There will always be too much to do
There will never be enough time in the day/week/year to do everything. There is no reason to assume that there is any correlation between the fixed amount of time you have in a day and the infinite amount of things you want to achieve. The two are completely unrelated, so why do we spend a fair amount of that precious time writing endless to-do lists that we know we’ll never actually do? The truth is that trying to do an overwhelming amount of everything will make you less productive, less successful and less accomplished. In a word: miserable.
A to-do list is a great way of not forgetting important things that really must be done but they are a very counterproductive way of prioritising anything outside of those essentials. To-do lists often turn into generic wishlists. Rather than being a useful aide-memoir, they end up being a list of things you feel guilty about… sitting on your desk/phone/ notebook silently judging you whenever you happen to glance over.
If you spend your life trying to do absolutely everything then you’ll end up doing about 40% of them not very well. Maybe 45% if you’re a Silicon Valley life hacker. It’s the quantity over quality option. If you choose to do fewer things better, that’s when you really start to see more consistent quality in terms of what you achieve and, likely, your quality of life. As far back as the 1890’s, the Italian academic Vilfredo Pareto came up with Pareto’s Principal or The Law of the Vital Few - identify the 20% of tasks that generate the most value in your life, and then invest your energy primarily into them. This was initially applied to economic theory but has become a guideline for almost any decision making process you can think of.
This necessarily means you’ll have to let things drop and that’s an uncomfortable realisation to make - both the general idea of choosing not to do things, and then even more so once you get into the specifics of the actual things you’re making the choice to let slide. But it isn’t a lose-lose ultimatum. Paraphrasing Oliver Burkeman, you move from a life of trying not to neglect anything to a life of trying to prioritise what’s most important.
In his provocatively titled piece The Secret to Life is Low Expectations Darius Foroux says “we’re very creative creatures…when we set out to do things, we always expect that everything will turn out exactly the way we want. But I guess it’s somewhere close to ZERO. ...It’s not practical to have high expectations because they hardly come true. So why have them in the first place?”
That might seem a little nihilistic but actually it’s useful to distinguish between high expectations, aiming high and high standards. Expectations come from your own imagination.
You create a picture in your mind of exactly the way you expect something to turn out and are disappointed when reality doesn’t deliver. But being honest, why would it? Aiming high means you set your sights on something to work towards and get your act together to make it happen - you compel yourself forward and deal with circumstances as they happen. And high standards mean you have a benchmark as to how you want something to be - it’s a level of quality you can use as a basis for judgment. High expectations are fiction, aiming high is an action and high standards are a fact. Back to Darius Foroux - “I’m not saying you shouldn’t have high standards or aim high…Those things are good. But just don’t rely on your imagination for timelines and outcomes.“
We might not be able to have it all, but there’s no reason to assume we can’t make the most of what we do have. The gap between what is and what could be, what you have and what you expect is called the aspiration gap. It’s essentially the same thing as managing your expectations - you hope for the best, plan for the worst, and end up somewhere in the middle. In choosing to do less things but with more care, you increase your chances of those things coming out a little closer to what you imagine.
I’d love your thoughts on this - are lower expectations the most reliable way to a happier life? Do you do nothing less than shoot for the stars? How do you keep your expectations in check whilst secretly hoping for the best outcome imaginable?? As ever… let me know.
Coaching is one of the best ways of managing your expectations. As the conversations unfold and we really delve into your assumptions and thought processes, pie-in-the-sky ideas often get revealed as just that. And with that realisation, you start to hone in on what is genuinely achievable and desirable so that together we work on the ‘real’ goal you have in mind, rather than the idealised version.
Drop me a line to book a free 30 minute call to see how we can work together.
