A new school year is starting. Someone once told me the beginning of the school year was like a freight train. It is massive and has so much inertia that, when it comes by, you either have to jump on or get run over. I have actually come to see that analogy as being too small. I think school years are like the tides. They just keep coming. And that is simultaneously reassuring and relentless. They are predictable – mostly – but if you are unprepared, there is a serious danger of drowning. Even if you are prepared, it sometimes gets so deep or turbulent that it is hard to keep your head above water. There is just so much to do – and so many people who think they know what you should do.
A few years ago, an administrator opened a faculty meeting saying she recognized most of us in the room were overly busy and she wanted to help us get things off of our plate. I appreciated the recognition and the compassion. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear most of what followed. I stopped listening for a bit, because I was suddenly engrossed in the over-full plate metaphor. It is a very different cognitive framing than freight trains or tides.
I am an American, so I have had plenty of over-filled plates – some figurative, some literal. The literal ones have usually come at buffets or potlucks – or holiday meals. In those places, having too much food on your plate is the first-est of first-world problems, but when it happens there are choices that have to be made. If you can’t consume it all, what do you remove? What do you prioritize? It makes a difference what you choose. If all of the healthy foods get removed, you can end up with a plate full of empty calories. Occasionally, that is not a big deal. But when it is a daily occurrence, it is a very real possibility to eat a lot of food and still be malnourished.
As I pondered what sorts of things are on my plate at work, it occurred to me there are more or less nourishing things there as well. And I suddenly became very aware of how many healthy things get pushed to the side – or over the edge – by demands that are not terribly healthy. As I imagined this mounded, figurative plate, I started to feel a bit guarded about it. I didn’t want just anyone to take things off for me. I wanted to be intentional about what got taken and what stayed. The problem is that the nourishing tasks usually call for attention quietly and gently, while the other stuff is loud and demanding. It is easy to forget the nourishing stuff is/was there.
Spending time with loved ones is not work. It requires energy and engagement, but it is not work. Likewise, it is not work to spend time doing things you love to do. In fact, it is usually invigorating to be with people, in the places, or doing the things we love. Even if it is physically demanding – if we end up physically exhausted – we end up with more mental energy than we had when we started. It is what feeds a person’s soul. We rest more fully too. A person with good, worthy work to do wakes with energy and excitement to do it.
In contrast, having to spend time with assholes – or doing things we despise – saps energy. And the energy lost is not just due to the work of enduring the time with that person or activity. There is also a period of dread beforehand, the psychological tax of controlling emotions in the moment, and the anger and resentment assholes and meaningless tasks tend to leave in the wake of their blatant disregard for our humanity. It is de-motivating – a disincentive to get started. And when it happens chronically, it squanders energy for all endeavors – including those we love.
The calculus of the to-do list is complex. The wonderful and the bullshit both compound energetically – just in opposite directions. There is surely a range of meh in-between, which is probably a much more linear drain on personal resources. Those are the sorts of things that are reasonably well replenished by good sleep hygiene, healthy exercise, and a decent diet. They are the sorts of unglamorous, unexciting tasks that need to be done – many of which make way for the wonderful stuff – and there are lots of them. This meh in-between is necessary, but it is not the stuff that animates life. We find meaning in the people and activities we love – in the wonderful. Burnout can come from too much meh, I suppose, but I don’t think that is usually the problem. I think it is more often the obligatory bullshit that chronically crowds the wonderful off the plate and leaves us without enough time or energy to do any of the good stuff – or even the mundane, necessary stuff.
So I appreciate leaders and colleagues who want to help reduce the overcrowding of our figurative plates to help with the epidemic of exhaustion and burnout. But I need them to be mindful of the nature – far more than the amount – of things piling up on our plates. The piles of bullshit need to be the first to go. The amount of space they take up is wildly out of proportion. I think we would all be surprised how much space we could find for the nourishing wonderful, just by eliminating the bullshit. And a little more of the wonderful could subsidize the mundane stuff that just needs to get done.