✅ Today’s checklist:
🤔 Riddle me this: I go up and down, but I never move. What am I? (Find the answer on the bottom).
📢 Communication: A social psychologist on balancing niceness and constructive honesty at work.
🤝 Allyship: New white papers on allyship and negotiation—created by women in engineering, science, and technology.
🔍 Job Search: Leveraging Enneagram to better understand your key career assets.
🌀 Career: Career identity can stabilize your sense of self…and also drive it to change.
💪 Values: You finally asserted yourself, and people didn’t like it. Now what?
If you find a sense of comfort and control in meticulous planning and preparing—if you always have your ducks in a row and then some—then you might want to sit down before reading the lines below.
“The desire to meticulously plan every detail of our life can inadvertently lead to a cycle of overpreparing and underachieving, leaving us overwhelmed and unfulfilled. Trust me; been there, done that. And it sucks.”
These words belong to writer and marketing expert Lara Hayes, whose Medium article Stop Overpreparing and Underachieving: My Go-To System for Planning 2024 the Right Way reads like a refreshing, though slightly chilly, breath of fresh air for anyone who finds the following thoughts, feelings, or scenarios all too relatable.
Don’t get us wrong: planning and preparation are positive things. Hayes’ overarching point is that planning and organization are assets when they positively contribute to your goals. However, like many good things, there is a tipping point where continued planning and organization starts leaching your mental clarity and productivity instead of truly contributing anything of value to your work.
Luckily, Hayes offers some solutions for anyone who suspects they may be pushing their planning and preparation habits towards or over that tipping point:
1. Keep reflecting on the details…just try to focus only on the truly important ones.
Being able to separate relevant and irrelevant details is key to optimizing the benefits you get from your fantastically detail-oriented side. Anyone who loves planning has this capability. They simply need to…press ‘play’ to activate it.
The act of planning can feel so innately virtuous, it’s easy to get stuck in an every-detail-is-important mindset. Simply remembering to ask yourself which ones really are important can get you unstuck.
2. Make your goals—whatever you’re planning and preparing for—specific and precise.
Hayes invokes the classic SMART framework for this tip. The more Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely you can make your goals, the easier it will be to spot superfluous planning.
3. Alter how you engage with planning.
“Rather than succumbing to the overwhelm of elaborate planning, I recommend streamlining the process and getting rid of the unnecessary noise,” Hayes writes. “Make the act of planning as painless and swift as possible. Your friend is running late to your house party? Your favorite TV show is not on yet? Your chicken needs to cook for half an hour? Great, use those 30 minutes to plan your year.”
“By adopting a minimalist approach to planning, you can prioritize the most impactful goals and actions, reducing excessive complexity and ensuring a more direct path to success.”
4. Make space in your mind for some chaos and randomness.
Instead of trying to plan and prepare your way around chaos, accept and embrace its inevitability.
“Because while planning is crucial, embracing flexibility is equally necessary,” Hayes explains. “Life is unpredictable, and unforeseen challenges are inevitable. By building flexibility into our plans, we can adapt to changing circumstances with resilience, turning unexpected obstacles into opportunities for growth.”
To prove to yourself that you can accomplish good things without planning out every step beforehand, give yourself permission to try jumping into a few things without any planning at all. Give it at least 15 minutes before determining whether it’s working or not. In the case that it’s not, no sweat—giving it a try will surely leave you with at least one constructive insight.
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One TA reader is worried about falling into the grass-is-greener trap:
The biggest challenge I am currently facing is being near degree completion and wanting a better job, but worrying that I won’t find a job with the current family-work life balance I have.
You bring up a very real and crucial concern, dear reader, one we’re certain many others share.
While this may seem obvious, we feel it’s important to say explicitly: The concern is substantial and legitimate, but please don’t let it stop you from at least exploring other opportunities. When you’re considering offers, use work-life balance as a make-or-break factor in your decision, but don’t let it deter you from getting to that point.
Okay. That’s enough from atop the soapbox for now…
Let’s talk about how you can get an idea of what kind of work-life balance you might enjoy at a job before you’ve started.
The before you’ve started bit is key. While it’s true that you will never really know what the work-life balance will be like before you start, you can take measures to find out as much as possible before you accept an offer.
If you prefer not to broadcast how much you value work-life balance during the interview phase…
Try some of these genius stealth techniques from the founder of the career coaching group, Woken.Ⓡ
To summarize, ask creative questions that get to the core of their existing employees’ work-life balance. In other words, ask about….
If you have no concerns about expressing how much you value your work-life balance…
Sweep aside any concern that asking about work-life balance will seem taboo to potential employers. (Sure, it might be to some, but those are not the ones you want to work for.)
Next, write a list of the specific questions you have about work-life balance to bring to interviews and even interview scheduling touch points. Work-life balance is a broad term that carries different meanings in the context of different lives.
A startup might tell you they prioritize work-life balance because they allow employees to start later in the morning, 10 or 11 AM, but we’re guessing that’s not exactly the variety of balance you’re looking for.
Try to ask about precisely what you want to know about their work-life balance culture.
For example, if you have kids, and what you really want to know is whether or not your potential employer will be okay with you shuffling your schedule as needed to be present for them…when they get sick, need early pick-ups, have school events you don’t want to miss, etc., then you might say something like: My family is my top priority, and being there for them is very important to me. Do you have any structures or systems in place that enable busy parents to shuffle their schedules or make up work when things they have no control over come up?
Hungry for more advice? Here are a few more goodies:
Fall is basically here, and the holiday season is just around the corner—meaning event planning is about to kick into high gear.
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📧 Dread your inbox less. Let Sanebox do the heavy lifting by filtering out the noise so you can focus on what matters.
📚 Get the inside scoop on what makes teams thrive with The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle—a must-read for anyone serious about leadership.
🚨 Job Ops: Visit our job board here.
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