Do the Damn Thing, Part 3: Fail and Refocus
You’ve done it. You’ve crafted long term and short term goals, made an action plan, set reasonable expectations, nurtured the skills that empower you to focus — and now you’ve failed. Welcome to being a human on this earth! Almost nothing of significance or importance, even on a personal level, has ever been achieved without a little bit of failure. It’s an inevitable part of trying to do something that matters to you. What you do next will determine whether or not you really succeed.
Examine your missteps with clear eyes
When we don’t achieve our goals, we’re likely to either: 1) trip over our guilt and fall headfirst into a shame spiral (“I didn’t get this done” becomes “I’m a failure and a disappointment”) or: b) refuse to clearly assess why we failed, and how our actions or inaction contributed to that failure. The best thing about failing is you can learn from it and give yourself a better chance to reach your goals, but you can only do that if you’re willing to look at it right in the face and be honest with yourself. One way you can do that is to walk backward through the progression of things you’ve learned over these last few weeks.
You didn’t get the thing done. Okay, were you doing the things you needed to do to ensure you were focused on the task? Did you say yes too many times when you should have said no, did you stumble on the mental hygiene you needed to engage in prior to sitting down to the task, did you minimize your distractions? If yes, were you realistic in the expectation you set for yourself? Did you give yourself enough time, did you budget enough emotional energy, did you learn from your previous missteps? If yes, dig back to those original goals. Do they align with your ethos and serve your highest purpose? Even if other people were involved in you not getting the thing done — they didn’t respect your boundaries, they demanded too much, there was an emergency, they triggered a mental health crisis for you — it’s important to ask yourself how you can better manage their expectations in the future.
It always comes back to balance: The reason you didn’t accomplish your goals is probably somewhere in the middle between all your fault and all someone else’s.
Make a plan to address the specific issues you identified in your clear-eyed appraisal
Maybe you’ve realized you can’t perfect your chestnut and mushroom tartlet on Sunday afternoons because your mother always calls to complain about something that happened at church for at least an hour and it’s a distraction and you have to spend your emotional energy to talk her through it. Can you set aside a different time in the week to talk to her? Or a different time in the week to bake? Maybe your co-workers haven’t respected your request to stop talking to you every time they walk past your cubicle in your open-floor office plan. Could you invest in some headphones as a visual signal that you’re busy and they need to leave you alone? Did you spend too much time getting outraged on Twitter? Can you delete the app or install a different app to lock you out of it for a certain amount of time?
If you’re not accomplishing what you want to accomplish, but you keep trying to accomplish it in the same way, you’re setting yourself up to fail. Acknowledge what didn’t work and why and look for a different path forward.
Learn to manage your negative emotions
Just because you haven’t worked out yet how to achieve your goals doesn’t mean that you are a failure. Do not let failure become part of your identity! It’s something that’s happened to you, maybe even because of you, but it’s not who you are!
You can’t undo your failure, but you can use the “undo effect” to combat some of the frustrating things you’re feeling. Researchers have discovered that positive emotions help speed recovery from negative emotions: “Negative emotions undermine the brain’s capacity to think broadly and find creative solutions. The vise grip of fear and stress and the emotions they generate — anger, blame, panic, resentment, shame — limit thought to a narrow field that obscures options.” So in the face of failure, do something you enjoy. Read a book, take a bath, go for a hike, ride your bike, host some friends for dinner, visit a museum, watch a favorite TV show or movie. Allowing yourself some joy will feel good and it will help reset your brain.
It also helps to cultivate a sense of humility. Not meekness, but a quiet understanding that we all fail, that it doesn’t mean we’re bad people; just that we’re people, period. In Jim Collins’ wildly successful book, Good to Great, he names humility as the one thing that sets really successful people apart. Humility allows you to look at your failure honestly without chastising yourself because a humble person doesn’t expect to always succeed or feel compelled to lie to themselves about why they failed to preserve a fragile self-image. Humble people are more likely to learn from their mistakes and not wallow in them.
