Twelve

Responsibilities

Practices quiz item #12:

If I didn’t do this, would anybody notice?

Unfortunately, not all of our tasks excite us. We downright dislike some responsibilities, and spending energy on them feels wasteful. If an activity is not a challenge or has no reward in it, motivation is difficult. After a long day at work, do you come home to, well, more work? If you’re a stay-at-home parent, you may never seem to stop working. Bill paying, cleaning, shopping, cooking…it’s a seemingly endless list of responsibilities. Spending energy completing low-value tasks at work feels like a waste of time. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could complete your tasks more efficiently, so you would have energy to spare?

ENERGY BANDIT #1 | Domestic duties

The very second you walk through the door you’re bombarded with requests about dinner, playtime, and homework assistance, plus the latest domestic details from your spouse. And that’s not to mention the day’s stack of mail, voice messages, and e-mails. And Jennifer has soccer practice at 6:30, and Jason has a piano recital at 7:30.

Parents lead more harried lives today than in previous generations. In many households, both parents have full-time jobs. The Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., found in a 2001 study that from 1989 to 1998, middle-class parents’ work hours increased by 246 hours per year—that’s six weeks. Add each child’s extracurricular activity schedule to that, and all relaxing family time on evenings and weekends has been replaced with household chores, grocery shopping, and errands.

ENERGY BOOSTER | Develop an evening routine for all family members

This begins the second you walk through the door. By developing an evening routine, you can retain your sanity, happiness, and energy level, and teach members of your family how to respect others’ boundaries. Communicating clearly and politely will help children realize that Mommy and Daddy are people too—with their own needs. You can consider the following evening rituals:

• If you dress up for work, change your clothes. This is the first thing you do, period. Nothing else comes first unless there’s blood involved. Throw off your shoes, and slip out of those work clothes and into your lounge pants. Even if you have to leave again that evening, trade your work clothes for more comfortable and casual clothing. Pat a cool washcloth over your face or run moistened cotton swabs under your eyes to refresh yourself. Politely explain to your family that you need these five minutes to yourself so that you’ll be better able to help them.

• Assist with and/or check homework, if relevant. Work before play.

• Enjoy playtime with your children. Remember the saying “The best thing you can spend on your children is time.” Use playtime as the payoff for completing homework and domestic-duty time. This might mean playing with toys, shooting hoops, or playing a board game with the entire family. Even teenagers will want to hang out with you regularly, though they would never admit it; their “playtime” might be watching their favorite Veronica Mars episode on DVD.

• Set a regular bath time for children. Teenagers may want to shower in the morning since they’re more concerned with their appearance, and that’s fine. They’ll likely have more homework that will take up time in the evening.

• Set a regular bedtime for children. Young children need ten to twelve hours of sleep, and teenagers need at least ten hours of sleep. Between bath time and bedtime is the bedtime routine. This can include the child tidying his or her room, packing the backpack for the next day, and a calming bedtime story. Turn off the TV, dim the lights in the child’s room, and minimize stimulation—no tickling, no wrestling, and no jumping on the bed. Even teenagers need a fixed bedtime. They will argue and beg to stay up later. To prove your point, you can conduct an experiment. Let your teenager stay up as late as he or she wants to. After one or two days of this, your adolescent will be sleep-deprived, and probably won’t argue about going to bed on time that evening. You won’t even have to say “I told you so.”

ENERGY BANDIT #2 | The daily grind of cooking dinner

Can you imagine how much simpler our lives would be if we didn’t have to eat? We’d save truckloads of money and decades of time. No meal planning, no grocery shopping, no cooking, no cleanup. But we have to eat to live; there’s no way around it.

ENERGY BOOSTER | Enlist help with meals

Meal preparation time and cleanup time will decrease if everyone pitches in. And it will also prevent stress, resentment, and energy drain. To get others to help, try some of these ideas:

• Children must learn to cook. Older children and your spouse can chop vegetables. Children can set the table and get out condiments. Each family member should also assist with cleanup. Everyone can have a specific assignment that rotates from week to week to prevent boredom and dread, such as clearing the table, sweeping the floor, loading the dishwasher, washing any items by hand, and storing leftovers.

