Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [36]
I don't want to sound braggy, but one of my best skills is the ability to concentrate only on what's essential. People sometimes ask me, “How do you do it all?” When I hear this question I occasionally feel a little surge of panic, wondering if the reason I have so much “extra” time is that there is a significant task that I'm not taking care of. Will I discover one day that all other human beings spend two hours a day doing something like draining their veins, and that my not doing so will result in the failure of my circulation at forty-five? But as the years go by and it becomes clearer that I'm not ignoring anything urgent, I see that the secret is dismissing the nonessential.
I can brag because once I was queen of the extraneous. I wanted to do it all so I could say I'd done it all. The first hint I had that this was a stupid approach was the summer before I went to work at Glamour. I had gotten a short-term job working in a political campaign, with responsibilities that included everything from doing advance work to spreading the word to the college crowd. One night some posters for a rally had to be painted and I got down on my hands and knees to do it myself. When I heard one of the higher-ups coming down the hall, I was sure he was going to walk into my office and canonize me. Instead he asked, “Can't you find some high school kids who can do that?”
I made gradual progress paring down my work, but it wasn't until I had a child that I was forced to be a master at it. Here are the three strategies that have worked for me.
1. Discover the Double To-Do List
There's not a woman alive who hasn't heard that she needs a to-do list. In fact, we became so obsessed with the concept that we turned the people who made Filofax into billionaires.
But simply having a daily to-do list won't get you anywhere. It will fill up with lots of housekeeping activities that good girls feel an obligation to stay on top of, like “order new computers” and “complete performance reviews.” What you must have as well is a master to-do list that describes all the gutsy steps for executing your major goal. You then use this list to feed the daily one, making certain you always block off time for the important stuff.
In these crazy times, just taking care of the basics can consume all your time, but you absolutely have to make room for your big goals. Rebecca Matthias, president of Mother's Work, a chain of stores selling maternity clothing (which is estimated to do close to $60 million in sales this year) puts it a wonderful way: “You must drain the swamp at the same time you're fighting the alligators. That's the mark of a successful executive rather than just a manager.”
2. Make It Snappy
Management consultant Nancy Austin likes to tell the story of a famous Canadian oil and gas wildcatter who on the eve of his retirement said, “It's so simple, it sounds stupid. It's amazing how few oil people really understand that you only find oil and gas when you drill wells.” As Austin points out, “You can pray, plan, prospect, prepare, Filofax to the max, but the only way to make things happen, particularly big things, is to pick a starting point and drill. You know—Just Do It.”
How do you train yourself to make it snappy if your instinct is continuously to cogitate, review, and be absolutely positively sure?
First, you need to recognize the myth that may be holding you back. Good girls try to make things perfect before releasing them because they think they have to be perfect. Wrong. In most instances, that's just not the case. You need to adopt the “half-baked cake approach” to ideas. I stole that phrase from Shirley DeLibero, executive director of New Jersey Transit. This is her philosophy: “I don't believe you always have to have a totally baked cake to go out there with. That doesn't mean I shoot from the hip, but much of the time it's important to just get started. You can always massage an idea along the way.