You could also manage your negative emotions by meditating, a practice that urges you to be gentle with yourself.
Perhaps most importantly, don’t project your own feelings of disappointment onto the people around you and isolate yourself from them. We are notoriously harder on ourselves than other people are on us, and the more we hide away, the easier it is to convince ourselves that they’re as upset with us as we are at ourselves. That’s hardly ever the case.
If your failure has caused stress or anxiety disappointment for someone else, accept that, apologize, explain what happened, and tell the person you’ve let down what you plan to do to make sure it doesn’t happen in the future.
Try again!
You can spend a whole lot of time feeling badly about messing up or you can acknowledge some simple truths — everyone fails, people who succeed are the ones who learn from their mistakes, failure can make you wiser and more compassionate, the only failure that’s final is the failure of giving up — and try again. Start at the beginning if you need to. Ask yourself what you truly love, make a plan to pursue it, cultivate the habits of focus that will allow you to succeed, and get up and dust yourself off and get going again.
You only have one wild and precious life on this earth. You’re in control of you. And you know what else? I believe in you.
Do the Damn Thing, Part 2: Focus, Boundaries and Single-Tasking
Yay, you! You’ve crafted some longterm goals and broken them down into shorter term goals with an action plan! You’ve set realistic expectations for this month, this week, this day and communicated them to the people who need to know them. Now you’re ready to tackle the most important part of doing the thing: actually doing the thing. There are zillions of books and blogs and Instagrams to tell you what apps and notepads and planners you need to be productive, and there’s value in many of those conversations, but none of those tools are going to be effective unless you know how and when to use them. Here’s what research has proven you actually need to do to focus and succeed.
Set aside time to plan your weeks and days
If you wake up in the morning and roll out of bed and spend your day doing the things causing your phone and email and Slack to ding and flash the loudest, you are not making the most of your one wild and precious life. Making planning a part of your day will help you feel calmer and increase your productivity (doing the things you actually want to do). Whatever your goals are that you set last week, make sure you’ve got a firm plan to take action on them at least weekly. If you’ve got that baking competition coming up, you’re planning to practice your scones for three hours on Sunday, which means you need to go grocery shopping on Thursday, which means you need to spend an hour Tuesday researching recipes. If you know all that on Monday, it’ll make it easier to say no to impromptu drinks invitations or your boss asking you to take on a last-minute project that’s going to require you to work late every night.
Get to know your mind and your body
One of the most important parts of staying focused when you’re settling down to work is consistently doing the prep on your mind and body when you’re not working. #Determination alone isn’t going to get you where you want to go — especially if you, like me (and one in five Americans), wrestle with anxiety, depression, ADD, etc. You’ve got to take your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health seriously. There are lots of ways to do that; no one thing or combination of things works the same for every person. However, a vast body of research offers some suggestions.
Doing mindful meditation for as few as ten minutes a day can improve focus, general well-being, and make you more resilient to stress. Regular exercise improves your mood, sleeping patterns, anxiety, depression, and makes your brain work better. Drinking lots of water and eating fruits and vegetables and protein enhances your state of mind and your cognition. Sleep is absolutely essential for focus. There are also just things you learn through trial and error: How much or how little caffeine gives you energy vs. gives you an anxiety attack. What time of day your mind is most alert. What environment you can concentrate best in. What medications work for you. What supplements have a positive effect on your body and your mind.
Maybe you can’t do all of these things, for a variety of reasons. That’s okay! Can you try one of them? Can you download a free meditation app and try it for five minutes a day for a week? Can you do a beginner’s yoga video from YouTube for ten minutes? Can you leave your phone in another room at night to get rid of the blue light and remove the temptation to scroll Instagram until the sun comes up? Can you add one fruit or vegetable a day to your diet? Can you drink more water?
If you want to focus better, you absolutely have to take care of your mind and your body when you’re not explicitly hunkered down trying to achieve your goals.