• Go to the grocery store the same weeknight every week. Notice that I said “weeknight.” Weekends are not for running errands. Weekends are for recreation to recharge your batteries. Besides, the grocery is more crowded on weekends; it will be more stressful and take longer. Figure out which night of the week is least crowded at the grocery. Hint: It’s not Friday. Purchase everything you’re going to need for a full week. This will reduce multiple trips to the grocery for just a handful of forgotten items, saving you time and energy. You will need ingredients for seven dinners, plus enough items for seven breakfasts and seven lunches for the whole family. Sticking with this number saves you time in the grocery store and streamlines your weekly budget. Know how much it costs you per week, and stick to that budget. Make a list of any ingredients you’re likely to forget. Children can accompany you and go on a “scavenger hunt” for items on your list, decreasing your time in the store.

• Cook more than your family will eat; leftovers make the easiest, healthiest, and cheapest lunches. Just put the leftovers into a container, pop it into the fridge, and then put it in your briefcase the next morning. And don’t forget the fresh fruits and vegetables to accompany it.

ENERGY BANDIT #3 | Allowing others to sap your energy

Have you ever noticed how clean the house stays when your spouse and children are gone? Have you ever noticed how much work you get done when your supervisor and coworkers are away? No matter how efficient we are, the habits of others can be giant stop signs smack in the middle of our energy expressway. The boss interrupts your flow with spur-of-the-moment meetings three times a week and countless head-pokes into your office to pile yet another meaningless project onto your already overloaded plate. The family cleaned the house last night, but the kids are still leaving their dirty socks all over the living room. Rather than telling them to put their dirty socks in the laundry hamper, you do it yourself because it’s easier than having to ask them more than once or dealing with an argument from them. Our stress builds up, and before we realize it, we’re screaming at everyone within a five-mile radius and can’t figure out why.

ENERGY BOOSTER | Divvy up chores among family members

Every single member of the family should contribute to household chores, as age allows. Try not to make chores gender-specific. Girls should know how to mow the lawn, and boys should know how to cook. These are basic life skills that they’ll need as adults. You’ll be doing their future college roommates and spouses a favor, making for happy and healthy households. The worst thing parents can do when it comes to household chores is to do it themselves without teaching children how; this even holds true for stay-at-home parents. If you don’t teach your children to chip in equally or even how to perform a certain task, you’re setting them up for shock and confusion when they move out of the house. Cleanliness is not about having a home worthy of a Better Homes and Gardens magazine feature, it’s about basic sanitation and health. Create some ground rules like the following:

• Each member of the family should always clean up his or her own mess, such as after fixing a snack or getting out toys.

• Make a list of all daily household chores: mealtime setup and cleanup, taking out trash and recycling, and pet care. Assign the same number of tasks to everyone in the household. Rotate them so children learn how to perform each task, which also adds variety.

• Make a list of all weekly basic sanitation chores: kitchen, bathrooms, floors, dusting. Rotate them from week to week. There is no law written in stone that the house has to be cleaned all in one evening. With a large family to divide chores among, cleaning the entire house in one evening may be accomplished relatively quickly. But with a smaller family, or with children who have extracurricular activities on different evenings, this may not be the case; simply spread cleaning duties over two or more evenings.

• Laundry: Each member of the family could do one or two loads of his or her own laundry on a given night of the week, or family members could take turns being in charge of laundry day from week to week.

• Lawn care: Like mealtime cleanup, each family member could be assigned a specific task, such as picking up sticks, mowing, pulling weeds, or trimming. These can be rotated from week to week so everyone learns how to perform each task, and to provide variety. In snowy climates in winter, snow blowing plus shoveling sidewalks, steps, porches, and decks can likewise be assigned.

ENERGY BANDIT #4 | Lack of dialogue about your preferences

We’re all guilty of it. We take on too much, and we don’t clearly communicate our needs to others. We’re afraid we’ll appear weak or inept if we ask for assistance. We don’t communicate our preferences regarding the habits of others, afraid we’ll come across as rude.

