Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life by Sonenshein Scott & Kondo Marie

Author:Sonenshein, Scott & Kondo, Marie [Sonenshein, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Tidying your activities will give you a deeper sense of yourself and your true priorities. But it does a lot more than provide a reflection of how you’re spending your days. It offers a way to make those days better. By discarding tasks that don’t spark joy and adding those that do, you will make your work much more rewarding.

CHAPTER 6

Tidying Decisions

A s a single mother, Lisa balanced a full-time position as a high-school art teacher with side jobs as a freelance artist and an online art instructor. Although she loved all her jobs, the number of decisions she regularly made had worn her down. Beyond the major ones relating to her classes—topics to cover, projects to assign, and classroom rules—hundreds, if not thousands, of daily decisions demanded her attention. A day’s lesson plan involved countless possibilities: Will the class work hands-on, watch a video to learn new techniques, or gain graphic skills with the help of a computer? During class, there were ongoing decisions to be made regarding mentoring students, evaluating them, and even disciplining them. And her side job presented another mountain of decisions: what to make, how to design it, how best to attend to her clients’ wishes, and how to build her social media following. It’s just constant decisions about what I’m going to do next, she thought.

Lisa was finding herself grumpy and exhausted—not just at work but also at home, where she cared for her nine-year-old son. “Decision fatigue is so mentally taxing that I don’t remember things… I have trouble forming my thoughts cohesively and can even forget words.”

She knew things had gone from bad to worse when, one Monday morning, she showed up at her high-school class without a lesson plan because she’d put off deciding what to teach until it was too late. You totally dropped the ball on this, Lisa! You’re failing as a teacher! she scolded herself. She also neglected her budding online teaching business, as her brain was wiped out from the many decisions across her jobs.

Chances are that no matter what type of work you do—whether you’re a corporate executive or an entry-level professional—you make thousands of decisions each day. Some researchers estimate that the number is upward of thirty-five thousand!

Many decisions are low-stakes ones made with little effort or awareness. We’d be completely overwhelmed if we needed to deliberately think about them—the best path to take when walking to our desk, which pen to use, what to say in a quick email reply. That’s why, despite the thousands of decisions we make every day, a recent survey finds that people, on average, recall making only about seventy of them.

Other decisions come with high stakes and require focused attention. We don’t face these types of decisions often, but when we do, they rightfully take up a considerable amount of mental and emotional energy. They usually involve the allocation of a relatively large amount of resources. If you’re in marketing, these might include deciding the suite of products and

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