Boundaries, baby
It’s a truth of the human condition that everyone is starring in a movie about their own life in their own mind. That means, for the most part, that your friends and family and co-workers and managers and teachers and pastors and partners and acquaintances and social media mutuals are doing what they need and want to do to fulfill their own desires and meet their own goals and find their own happiness. Which means you better have some firm and serious boundaries in place or your entire life will be spent as a guest character in someone else’s story.
You’ve already gotten a jump start on this because you’ve created some reasonable expectations for yourself and communicated them with the people who will likely need things from you, which means your boundaries are taking shape in your head. Here are three more ways to firm them up.
1. Learn to say no
Listen, I know how good it feels to say yes. I know how self-righteous it feels to be the hero or the martyr who steps up again and again and does the thing no one else is willing or able to do. I know how easy it is to take on the tasks you know will please people. I get it. I really, really do. But if you don’t learn to say no, you’re going to fail. It’s that harsh and that simple. You’ll say yes to the point that you’re only doing what other people want you to do, which is failing yourself and your own goals; and you’ll keep saying yes until you’re so overloaded with other people’s stuff you’re failing them too.
This goes for emotional tasks as well as physical ones. Learning to not stop everything you’re doing to, once again, be a therapist to your friend or parent or co-worker or boss who’s always having some kind of crisis is just as important as not halting in the pursuit of your goals to start pursuing their goals. “I’d love to talk with you about this, but I’m working on something that’s going to take up the rest of my afternoon. If you still need to talk about it tomorrow, I can set aside some time to do that,” is a perfectly normal and acceptable thing to say.
Start saying no to very small things, and then to regular small things, and then to medium-sized things. Once you see how much it improves your quality of life, and how misplaced your pride is in self-sacrifice, it’ll become a lot easier to say no to even the biggest things. Your energy and your time are valuable and finite resources, and they belong to you. You get to chose how to spend them.
2. Establish your workspace
Whether you’re working in bed, in an open-floor office plan, in your own office or home kitchen or backyard workshop, find a way to let people know that this is your space and your time and you will be focusing on your priorities while you’re here. You can explain it upfront, or explain it when you’re interrupted. You can wear headphones. You can put up a sign. You can shut the door. You can tell people you won’t be responding to emails or texts or shared workspace notifications for a certain amount of time. If you jump at every ding and rush to every Slack channel that lights up and click on every new email as it comes through and stop to answer everyone’s questions as soon as they ask them and take on whatever task they ask you to do, you’re never going to get anything worthwhile done (or it’s going to take you ten times longer than it should to do it).
3. Take time to take care of yourself
Instead of, as I mentioned last week, pushing yourself to the absolute edge and then flaking on everything you’ve promised to do, take care of yourself preemptively and proactively. Take days off, take time to go to the doctor, take time during the day to exercise or meditate or stretch or go for a walk or look away from your computer. It’s much easier to evaluate how you’re doing with your goals, and to contemplate saying no, and to reaffirm that your time and space are your time and space when you’re proving to yourself and to other people that you care about yourself enough to regularly do what you need to do to feel good. Also, feeling good makes you want to keep doing the things that make you feel good, so figure out what those things are and make a habit of them.
Become a single-tasker
Multitasking is a myth. No one can do it. Neuroscience has proven time and time again that your brain cannot do multiple things at once and if you’re rapidly switching back and forth from thing to thing, constantly changing your focus, you’re losing little bits of data every single time. It’s less efficient, it causes us to make more mistakes, and over time it takes a toll on our mental and physical health.
When you think you’re multi-tasking, what you’re actually doing is rapid-fire stopping and starting and stopping and starting and stopping and starting individual tasks. Imagine what stepping on the gas and slamming the breaks and stepping on the gas and slamming the brakes and stepping on the gas and slamming the brakes would feel like in a car. That’s what you’re doing to your brain and ultimately to your body when you try to focus on multiple things at once.