ENERGY BOOSTER | Communicate clearly

Clear communication is vital in the workplace and in the home. Use the following clear communication techniques to save you time and energy.

• Don’t assume that you know what someone means when they’re assigning you a task. Ask questions. Have them clarify. Sometimes others unintentionally or inadvertently withhold information. Perhaps they’re in a hurry; perhaps they know you always understand instructions and do an exceptional job; perhaps they have a subconscious fear that you will get promoted above them. Even if you think you know what someone means, confirm. If you proceed without confirming and it turns out they wanted something different, you’ve lost all that time, and you have to start over. In other words, you’ve just bunched up your schedule, which adds to your stress level.

• Say “please” and “thank you.” People love to be appreciated. When someone accomplishes a task, be sure to thank them: “Thanks so much for cleaning the bathrooms.” This is an especially good example for children. Being thanked tells them that they’re important. And they respond better to polite requests rather than to yelling. And they definitely respond to enumerated reasons why instead of “Because I told you so.” “Jason, could you pick up your toys from the stairs right away, please? I wouldn’t want you to trip over one and break your leg. I’d much rather play tag with you than drive you to the emergency room.”

• A little humor goes a long way. “You want it today? Well, that’s too late. I’ll give it to you yesterday. But really, I can get it to you by eleven AM tomorrow. Does that work for you?”

• Challenge unrealistic deadlines. We live in a fast-food, instant-messaging, expressway-speeding society, and people want their requests now. But now, or even ASAP, isn’t possible in this time-space continuum. Perhaps you need to question deadlines when people do the equivalent of asking a gourmet chef to deliver a meal to your table in seven minutes. Having inadequate time to accomplish a task compromises quality. Sometimes unrealistic deadline requests are the symptom of others’ procrastination. Perhaps your boss knew a week ago that he wanted this project, but he just never got around to asking for it because he’s been too “busy” to take the mere ten minutes it required to explain the project to you. So he dumps it over your head and wants it finished in one day. But in reality, it’s going to take you a full three days to complete it. It’s like the saying I’ve seen posted in photocopy shops: “Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine!”

ENERGY BANDIT #5 | Spending an inordinate amount of time perfecting menial tasks

We can also get sucked into spending too much time on low-priority items. This is especially true of perfectionists, who can dig themselves deep into a given project to make sure every last little detail is just so. I heard a story about a couple who was removing wallpaper from their bathroom. The husband, a perfectionist, noted that they would have to remove the baseboards to remove all the wallpaper. The wife informed him that neither they, nor likely any future owners of the home, would want to remove the baseboards for any sane reason. And she promptly retrieved an X-Acto knife.

ENERGY BOOSTER | Keep the main thing the main thing

Often we get sucked into performing tasks that don’t add value. This is especially true in the workplace. We might have to write quarterly reports to our supervisors about the quarterly reports we submitted to another department. I know of a woman who worked as a fund-raiser for an organization. Her supervisor wanted her to spend several hours revising the output format of the report they reviewed in their weekly fund-raising meetings; he wanted it to be generated from the database instead of from a word-processing program. She politely asked whether he wanted her to spend four hours tweaking the report output format, which they spent less than an hour reviewing every week, or four hours calling donors to raise more money. He immediately saw her point.

Prioritizing is all about trimming the fat and avoiding expending too much effort on getting the little things just right. To minimize the time spent on every item you undertake, while still maintaining quality, try these methods of streamlining your energy into effortless efficiency.

• Do first what’s due first.

• Try to resolve small items (requiring less than three minutes) immediately, without even writing them on your list. Just don’t let all those tiny little items that pop up every day eat your entire schedule. Tend to the important or time-sensitive ones, and ditch the rest or tend to them later.

• Don’t spend too much time on low-priority items. This will create a gridlock of high-priority items, all honking for your attention.

