Doing Less

  It's funny how, whenever I know I have a lot of assignments to do at work, I kind of hunch my shoulders a bit, as though I were about to pounce on a mouse. I get this way especially after my weekend finishes and I have to buckle down to the tasks at hand. And yet, time and again, I notice that at work, it all comes down to one thing at a time. It reminds me of an old game I used to play as a kid called "Beat the 8 Ball", where these four players had to compete to be the first one to intercept a spinning ball as it was travelling down a funnel. The idea behind the game is that no matter how many people play, only one move can intercept the ball. There can't be more than one winner. In the same way, there can only be one clear route at a time, and our ambitions to get everything done have to funnel down into a few manageable steps.
    "Doing less" does not necessarily mean slacking off, or doing nothing at all. I think it means having a clearer perspective on what can be done at any given time, and not giving oneself too much stress regarding what hasn't been done. It might even mean the ability to relax a little bit at work, knowing that some things do manage to resolve themselves without too much intervention from ourselves.
   There are two ways to look at this. The first is that being tense (or raising one's shoulders in pounce mode) is not going to make one's work go quicker. This way of tensing up the body is perhaps a holdover from days when we needed to make ourselves look bigger and stronger than the animals around us who were prone to prey upon us. Since those days are far behind us, it's not productive to always be hunched over and over-tensed at work.
    The second way to look at it is that there is never a need to invest fear into one's work. If the work can't be completed on time, then it's okay. As far as one is more concerned about the work itself than about a perceived timeline, then one can know whether it's been done to the best of one's abilities. Of course, we often have to calibrate time and effort in ways that maximize efficiency, but there is no need to be fearful about it. Whatever we fail to do becomes a learning opportunity as well.