It’s always the smallest darned things

I think I have a pretty high tolerance for juggling life admin.

I regularly show up at the right meetings (sometimes even on time!). I almost always deliver reports when they’re due. I keep a small child alive. Very rarely does a plant in my care die. I go to the dentist for a check-up twice a year. I call my mother to see how she’s going. There’s normally food of some description on the dinner table (not always of high nutritional value, I’ll admit). And… I’m pretty much on top of my emails.

I mean, what more can the world possibly want from me?

Like a lot of you, I keep myself a busy schedule and, mostly, I like it that way. There's a fine line between too busy and bored inside this brain.

But then I keep having these little micro moments that just about tip me over the edge.

Those little moments where someone asks something of me that is so innocuous, so miniscule in its significance that my reaction is way out of proportion.

Here's a recent example.

The teacher of my aforementioned child requested a “progress meeting” with me that led to a decision to get some specialist learning support.

In piles a long list of administrative tasks that there was no one else to do: research local providers, call around to various specialists, discover universal waitlists, call friends for advice and recommendations, call more specialists, wait for response, explain background situation ad nauseum, book assessment, remember to tell school about early pick up for appointment, rearrange work meetings for assessment, remember to pick child up for assessment, attend assessment, hear diagnosis, commit to regular appointments.

Phew. I'm feeling pretty accomplished by this point. I have really pulled out all adulting skills on this one.

But then the micro moment happens. The only available spot the specialist has means I'll have to pick squidgy child up from school early every week. Helpfully, the school has an app for parents to log absences, but there’s no recurring absence option. So, I email the school asking for their help.

"Good Afternoon Kristine, Please log a part day absence on the app every week. This will remind the office to have them ready when you arrive."

Well, didn’t that email just about reduce me to tears.

Can’t one thing just be easy? Can you not just take this one insignificant thing off my plate? How come I need to be worried about AI stealing my job AND not be able to set and forget the most tedious tasks here??

Sure, it's not a big deal. Indeed, it is 100% in no way a big deal in comparison to basically any other problem you can probably think of.

But because I so often run myself right on the edge of keeping up, it only takes one thing like this and next minute I’m curled up in a ball crying into lukewarm tea.

The constant need to remember, decide, act, follow up. None of these things are hard in isolation — but they hardly ever arrive one by one, do they? They arrive on top of everything else we’re already trying to hold together with sticky tape.

That’s why it’s really hard (and often unfair) to ask someone that already has a full-time job to implement a big project or solve a messy problem at the same time as they do their day job – there just isn’t enough mental capacity to go around.

The real friction isn’t always in the big decisions. It’s in the cumulative cost of small, thoughtless ones.

Finding the mental capacity for deep and critical thinking is a constant challenge for most of us.

So part of the value I explicitly offer to my clients is to shoulder some of their mental load. Being a safe pair of hands to trust with a big and messy problem to and know that it will be treated with the care and attention it deserves.

Whether I’m helping teams design strategy or rethink operating models — I always ask:

What additional load are we putting on people here?

What could I do to make this person’s day a bit easier?

Could we engage with people in a better way?

I certainly don’t claim to always get this right. It’s a hard balance to strike when you want to give people the opportunity to contribute but not demand too much of them.

Being easy to work with.

It feels shitty to be on the receiving end of a system that hasn’t necessarily got people at the heart. A system that assumes you have the time, energy, and slack to be successful, or to participate effectively.

So my aim, above anything else really, is to be easy to work with.

Here’s some things I might do while preparing to engage with people:

ONE: Tell them what you’re going to say, say it, and then tell them what you’ve said

If you’re meeting with someone to give them an update on status or a briefing on a particular matter, make their life easier by having a simple message that is repeated. You can go into the technical detail throughout the meeting too, but anchor the conversation around the key points. Here’s an example:

“Thanks for your time today, I wanted to talk to you about three things: [thing 1, thing 2, and thing 3]. Let’s start with thing 1.”

Then you talk about thing 1 making it clear what you need from them and what the risks are before moving on to the next thing.

At the end of the meeting you recap:

“Just to recap what we’ve discussed:

On thing 1 I will [do xyz], and you will [do xyz]

On thing 2 we agreed that [xyz]

And on thing 3 we will monitor the risks and I’ll let you know if anything changes”

TWO: Give people warning about big questions.

If you need to get feedback, insight, or perspectives during a meeting, give the person the benefit of providing your questions or the context ahead of time.

If the matter is complex or technical, provide them with the background in a pre-read or whatever format is most appropriate, but also make sure they know what you need from them. So, for example:

“Here’s the three things I want to discuss with you” or

“There’s three questions I would value your input on: 1, 2 and 3”

No, I’m not accidentally using the number three. Grouping items up into buckets takes mental load off other people. It makes your ask more manageable for them.

If the other person is someone who needs to think before providing contribution, you’ve given them the space to consider what they want to say by letting them know in advance.

THREE: Do the heavy lifting

If people go to the effort of giving feedback or making a contribution – do them the courtesy of paying attention, taking notes, and replaying to them what you’ve heard. This way they get the opportunity to confirm you’ve understood.

Go back to them after the meeting and confirm what you’ve taken on board. Show them that you’ve made changes (if you have). Have you heard this complaint from others? That they’ve given so much of their time to review documents and provide feedback and they never hear an update or see any progress in return?

Don’t be that person. Nobody likes that person.

Because it’s not about the process, or the system. It’s about the humans inside it.

And I don’t know about you but I don’t want to purposefully contribute to someone else being curled up around a mug of cold tea.