Be Your Own Manager: How Much Work is Enough?

In my last Be Your Own Manager entry, I floated the question: how hard should I push myself?

There’s another element to this question, which is especially important once you start setting goals, which is: how much work is “enough”?

This question is relevant in all kinds of workplaces, honestly, especially as Corporate America keeps pushing for greater “productivity” with no care or attention to the long-term benefits of having a healthy and well-rested workforce.

There’s not much I can do for Corporate America, though, so for now, I’m just talking about the concept of “enough” on a personal or creative front.

Best to start with the painfully obvious: there is always more you can do. More art you can create. More classes you can take. More blog posts. More social media outreach. More research. More reading, watching, listening to, or looking closely at other people’s art to keep yourself both informed and happy. More.

It’s really easy, given that, to feel like your efforts are never enough.

So, let me start with this: Doing anything at all is enough. Whatever you did today, or last week, or last month: that was enough. Whether or not you keep reading from here, please remember that. Carry it with you throughout the rest of this discussion and after.

So, although you’re already doing enough, your inner manager may still want you to do more. Whether you’re trying to build a career or push yourself to new levels of achievement, you have some desire to set more ambitious goals for your daily or weekly work.

Me too. And as I’ve mentioned before – this is an area of my life that was dramatically changed by my experiences with burnout. Learning to be my own manager, as I re-built my work habits, required me to do some much deeper thinking about two kinds of documents that employees and managers use to manage the workload.

1. The To-Do List
2. The Have-Done List

First, a caveat: I’m using the term document pretty loosely. There’s no standard form, certainly, and a lot of workplaces don’t encourage any kind of written record. But I’m also using the term intentionally because I think there is VALUE in writing these things down. Within reason, and with a couple of caveats.

To-Do lists can be dangerous. They give you an illusion of a “plan” without necessarily taking into consideration your available resources. That’s not a plan. That’s simply frustration waiting to happen.

The To-Do List

Most managers don’t actually want to see your to-do list. They understand that everyone manages their personal work plans differently. Personally, I love a good spreadsheet, that I can sort on my choice of variables. I once worked with a woman who managed her entire busy office using yellow legal pads. What would have driven me crazy made her feel grounded and centered.

A good manager knows they’ll see the results of your to-do lists in the work you accomplish, and they don’t need to see how you get there.

Unless there’s a problem.

To-do lists were the primary instrument of my burnout. They were always too long, and no amount of prioritizing, or triaging, or trying to block out the “less important” items ever made me feel like I came close to catching up. In six years, between two different jobs, I literally never reached the bottom of even the “high priority, pretty please can you at least do this much?” section of the list.

I didn’t know (yet) that To-Do lists can be dangerous. They give you an illusion of a “plan” without necessarily taking into consideration your available time and resources. That’s not a plan. That’s simply a series of frustrations waiting to happen. When there’s your lists get too long, there is no “time management” technique that can save you.

I didn’t have a manager at either of those jobs, and I hadn’t yet realized that I needed to be my own. A good manager would have realized there was a problem and asked to see those to-do lists. A great manager would have drawn a firm line under the number of tasks that I could reasonably accomplish and thrown out all of the rest (or found someone else to handle them).

But I didn’t know I was allowed to do that. And I didn’t know how to figure out what was reasonable. I didn’t start learning that until later, when I discovered…

The Have Done List

Do you ever find yourself writing something down on your to-do list JUST so you can check it off? I’ve met people who get a little sheepish about that, but I think it comes from a very healthy instinct. You want CREDIT for the work you put in. And why not? You did the work, after all.

In a corporate setting, the official “have-done” list will have a more awkward name, and you may not even be aware it exists. People with bad management often find out about the have-done list only when it’s being used against them in a performance review, and they may have major disagreements about what’s on the list.

A good manager, on the other hand, will engage you in conversations, at regular intervals, about what you’ve been accomplishing lately.

You can probably guess, from my comments above, that I never once thought of making a list like this when I was working in my previous career. I was too busy putting out fires.

But once I’d left, and I was recovering from burnout, these were the only kinds of lists I kept. I would start each day with a completely blank page, and I would write things on the list as I went, even in the early days when those things I accomplished were tiny: “Wrote for five minutes,” “Walked around the block,” “Did a load of laundry.”

At the end of the day, I had a list of everything I’d done. More importantly, I kept those lists. Over time, as my health improved, I could see them get longer, and I started to build a sense of what I was capable of accomplishing, and what might be reasonable to put on a “to do” list without triggering anxiety.

I still make one, every day, although it’s changed format and purpose several times. I no longer need them in that day-to-day sense, but I love having a reference of everything I’ve worked on, anytime I need to look back for one reason or another. And this ongoing habit has made my to-do lists much more useful.

Up at the top of this post, I commented that I can’t do anything for corporate America on this front. But that’s a tiny bit of a lie. There is something I can do, and something YOU can do:

Keep a Have Done list at work, too. Even if you don’t think you need it. Even if you have a great manager (for now). Even if it’s just a yellow legal pad that you stick in your top drawer at the end of the day. Keep it, so that you can reference it any time you, or someone else, feels like you haven’t gotten much done lately. Being able to immediately conjure up a list of your accomplishments is worth a few minutes a day.

Next time, I’ll be talking about leveling up these two documents, and doing performance reviews that are really helpful.