Just as important: Don’t get caught up in other people’s attempts at multi-tasking, even your partners’ or your boss’. If someone else is ping-ponging around and expecting you to ping-pong around with them, you have to reset their expectations of you. Nearly everyone thinks that whatever they’re doing at the moment is the most important thing anyone could be doing at the moment, but if you stop to help someone who is convinced they can defy their brain’s proven limitations and actually multi-task, you’re interrupting your workflow and the progress you’re making toward your goals, and for who even knows how long? They’re probably going to zip off again in five minutes and return every half hour for five minutes at a time and ruin your entire plan for the day. Set those boundaries. Say no.
Multitasking is the opposite of mindfulness, and as such, it provides no room for perspective. Group similar tasks together. Use a timer if you need to. Do one thing at a time.
Eliminate distractions
Most people don’t differentiate from the sound of a text message and a baby crying, a Slack alert and a fire alarm. We rush to every noise that begs for our attention. If you’re really going to do good work and make progress toward your goals while maintaining your acquaintance with calmness, you’ve got to eliminate the flashing and noise of every clang that isn’t essential. Social media notifications, Slack alerts, text messages, non-emergency phone calls: they can wait.
Distractions also take place in the form of untidy workspaces. If there are multiple stimuli in your line of vision, it’s harder for your brain to focus. Science also suggests that people feel more relaxed when they’re not surrounded by clutter.
And, of course, noise. If you even think you have ADD, prioritize figuring out how noise affects you. (I’ve written more about that here.)
Most of these skills — and they are skills, you have to develop them — don’t come naturally to people, especially to women who have been taught that their time and attention and even their bodies belong to the people around them. But the more you deliberately work on doing them, the better you’ll get at them. I promise.
Next week: What happens when we inevitably fork it all up?
Do the Damn Thing, Part One: Setting Goals and Realistic Expectations
I’ve been working as an editor in queer media for over a decade and in the last two years I’ve heard more people say some variation of “I don’t know how to move forward” than in all my other years combined. It’s a broad thing, sometimes, of course. How do we find the courage and hope to keep taking action to try to create change when every single day is some fresh political horror? But it’s also very much a personal thing. So many people in our community, are burned out, beaten down, depressed, anxious, frustrated, stifled, stuck. We don’t know how to accomplish the day-to-day tasks we need and want to do. I know because I see my friends and acquaintances and co-workers saying it. I know because I see it from Autostraddle readers in the A+ inbox. I know because I’ve experienced it and been caught in the tentacles of it as well.
It goes something like this: We say yes yes yes to everything. When we inevitably cannot do everything, we stop trying to do anything. We’re mad at ourselves and we’re resentful at the people we’ve disappointed by our inability to get the thing done we said we’d get done. We shut down. We check out. Our tasks remain unaccomplished, the people we’ve made promises to remain frustrated with us, and we remain unfulfilled.
It doesn’t have to be this way!
Nearly every self-care article I read offers the same advice: Once you’ve inevitably pushed yourself to your physical, emotional, and mental limits, it’s okay to flake on everything and take a bath and a nap. And yes, when you can’t go anymore, you can’t go anymore. When you’re at the edge of yourself, you’ve got to stop everything to take care of yourself. Or, you know, you could just keep going until your body literally shuts you down.
Wouldn’t it be better if we learned to keep some distance between ourselves and the edge?
January is a time for resolutions, but I’m going to give you something better than that: A pre-New Year three-week lesson on figuring out what the heck you want to do and actually doing it. In week one one we’re going to talk about goals and how to set and communicate realistic expectations. In week two we’re going to talk about actually getting shit done. And in week three we’re going to talk about taking a clear-eyed look at our unavoidable failures, refocusing, and starting again.
Goals
Goals come in different shapes and sizes, but before you start breaking them down and crafting a plan to accomplish them, you have to know one thing for sure: What’s your ethos, your highest purpose, the thing that you want to be true about you and your life? We’re more motivated to do things we know will fulfill us, and when we have a clear sense of our guiding ideals, it’s easier to pare down everything from our long-term goals to our daily to-do lists.
