June 17, 2024
Dear leader,
I have done two things that will kill a creativity streak dead. One: I've not written in a week. Two: I looked at email, Slack, YouTube before sitting down to write this morning.
In my defense, creativity streak killer number one was because I have spent every day of the last week at my aunt's hospital bedside. She is severely autistic, blind, with no language that anyone but us can understand, and can't take care of herself at all, obviously. So I'm there to make medical decisions, feed her, get her more magazines to “read”, which for her means turning the pages. The tactile soothes her. It's her main occupation. I can totally give myself a pass for this.
However, creativity streak killer number two was completely avoidable. What had me open my email before writing this morning? Why did I decide to click on that link and get into watching a colleague's TV interview about organizations with no CEO? I even looked at the calendar for the day. Realized a few things that had shifted, so I went into schedule mode.
So now my head is full of the tyranny of tasks and full of other people's thoughts. Two things that are not conducive to stream of consciousness writing. With other people already in my head, I'm not even sure whose consciousness is at work here.
Begin again. Just begin again. I suppose that's the saving grace of anything. You can always begin again. So I will.
I'm not sure what I want to write about. Oh, yes, I am. It's so funny that before I can even get to writing the end of a sentence about not knowing what to write, my mind knows what to write. I suppose that's the utility of writing longhand.
Anyway, what came to mind was the topic of capacity. I am finding that I either have less capacity to get things done in a day and move things forward over time, or I am unwilling to work beyond my actual capacity. Working beyond my actual capacity… that has been my modus operandi for most of my working life.
This is the part of the letter that's aimed at you, dear leader. I hear you being so very busy. Either busy with work at your job, or busy with the many collaborations you've taken on, or busy trying to find work. I hear you say that too many things have hit your calendar all at the same time.
I wonder about the volume of your actual capacity. How big is that volume? How much fits inside comfortably without bulging out the sides or straining the seams? I wager most of us don't know the volume of our capacity, as we've grown up in systems that push us to take in more, then a little more, and, can you just do this one extra thing too, please? And we say yes.
Of course, our advanced work structures like Agile are specifically geared to avoid the overflowing container and to get a team and — possibly, eventually — even an organization to work within its actual capacity. These help for sure. And as I zero in on the individual level, in this case myself (and maybe you can zero in on yourself) I have to ask some questions.
What has had me historically take on more than my capacity?
And now that I am working more within capacity, how can I greet and then relax that voice inside my head that says, ‘You're not getting enough done?’
Some things to mull over today.
Love,
Lyssa
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