How to Solve the Conundrum of “Finite You/Infinite Needs”
If you are reading this, I am going to guess that there was something about the title that you can relate to. Perhaps you are in a position at work that demands too many hours. Or maybe parenting, relationships or social duties have you overwhelmed. Whatever it is, I’d like to relate how I solved the aforementioned problem of “finite me/infinite needs” in hopes it can help others. I don’t claim to have all of the answers, of course, nor will my solution be available to all. But I hope in my story you can define you own solution to the problem of infinite needs. I will start with two business-focused solutions, but my final three are more broad and have worked in my personal life as well.
In July of 2008 I accepted the job of “Assistant Dean of Career Services, Strategy and Marketing” at Washington University School of Law. I was young, and this was a big career break for me — I had multiple responsibilities embedded in that overwrought title. The strategic ones were not overly dramatic; I sat on the University Strategic Counsel with a bunch if people with more fancy and powerful titles than mine. I spent a decent amount of my time learning in incredible detail and nuance about law school and university rankings, which incidentally has now become the fastest growing part of my consulting firm years later. But that was manageable. What was not manageable was that I was also responsible for the employment of about 1,000 students per year — during the Great Recession. The recession hit about every sector, but few more so than legal employment. In short, companies were not spending money and thus started to refuse to have first-year law firm associates work billable hours. Firms responded by not hiring. This all came as close as possible to a veritable “pulling up the drawbridge” to the entire hiring castle. On graduation day one year, I had three students have their jobs pulled away from them. On graduation day.
So, I worked long hours. I also inherited a large staff, all of whom reported to me. The general rule of the business world thumb is that you should have roughly 7 people report directly to you, and I had over 15, including work studies. Some bought into our new mandate, which was to emphasize developing relationships with employers over building a toolkit of employment search skills for students. Which also meant I traveled a great deal across the nation to meet with law firms and government agencies. In one day in New York City I met with 10 employers. On each cab ride from one meeting to the next I would frantically check my phone and respond to as many emails as possible — I received between 200-300 a day.
Most of us have been here at some point in our careers, and it isn’t a fun place to be. I had no significant other, no social life, and I was working 7 days a week. A few days I would just never leave the law school. It was unsustainable. So, I caught my first big break, and it is a lesson I have carried with me to this day. I made a great hire in an assistant named Kristine Kay. What is a truly great hire? Someone who buys into the overall mission. How do I know Kris did so? One night she came into the office at midnight to email a bunch of law firms in China so they would get the email as they were arriving to work. I never asked her to do this, but she knew that I placed a certain amount of strategic emphasis on the timing of email. But here is the kicker. Kris never told me she did this. She didn’t do it to impress her new boss — she did it because she was dedicated to getting the job done. Put in other terms, we were completely aligned in that regard, and my life started to get a little more balanced, a little less dominated by those infinite needs. (1) Make dedicated hires was my first lesson.
I’ll jump forward to 2012, when I started my own legal and higher education consulting firm, The Spivey Consulting Group. When you run your own business, you no longer have a job description. There is, quite literally, a near limitless number of things you can do. You don’t have to ever shut yourself off if you don’t want. My first night I looked out the window as the sun rose — I had been up all night working on our website and had no idea I had pulled an all-nighter. Many more would soon follow.
But I got lucky and worked hard, and our demand increased rapidly. I remembered the first rule and made some great hires: Karen Buttenbaum from Harvard Law School, Derek Meeker from Penn Law, Danielle Early from Harvard Law, and Anna Hicks, initially our intern who we then stole away from UVa Law and is now our COO and runs the daily operations of our entire firm. Which is where I learned the second rule: (2) Never manage people when they don’t need to be managed. Right? If you have the talented and dedicated people — just let them loose. Only manage when there is a problem. PJ Fleck, who just finished a historic season as the head coach of The University of Minnesota Football team, says it best:
But the “managing” of people carries over to relationships beyond work. I’d like to quote someone else, Thich Nhat Hanh a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, about empathy in relationships:
“When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.”
My takeaway is this. The less I try to change others, the more I try to understand them and let them be themselves, the better my relationships are with them. I mean this because I have seen it from both sides. From my micromanaging, which is almost always utterly a waste of time, to my being more hands off. (3) If you want to create more time for you, focus on you. Don’t try to change others.
Changing topics, I do want to address one area that has made a tremendous amount of difference for me that is a simple scheduling matter. I now wake up at 4 AM each day, when for most of my life I was more of a 7-8 AM riser (at best). This has done wonders for me — it is a GAME CHANGER. From 4 AM to around 7 AM I have no distractions, it is me locked into my work utterly focused. Three hours of focused work has translated to an entire day of interrupted work for me, I am not exaggerating. Put another way, and very importantly, when I started waking up at 4 AM, I created what I had previously thought were finite time resources. (4) Three early, uninterrupted hours in the morning equals 8-10 hours to me during the day. It may be different for others, but whatever you do, carve out those hours. You will be amazed at what you find you are capable of when you are in them.
What do I do after those three straight hours of uninterrupted work? I trail run in the mountains. Almost every single day — and at times multiple times in a day. An hour of running at high altitude in the wondrous natural beauty of the Colorado mountains and forests, I would posit, creates two more free hours of work. I do my best thinking on these runs and science supports this. A wonderful book “Brain Rules” by John Medina, discusses this in detail — how we evolved moving such that our neural pathways function at their peak while we are moving. (5)Exercise and healthy living, within commitment to this every day, frees up time for me.
Finally, and this is an area I have become very successful at despite my biological impulses to the contrary, (6) walk away from drama. I could give thousands of examples, but the easiest is from my experience online, where they call me “Dad” on a subreddit forum focused on my field. There are times where people will make things up about me or my firm. I last year had a mother pretending to be her son posting under his name as if he were upset with my company, even though he was utterly happy with the company. We figured this out quickly, and our lawyers were going haywire over it. But we never responded. It died down. I had a stalker, of sorts, who made multiple Twitter accounts and who obsessed in an unhinged manner over a singular question that we had already answered online. I never responded, and he eventually went away. I have a close friend with episodes of mania who at time sends emails utterly not themselves — or at least not what they would want to say for them. I do not respond. It’s an incredibly hard thing for me not to. My nature is to be very proactive, to always respond, but I have seen such responses destroy both businesses and relationships. If someone is making something up about you, if they are saying something untrue, why would there ever be a reason to respond? The truth in on your side, just have faith in that and move on.
Ironically, this was one of my longer blogs, but I hope it helps because so many of us feel the crunch of time each 24-hour rotation of the Earth on its axis. We often don’t feel like we have enough time to accomplish the myriad of things on our to-do lists, let alone the problems that pop up on an almost daily basis that cause us to have to stop in our tracks and take time out to solve them. But I have found a solution that works wonderfully for me. I surround myself with dedicated people, I do not over-manage them, I (still working on this one) try to understand others better, I get up before anyone else I know so I can get work done undistracted, I free my mind through exercise, and I walk away from the drama of life. I hope you find your own equation that solves the finite you/infinite time conundrum!
– Mike Spivey