Once you know who you want to be, you can start figuring out what to do about it. Begin with big goals and break them down into smaller goals and then break those into actionable tasks. The Passion Planner Roadmap (which you can download for free) is a popular tool for this, but you really don’t need anything more than a piece of paper and a pen or pencil. Essentially what you’re doing is working backward. You see yourself accomplishing something big in 2019; then you see yourself accomplishing smaller pieces of that every month; then you see yourself taking on those smaller pieces every week. Now you can prioritize your day-to-day to make sure you’re reaching for your highest purpose.
The top of this goal sheet is what I made on the plane on the way home from our senior staff shakedown this summer. I filled in the bottom as the year progressed, and as I worked with a career counselor for ten weeks. My goal was to write and shepherd 100 collaborative TV Team posts by the end of the year. We did it!
Enormous bodies of research show that the following things are true about goals.
+ You’re more likely to accomplish them if they’re specific and positive. (I will get onto The Great British Bake Off.)
+ You’re more likely to accomplish them if they’re measurable. (I will win a local baking competition with my spiced orange Chelsea buns.)
+ You’re more likely to accomplish them if you anchor them to a specific place and time. (I will bake ten hours every Sunday for five years.)
+ You’re more likely to accomplish them if they’re reasonable. (Okay, I will bake three hours every Sunday for one year.)
+ You’re more likely to accomplish them if you write them down.
Realistic Expectations
You’ve done it! You’ve set goals that align with your ethos and written down a specific and positive action plan to help you accomplish them! Now we can talk about what’s going to happen in your day-to-day life to allow — nay, empower! — you to achieve those goals. It’s time for some realistic expectations!
There are two parts to realistic expectations: setting them for yourself and clearly communicating them to other people. There’s basically an entire alphabet of things you experience when you don’t set realistic expectations: anger, blame, criticism, despair, escape, futility, grief! That’s a progression of really terrible emotions to bloom from the seed of simply putting three too many things on your to-do list every day. But it’s true. When we overestimate, over-promise, over-commit, we under-deliver (or don’t deliver at all) and often end up in a shame spiral because we’ve let down ourselves and the people who were relying on us.
My to-do list for the third week of November, filled out on Monday morning. My physical and mental health first, writing second, editing third, social media fourth.
Here’s how to stop yourself before you’re hiding in the cupboard under your stairs, glowering at your phone and considering smashing it to death with a meat hammer, getting sadder and angrier at yourself and the person texting you to ask why you haven’t done what you said you’d do.
When you’re compiling your to-do list for the week or the day, ask yourself:
+ Acknowledging that my creative energy, emotional stamina, mental toughness, intellectual vigor, and literal time itself are finite resources, do I possesses enough of all of those things to get this done in the expected time frame?
+ What has the past proven to me about this task? (It always takes longer than I think it will. Someone else could do it better/faster. It’s consistently unfulfilling so I dawdle on it.)
+ Has anything changed since the last time this task was on my list? (I have an assistant now. I have delegated other tasks and now have three extra hours for this task. I’ve learned more efficient ways to do parts of this task.)
+ Who or what is creating the expectation that I do this thing? (My desire to be liked, my need to feel important, my inability to say no because I’m a people-pleaser.)
+ Does it align with my written goals and highest purpose? (If not, is it just one of those things everyone has to do because they’re adults and work is work, or is it something I could delegate, say no to, etc.)
Once you have set realistic expectations for yourself, communicate them to the people who rely on you. Bosses, co-worker, partners, friends. Let them know what you’ll be doing and what you’re unable to do. If anyone asks (or tells) you to do something that’s going to eat up one of those aforementioned finite resources, you can let them know. “As I mentioned, I have promised to make a poached pear tartlet for the local pie-baking contest, so I don’t have time to take this on right now.” Or, “Yes, but this is going to prohibit me from doing the deliciuous tartlet I told you about, so I’m actually going to need you to find someone to cover my shift for next Saturday so I can go to the tartlet-baking contest in the next town over.”
You’ve set goals! You’ve set and communicated realistic expectations! Next week we’re going to do the damn thing!