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Dear friends,
May this new year bring peace and rest for all of you. The post-holiday part of winter tends to drag for me; I hope you are finding ways to enliven the short dark days! Today I am sharing an end-of-December experience that may resonate with you.
Do you remember in math class when you solved a complex, multi-part problem only to make a computational error at the very end? These types of careless errors always felt worse to me than if I did not understand the concept. Lately I have been making some careless errors in life! At work, I sent in edits to an abstract after the deadline had passed (even though it was clearly in the email request I received.) On the home front, I ordered a return address stamp that had a typo, which I didn’t notice until stamping 50+ holiday card envelopes, messed up an Amazon order and ended up with 8 identical gifts when I only needed 2, and, worst of all, I wrote down the wrong time for a DMV appointment and therefore missed it. I was really annoyed with myself, because all these mistakes cost me something more valuable than money- time. Each one of these slips happened because I was not paying enough attention. Just like in math, in life, rushing leads to careless errors. In turn, these errors cost more time than doing things carefully the first time around.
Self-castigation is never helpful, and eventually I decided to debrief with myself about each of these situations. I did not want to dwell, but I wanted to learn. I decided to use the “5 Whys” method, explained here. It is a very simple tool. Ask yourself, or your team, why an event happened, and then ask why again. For example, why did I mistype my address onto the stamp order form? Answer: I was typing on my phone, at night, at my mom’s house, over Thanksgiving, while multiple family members were making requests for my attention. Next, why did I choose that moment to order the stamp? I needed it to come soon because I did not have much time to send my cards out. You get the idea.
My debrief led me to the conclusion that a combination of time pressure and emotional stress kills my ability to attend to details. This underscored my conviction that I have to give myself a planned window of time, with a clear head, for these types of tasks. Between Thanksgiving and winter break, time and emotional bandwidth are in short supply, so the logical solution is to create more time. Looking ahead, for 2024 I already blocked 2 days on my calendar as out of office, so I can get a head start on end-of-year stuff, and I have limited my availability for meetings in the three-week sprint between Thanksgiving and my winter vacation. While this sounds extreme, my debrief showed me that I will end up losing more time if I don’t make generous allowance for the many small things competing for my attention in this busy time interval.
So, next time you are frustrated with yourself, don’t dwell on it, debrief it! Let me know how it goes. As always, please share widely and, if you are so inclined, sign up for the blog here. Keep in touch and do share good news so I can amplify your successes!
Warmly,
Urmimala