The Most Important Thing

With great naivete (or perhaps willful blindness) I signed my baseball-loving son up for a travel baseball team. My husband and I only have the one kid, and other, larger families seem to manage the time commitment, so why not us? Apparently we are not other people, which is a lesson I should have learned in grade school.

In any case, one evening last week found me in the kitchen willing the chicken to cook faster because we only had 15 minutes until we had to get back in the car for baseball practice (again?!?). Meantime I quizzed my kid on the completeness (or lack there of) of his math homework, whether he had iced his sore knee, and if he had packed his water bottle. He was cranky and monosyllabic and I was annoyed and shrill, trying to get everything done. Handing him his plate of dinner (I might even have shoved it at him and said “here”) I really looked at him for the first time that evening, and he looked back at me with a face full of woe.

Uh oh. I had missed something.

That evening, rushing from task to task, I missed The Most Important Thing. It was sitting there in front of me, but I ignored it in favor of action – cooking, packing, nagging. I wasn’t able to look at my chaotic evening and understand what, among all of the things I might do, most needed to get done. That night I blew it.

Our days at work can look like my evening chaos. Too many tasks, too many urgent things, too many mouths to feed and not enough time to feed them all. The default is just to put your head down and get it all done, plowing through the work and your to-do list. The risk is that in doing everything, you don’t have time and energy to do the things that really matter. Or, if you decide that you WILL DO IT ALL, come what may, you risk burn out and cynicism. In either case – whether you fail to do the important things because you were doing all the things, or whether you become angry and exhausted because you do too much, you probably aren’t setting yourself up for long-term success and job growth. It simply isn’t helpful.

We explicitly teach and value all sorts of skills at work, from writing to Excel to Human Centered Design. But we don’t explicitly teach Recognizing The Most Important Thing. Don’t be deceived, though – workplaces do value it and reward it. It just happens to be one of those unstated, untaught, implicit skills of the work world that you are expected to pick up on your own.

Can we teach it if we try? I don’t know – it’s one of those soft fuzzy skills that is hard to pin down. But here are some questions, at least, that might help.

• Do you know what is most important in your work? Can you articulate that in an overarching way (I make sure my project staff overseas have the documents and procurements they need to function) and for any given day (the proposal is due tomorrow; I need to focus on that)?
• Do you and your supervisor agree on what is most important? If you don’t both of you are going to be dissatisfied. Not having agreement with your supervisor on what is most important is untenable – it simply cannot end well.
• Do you have the confidence, knowledge, and ability (maybe we could even call it the self efficacy, hmm?) to decide not to do things that are less important than others?

If you answered “no” to any of those above, you don’t have what you need to do The Most Important Thing at work, and not get distracted by Less Important Things That Suck Your Time. But look – those questions are practical. You can dig into any one of them and make some progress. Pull out your job description and rank it, make an appointment to talk with your supervisor about priorities, experiment with not doing something you think isn’t important and see if the sky really does fall.

That night before baseball practice I did blow it. I hustled my son out the door fed, clothed, and homework done, but I knew I had missed doing my most important job as a mom at that moment, which was to make my kid feel known and loved amid the bumps and bruises of his life. I would have done better to send him off hungry, or with his homework undone. The good thing is that there is always another opportunity. There have been other harried nights since then, one of which we decided to skip practice, order take out, and watch Agents of Shield on Netflix while piled on the couch. Sometimes that is The Most Important Thing. The hard part is recognizing it.