becomes.

How did she lose “it?”

She keeps what she’s feeling to herself. Who could she tell? The manager, who gave her “the talk?” Coworkers? She was already feeling awkward around them. Even though she wasn’t a complainer, this really hurt.

On the way home that day, she was standing in line at her favorite coffee shop. Like every day recently, she couldn’t help searching her mind for whatever it was the she was missing – and she didn’t even know what to call it.

As she told me the story later, she was two people back from the front of the line when, without realizing it until after she had already said it, she lifted up her head and said out loud, “Where did I lose it?”

The people in line in front of and in back of her were startled at first, then immediately started looking around, moving their feet to see if they were standing on anything, and then they all looked up at her.

In a much quieter voice, she smiled and said, “I’m sorry! I was just thinking out loud. There’s nothing for you to find.” After she said it, she hoped it wasn’t really true.

Tina ordered her coffee, went over to the end of the bar as the barista made it, and enjoyed watching the way that the shots of espresso flowed into the coffee cup, and how the soy milk sounded as it was steamed. She was a little surprised how the shapes in the foam on top of her drink reminded her of looking up at the clouds floating across the sky when she was a little girl. She even caught herself smiling in an unforced way for the first time that day. It felt good, too.

The next thing she heard was the barista saying, with an unmistakable smile in her voice “Tina? Is there anything else you’d like?”

Tina looked up, a little embarrassed, because she realized she had been standing there and daydreaming for a while, staring and imagining at the shapes in the foam. Then she noticed that the barista was Isabella, someone she had become friendly with over the months that she had been coming to that coffee shop. She also realized that Iz (which is what Isabella asked every one to call her) was one of the main reasons that she liked coming there.

It was a busy coffee shop – very busy – and one of the first things she noticed about Iz was the way that she seemed to be able to go with the rhythms of the busyness as they presented themselves, high-speed or uncharacteristically slow like it was now. She found herself admiring the way Iz was able to shake off even the occasional very rude comments that customers who were having a bad day and felt the need to take it on someone, even someone who was as undeserving of them as Iz was.

Tina looked up at Iz, smiling, and said, “I’m sorry. I just don’t know what’s going on with me. It seems like a while since I’ve known.”

Tina surprised herself that she said that, but before she could apologize, Iz exclaimed, “Now that sounds interesting! I’m coming up on my my 30 minute dinner break. Mind if I join you? I’d like to hear about it.”

Iz walked to the end of the counter, removed and folded her apron, asked one of the other baristas to please make her a decaf, and gestured for Tina to join her at a quiet table.

Tina joined her, thankful for someone safe to tell her story to.

It turned out to be a very helpful conversation – even more than she had hoped it would.

Next post: Tina begins to discover margin.

Margin: the undervalued source of greater effectiveness

Margin.

The easiest way to recognize what it is and what its like to have it is from recognizing what it feels like to not have enough of it.

That school bus that you’re stuck behind,  stopping and starting as it picks up children as you’re coming out of your neighborhood isn’t making you late. Lack of margin is.

The annoyingly rude person driving just over the speed limit in front of you when you finally get to the freeway, isn’t making you late. Lack of margin is.

The red face you get from those people with too much time on their hands, standing in line ahead of you, asking what’s in the coffee drinks that you already know by heart, who just don’t have the common decency to come in the middle of the day instead of holding up everyone else like you, who has a real life, and things to do? Yeah. They aren’t making you late, either. Lack of margin is.

In the illusion of productivity we pack our schedules until they are overflowing.

Too often, the first thing we say to someone when we meet them is, “I’m sorry I’m late, but . . . ”

It’s. Not. Working.

The cup of coffee in the picture is a quad espresso with three Splendas with some soy milk steamed and foamed in. It was great.

Margin gave it to me. Margin and $2.90.

I had it after my ophthalmologist appointment, with my pupils dilated wide enough that I’m pretty sure I could have seen the United States flag that the Apollo crew planted on the moon. And it was daytime. I was wearing one of those plastic sheets that drop in behind your regular glasses, and make you look like an Angry Birds character. And because I had built in 20 minutes of margin into my schedule between the end of that appointment and when I had to be at the next one, I was able to talk to the barista as he artfully made my drink, sit at the counter and actually drink it without chugging it, and take a picture of it with my phone because I was thinking about writing this post.

It was pretty great, and so was the rest of the day.

In the next post, you will meet Tina, and read the first part of her story about margin. Here’s hoping you have enough margin to read it and think about it, and put some of it into play.