Careful What You Wish For

by Matthew Best

An interesting thing happened to me this past week. One day this past week I was attempting to get out the door to do some work at Panera,otherwise called my office
away from my office. The kids were asking me tons of questions,one of the cats had just done something unmentionable outside the litter box,the baby started to cry - we have a pretty full house,so all this is pretty normal.

I was a bit frustrated though. I was frustrated because I was concerned that I wouldn't have enough time to get my work done. I didn't leave the house in the best of moods. It hit me when I got into my car. At that moment I realized that I had gotten exactly what I wanted and I was frustrated about it. I wanted to spend more time with my family - which has been happening. I wanted to work less - which has been happening.I was getting exactly what I had asked for.

So why the frustration? What I came to recognize about the situation was that I was still dealing with the effect of old habits - habits about how much time I "needed" to work. I was used to working many more hours and now I was shifting to working fewer hours. My key for avoiding a recurrence of the frustration is to not only define the goal clearly, but also the consequences of achieving the goal - think of it as symptoms that let you know that you are completing a goal. When I had neglected to do this, I became frustrated at what was going on. When I remembered what the goal was - I remembered that less work time means working smarter, not harder. It means setting up better systems to handle time consuming tasks, etc.

So what are you attempting to accomplish? Are you making progress on this? How do you know? What are the consequences of achieving the goal?

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