Processing Space | Customers, Etc.
What do you do when you have all the time in the world and no idea where to begin?
Last Monday, I dropped off the kids at school and had gone to the orthopedist to look into some elbow pain I’ve been having. When I got home at 11 AM, I really wanted to exercise, but I was faced with this nagging question in the back of my head, “How do I know that I have time to exercise?” My brain had a million todos floating around and I knew I needed to be back in the car by 2:15 PM to drive to three different schools to pick up the kids. Even though I had several hours of “me” time, there was an underlying anxiety about my tasks and if I really had the time to give to myself to exercise.
Monday was also the first day my wife went on a weeklong retreat—to the same monastery that I had gone on retreat several weeks earlier—and I was alone with the kids all week. Since I’m not currently working, I really do have the time to get (most) everything done, even if it’s harder by myself. The challenge I was facing was knowing when—or whether—I had time for me.
In this case, “me time” meant exercise, but it could have easily meant any number of things. On one hand, I could easily have said, “I have to exercise. If I don’t exercise, I won’t be able to function,” but that wouldn’t have helped shake the underlying anxiety. So I asked myself a question:
Is there something I can do with this space to reduce my anxiety so I can take the time I need to exercise with a clear head?
The discomfort of space
Facing a big block of open time is often uncomfortable. Sure, if you’re taking a Sabbath, a day of rest, a big block of open time is expected. But on a day when you’re supposed to be productive, a big block of open time is daunting. “What if I don’t get everything done? Will I feel guilty for wasting precious productivity time? Where should I even start?”
One of the unspoken benefits of having a traditional job is knowing what to do when you show up for work1. You receive money in exchange for work, but you also receive a mandate for what to do with your time. “Job responsibilities” are (hopefully) defined well enough that you’re able to work a complete day knowing you had done good work and your job will be waiting for you when you return the next day.
That said, even traditional jobs can have moments of discomforting space that we don’t know what to do with. The hallmark aspect of how I managed the support team at FullStory was extra-queue-rricular time, regular large blocks of time out of the queue where team members got to work on projects that improved the lives of their coworkers and customers. Even though customer-facing work has its challenges, there’s a certain comfort to knowing that when you have crushed a bunch of tickets all day, you’ve done your job. But what about the days where you’re not in the queue at all? What do you do with that time to feel productive? To be productive? It was common for me to coach successful support professionals about how to fill that unstructured space, which could often feel uncomfortable when you were used to working out of a queue for most of your career.
Get it out. In writing.
Going back to my Monday morning, even though I wanted desperately to exercise, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get into the workout with a clear head. I decided to start journaling. I opened an app and just started writing the thoughts in my head to see where they went. John Steinbeck used this method when writing East of Eden, writing letters to his friend and editor to get warmed up.
My first few sentences were mainly just ruminations about feelings. As I got going, simple ideas crept into my head about how I might solve the challenge of knowing if I had the time to exercise. So I wrote:
To start, I’m going to just list the things off the top of my head that I feel I need to do:
• Pick up kids from school
• Plan and make dinner
• Eat lunch
• Schedule out the rest of the week
• Catch up on emails
etc.
Actually writing “I’m going to just list the things” was helpful. And then I did it. And the uncomfortable space was starting to feel a bit less daunting.
From writing to doing
At a certain point, I moved from “writing” to “doing”. It was a natural transition, not forced. I realized that it would be helpful if I put the tasks in an app so I could filter them (I used Todoist), so I wrote that out and then I did it. I had “Schedule the rest of the day” as a task since that was hanging over my head, so I pulled up my calendar and started slotting in tasks on the calendar. Thankfully, the entire calendar wasn’t yet full. Maybe I could still get that workout in.
The biggest task hanging over my head was preparing dinner. We had plenty of leftovers from the weekend and I just needed to make some rice in the InstantPot. But I hadn’t yet planned it out so it still weighed on me. I started a Google doc and made two sections: Food and Steps. The Food list was bulleted. The Steps list was numbered. I estimated how much time it would take to prepare dinner and added an event to the calendar. Quite simple but also quite powerful.
Because it was entirely new, the entire process of writing and doing and planning dinner took about an hour and a half. But when I was finished, the anxiety was gone. I still had over an hour to exercise before I had to get back in the car to pick up kids from school. And I had a clear head.
“Process-ing” the space
On Tuesday, I was surprised to face a lot of the same feelings and questions when I faced a big block of calendar space. Again I wanted to exercise and again I felt an underlying anxiety about if I could exercise. So I repeated the same process I had done the day before. I even went back and read what I had written, which turned out to be immensely helpful. “Yesterday I started with a written reflection, then I listed out my tasks, then I filtered those tasks to what I would do today, then I looked at my calendar and scheduled them out.” I noticed the same repeated todos (e.g. “start a load of laundry”, “plan dinner”) came up. Because I was already familiar with the process, it only took thirty minutes to get through the steps. Steps. Huh, a pattern was emerging.
By Wednesday, I was confident enough that the process was effective that I wanted to experiment with a way to turn it into a system. “How can I get myself to do this same process in a repeatable way?” I turned to Notion as a way to come up with a repeatable process. When I created my new teamspace, there was a “Journal” section put there automatically. Huh. I tried making a new entry and was delighted to see there was already a “Daily Entry” template. That template gave me ideas about how I could use Notion, but I customized it to match the process that had emerged. Now when I’m ready to begin the process, I can just click New > Ben - Daily Prep and voila!, it’s ready for me to fill out:
“Isn’t all of this a bit of overkill for something people do automatically every day?” I dunno! Maybe! I find it helpful to be aware of both the underlying feelings as well as the process that can take us from disorder to structure in a way that has the power to relieve anxiety and create space for other work to be done (or rest to be had).
I find writing to be a helpful tool for processing things that make me anxious. It gets things out my head and into a space where I can try to get my arms around the problem and maybe even move towards a solution. Looking for patterns in the writing can help systems emerge, which lead to repeatable processes, which in turn create more space.
If you found this post helpful, let me know what stood out.
This is of course less true in more senior positions as you’re the one that’s expected to fill the space. But even then it’s still partially true.