Tactics for Reducing Stress and Solving Sticky Problems - A Grab Bag for Hard Times

• add more time or money: they say time is money. can you add one or the other to reduce pressure?
• visualize unknowns in detail to bring them into existence. don't worry if it feels arbitrary.
• adjust your long-term perspective: what are the chances that anything about this situation will matter to you at the end of your life?
• adjust your identity: the current situation and its outcome will not say anything important to you to the people that matter.
• focus on contribution rather than achievement: did you make a change for the better? good. was it enough? who can say.
• eliminate and prioritize: it may be that you have to aim to do less, but better.
• get help and work it out together: are you effective in using your team members and partner teams as assets toward the larger strategic vision?
• disentanglement/simplification: assess whether you are treating multiple problems/factors as single, unified, factors. Things that are complex when taken together may be much simpler when you understand that they are separate but related concepts.
• focus your decision making on action selection and then execute. if no action is available, switch tasks to something where there is action available and revisit the current subject later.
• talk. this is another form of giving form to the unknown. you were given this task by someone. ask this person questions until you understand the whats and the whys. ask people you trust about the things that concern you. you will convert unknowns into obstacles, which can be avoided or mitigated or incorporated into the solution.
• don't follow too closely and you won't have to rely on your reflexes and attention. this is an expansion on time and money. on the highway you can choose your following distance. follow too closely and you end up having to react quickly to the driver ahead. a poverty mindset often keeps us from giving large following distance. know that no matter how many cars lane change into the space ahead of you, you will get where you are going.

What We Need: It's Not More Money

Lunch conversation went deep yesterday. Everyone at our lunch table has, in some way, arrived at the point where we have financial fitness. And although Craig is a bit too young to be as much in a state of existential transition as the older gents at the table, I think I can say this about all of us:

We make enough money and adding more money will not make us any happier.

Money right now is just this game we play to help us select one employer over another.

But the larger task we have before us is to figure out what it is we are going to do with what we have, now that we have more money... if we can make more time.

We are employees, not entrepreneurs. This place that we work... we are delivering the best hours of our days to act out someone else's purpose... for money. And we have to question whether it's worth it. And also, if not this, then what?

Strangely, Salesforce is also helping in their own way to provide fodder for consideration.

My volunteer gig wouldn't be if I were still working for Juniper or Verizon. I don't think it makes me a happy person, or better than anyone else for that matter, to be doing a volunteer gig. But I do think it makes me better than I was before I starting doing it. It gives me a practice venue for being humble and getting my hands dirty and reminds me that hands-on service can be rewarding.

Wednesday mornings, I go to tend the cats at the Sterling Petco and I love to try to do an unquestionably thorough job of it. When I sweep those cat habitations, they are CLEAN.

I don't sweep my own house that well!!

Maybe that says a lot about me, but I don't quite know what. If nothing else, that I am able to drive hard when:

• I know there is a clear purpose (making sure the cats have a clean living space and getting those cats homes)
• I know the beneficiaries personally (Twinkle, Halley, and the black-and-white-one whose name I can't seem to remember)

I think it is really generous of Salesforce to give us paid time to do volunteer activities. It's a grand experiment of sorts.

These are largely community activities that are of uncertain impact and are most certainly not remunerative. Non-remunerative... means that it doesn't earn money... is not lucrative... is not financially rewarding. They don't know what they will get out of it. Probably good PR. But also, maybe, a tiny sliver of a way to change the world by changing people. Reforging them.

Think of it as 10,000 tiny nudges, one delivered to each employee. I accept the challenge. And, I find that it is feeding me spiritually to have my volunteer time as a practice as I ask myself questions about what the hell I am going to be doing in the world that will matter. It helps a great deal to have a space where I can consider what matters without also considering whether something is remunerative.