• Don’t let perfectionism suck you too deeply into a minor task. Hence the saying “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Keep it in perspective. Be efficient. Set a limited time to accomplish the task. If you set aside only an hour to get it done, you’ll get it done in an hour.

ENERGY BANDIT #6 | An inability to muster the energy needed to do chores

Perhaps you’re faced with tasks you dislike—they’re redundant, they offer no challenge, and there’s no inherent reward in accomplishing them, but you know you really should do them at some point. Annual household maintenance chores often fall into this category. So can filing in the office. Or filling out monthly activity reports.

ENERGY BOOSTER | Transform your outlook about truly necessary, but dreaded, tasks

If you can’t change the situation, then change your mind:

• Be grateful when things are easy. The task you have to accomplish may be redundant and offers zero intellectual stimulation—but if it’s truly necessary, you can’t blow it off. But it’s much less stressful than having to deal with something that’s difficult, such as a flat tire in the rain while on your way to a meeting with a prospective big client. Be glad when things are easy. Life is chock-full of difficult things. Enjoy whatever autopilot items come your way.

• Take the opportunity to make the task relaxing and meditative. Our lives are insanely busy. Think of a mindless task as a well-deserved respite from the hustle and bustle. Your boss wants you to stuff two hundred envelopes? No problem. It’ll be a nice break from the annual budget that’s been tying your brain into pretzels for the past five hours, not to mention giving your eyes a break from frying on the computer screen.

• Use your time and brainpower wisely. Focus your mind on something else while your body is on autopilot. When you’re stuffing those envelopes, you just might be surprised that you’ve figured out the problem to that annual budget that’s been plaguing you for days. Finish composing that poem in your head while you clean the sink. Brainstorm more effective and creative communication techniques for dealing with the kids. You’ll be finished with your task before you realize it. I saw a sign once at a small airport that read, BOREDOM IS A CHOICE. It’s so true. While performing a simple task, you can tie up any loose ends in your mind about other pressing details or think positive thoughts about yourself or a loved one.

ENERGY BANDIT #7 | Procrastination

Call it putting things off, inactivity, or lack of initiative—no matter how you slice it, it is procrastination. The good news is that the dread of doing something is always worse than actually doing it. Procrastination builds stress, like a dam. But doing the thing transforms your energy, like a waterfall flowing.

ENERGY BOOSTER | Force yourself to do it

When you finally do the task you’ve been putting off, the reward is the freedom from the stress that it was causing you. It feels so great to have it done. Good stuff immediately begins to flow into the space it was occupying. You’re no longer paralyzed, and you get your energy back. If you keep procrastinating about doing something, it’s still there, staring you in the face. But if you actually do it, it’s gone; it’s behind your back. If you’re having trouble getting motivated, dangle a carrot in front of yourself. Tell yourself that as soon as you finish your fair share of the household chores, you can treat yourself to a square of dark chocolate. The flavonols are good for your heart, and it will curb your desire to do a face-dive into an entire cake. But don’t exceed more than two or three squares per day!

ENERGY BANDIT #8 | Doing the fun, easy, or trivial thing first

After I finish a speech, I get to the airport right away, even if my flight doesn’t leave for some time. Clients have asked, “Would you like to camp out in this empty office after your presentation and do e-mail? You’ll have plenty of time to get to the airport.” I always politely decline, explaining that I can’t truly relax until I’m at the airport and settled. Missing my plane is not worth the risk, so I put energy into getting to my gate (a rather difficult task with air travel these days), and then I can relax.

ENERGY BOOSTER | Work before play

When you do the work first, it will no longer be hanging over your head. What fun is relaxation time if you’ve got a to-do list nagging at the back of your mind? After you accomplish your task, you can read your book, take a long, hot bath, watch the sunset, or whatever it is you love to do. Not only will this help you get it done, but it will help you get it done faster because you have something to look forward to. The earlier, the better. When faced with an unpleasant task such as arguing with your bank, dealing with an angry customer, or taking down outside Christmas lights, do it first thing in the morning. Otherwise, you’ll lose energy thinking about it all day and probably will find an excuse not to do it.