Do your commitments match your convictions?

This will be my last article for the year. I am writing this while relaxing with family and I hope you are too. During these last few days, all of us are looking back at 2011 and planning/scheming for 2012. We plan most parts of our life, our career, finances, retirement, kid’s education, etc. We are always running to accomplish things and check things off our to do list. But we rarely stop to think whether we are truly spending our energy on what really matters to us. Before you dismiss this claim saying that you are not one of those people, let us consider one fictional case.

Meet Mike. He is a senior executive and is highly regarded by his peers and the company’s share holders. He travels frequently so he misses a lot of his kid’s soccer practice. He has not taken a long relaxing vacation with his wife in quite a few years. Now he is too successful and the other executives and share holders treat him with so much respect, he is afraid to back off from any of his commitments. He feels he will be letting them down if he stopped working hard. He wants to volunteer for his church but he doesn’t even spend enough time with his kids, so he feels volunteering right now is out of the question. He is making good money but he feels something is missing.

Does that sound familiar? That pretty much sums up any working class adult. Replace the “senior executive” with any position, mid level manager and he is climbing the ladder and has to keep going, a fresh graduate, now is the time he should work hard and prove himself. All of us have a reason why we have to keep going as fast as we can. Either because of career ambitions or necessity, we are busy all the time. When we find ourselves overwhelmed and need to cut out some tasks, the first thing that mostly gets the axe is family commitments.

How Americans spend their time (Click to enlarge)

It is not because we love our family less than our job. Twisted logic says that since we are working hard for the family, the family will understand our stress better than the boss. How many of us struggle to find balance between our work ambitions and our personal lives? How many of us are overwhelmed by the number of daily tasks that need our attention and let our quality of life erode? I am guessing quite a few.

I have been conducting a poll this month. There were 181 responses.

The results actually surprised me. I was expecting at least 10-20% of the responses to be unhappy with the time they spent, but 50+% survey responders said they were unhappy with the time they spent at work. I even got a comment- ”I have let work become my focus to the point that I’ve forgotten what else I used to like to do. ”

Where are we going with this? Life seems to be in the fast lane all the time and we are competing to pass each other. Where to? For many of us it takes some serious crisis, like an illness, losing a loved one or a divorce to do some soul searching.  But most of the time, when we get there it is too late. Even in personal finance, it takes a melt down or a birth of a child or some significant change in life to see we need to change course.

How to align our commitments and our values?

Why do we need a crisis to pick the right path? Professors Donald Sull and Dominic Houlder studied the commitments and values of their students, who were mostly pursuing part time MBAs and came up with a frame work to match our values to our commitments in their paper Do Your Commitments Match Your Convictions?

Their frame work is fairly simple and intuitive. It consists of a 3 step approach

• Identify your values : Take stock of what is important to you. Be honest, don’t write what you think should be a priority to you, write what you really do value. They suggest having a worksheet with separate columns for the values themselves and money, time and energy spent for each of the values. Be as specific as possible. Here is their worksheet. (the full instruction to fill this is in the downloadable paper linked above)

I modified the worksheet to list ALL the tasks I do everyday, plus the tasks I would like to do but don’t have time. I also included  additional columns to take stock of the time & money spent now vs what I want them to be. Here is how it looked (roughly digitized).

• Identify the gaps  : The second step in their approach is to identify the gaps. If you have taken the time and thought to fill out the worksheet honestly, it should be straight forward to identify the gaps.
• Understand the gaps and change course :  If your values and your day to day commitments already align well, great! You are ahead of a lot of people. For the rest of us, the idea is to identify big gaps, something thatyou value a lot that receives little to none of your resources or a single value that takes most of your time. Most of the time, we already know about the discrepancies. It is this step where we stumble and give up.

Why we fail to change even though we know we ought to?

This behavioral problem is not unique to time management. It is in personal finance, relationship and career management. We already know what we have to do, but we still don’t.

There are various reasons why we fail to change our commitments to align with our values.

• Keeping options open: This is prevalent among fresh graduates. We accept tasks from different departments at work to keep options open and after all this is the age when we can work as hard as possible, right?
• Not thinking out of the box: We do the same thing again and again expecting different results.
• Keeping up with the commitments made in the past: We keep up with commitments we made in the past but keep accepting new ones, thus, commitment clutter.
• Continuing traditions that no longer fit : We do a lot of things everyday out of habit. It might no longer be relevant if we stop to think about it, but are too busy to recognize that.
• Commitment creep : Prof. Sull & Houland say we experience commitment creep when we commit ourselves without really thinking about what we are taking on, without reflecting on the long-term costs of the implied promises.  This was the case of Mike we met above. He feels a binding commitment to the share holders to make things work. There is no legally binding contract, so there are no exit clauses.
• Depending on others for validation and praise : My very own weakness. Success and praise are my motivators.  Right now, I don’t have kids, so I can work 60-80 hrs a week and I get praised for that. When we do start a family, I have to cut back but I would still liked to be praised for my beating any hard deadlines.
• We require acknowledgement : Often times, we get positive acknowledgement at work, but we don’t tell our loved ones how much we appreciate them, whether they are working away from home to bring the money tohave a great life or working at home to manage everything. So we soon drift towards work where we get immediate gratification and praise.
• Fear of failure : Another one of my faults. I know I am successful in the work I do now. If I have to cut back and change course, I fear that everything will fall down like a stack of cards. How will I face other people when I fall on my face? So I keep doing what I know I can do.
• Inertia : We just don’t want to change. Period.
• Other reasons : A lot of us have two jobs so that we can pay off debt or make ends meet. This requires even deeper probing to see if you could get a better paying job or find another way that will help you stay close to your values.

It is difficult to accept that we have to change. We usually blame others like our work or the Government, anyone other than ourselves. We have to take responsibility. We are the only ones who can make ourselves happy.

What can we do about it?

I am going through a self-exploratory phase. Recent illness and some other personal changes in my life has forced me to think about what really matters to me. This might all sound very philosophical but I can no longer hide under my excuses. I really cannot afford to ignore what really matters to me in life.

It takes effort, but we can change. Here are some of the things that might help -

• Let go of my ego :  Lot of us have this illusion that without us the company we work for will come to a grinding halt. Nope. Life will go on. I am not indispensable.

• Delegate, don’t try to control everything
• Responding like a robot : My husband jokes about how many times I check my email. With almost everyone having a smartphone or a Blackberry the line between work and life has been constantly thinning. We should be able to compartmentalize and save ourselves from constantly getting distracted.
• Declutter your commitments: Before taking on a new task clear something else.
• Learn to say “no”: I have a problem with this. Even if I am asked to do something I hate, even if I know I don’t have to take that on, I have trouble saying no. I have to learn to say no.
• Don’t try to do it alone: Clearing up commitments is not a do it alone thing. We need to talk about our values with our family and based on that to our boss.  For that we need to -
• Make decisions: We have to decide what is important to us and work towards that.

• Stop making things more complicated than they should be: This might not be a personal decision, but a lot of companies have too many managers and time management programs, a lot of us are spending half our time filling out time sheetsand answering administrative emails than getting actual work done.
• Want to change: Finally we should want to change. Nothing will change unless we are motivated to do it. At any point I can come up with 10 convincing excuses for why I am busy. Deep down, I know if I really want to I can change.

I don’t know who said this, but this pretty much sums up my sentiment - If you don’t like the story your life has become – tell yourself a better one.