As Americano As Multitasking

So, I’m assuming that not all of you sit around reading over the Harvard Business Review each month, and in that case, my geeky self has your back. I came across an article called “Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life,” by Stewart Friedman, about “improving our performance in multiple domains of our lives,” or as I put it: being happier. Now I know many of us feel stressed, overworked, and as if we are devoting too much of our life to either school, work, community, or (for my fellow people who are as self-absorbed as I can be) even ourselves.

Our man Stewart conducts seminars to assist businessmen and businesswomen in finding a way to manage their lives. He calls his strategy “Total Leadership,” I call it “killing two, three, or four birds with one stone.” Although his program is geared toward business professionals, I believe his idea can be catered to us common folk as well.
Now, allow my analogy, imagine a huge apple pie. That apple pie represents your week. In your head divide up the apple pie: how much of the pie does your boss, or if you’re at school, your professors, eat up? How much does your family eat? How much do you let your community eat? And, finally, is there anything left for yourself? Now (especially if you are a woman because we tend to forget about feeding ourselves), are you wondering why you baked this amazing pie and you only got to have un poquitito or, even worse, nada?

Now here’s where the “Killing two, three, or four birds with one stone” theory comes in. What if you could magically have your boss and your community share a piece, a piece that will leave them both satisfied? I know my analogy is falling apart slightly, but in the spirit of magical realism, let’s just pretend, eh? What we need to do is figure out ways in which we can get the disparate parts of our lives to share our delicious apple pie.

Stewart recommends thinking of three small experiments, three small changes that you can implement that would benefit more than one part of your life. For example, I am going to start working out three times a week – it will benefit my work product because I will be more alert and less tired, it will benefit myself because I will look like a banger and that raises my self-confidence, and it will benefit my family because I will force my sister to come to the gym with me for some close family bonding. It is important to make small but significant changes. Do not do some New Year’s Resolution b*s*, because we all know we never live up to our grand promises. And write down what you are going to do. Who is it going to benefit, your results, write down everything! It is a way to stay focused on your goal and remember what it is you are trying to accomplish.

However, what I enjoyed most about Stewart’s article was his insistence on self-reflection. That we must understand what our roles are as sister, brother, mother, father, daughter, son, student, teacher, etc., etc., and what is expected of us. He says that we should ask and clarify because sometimes we are attempting to carry too much. Our roles are more pliable and easily mutated now – we can integrate both our private and public endeavors in order to just be happy.  We also need to pay more attention to ourselves, what makes us happier and who and what are our priorities Hopefully, if we try to change our life through small (well-documented!) steps, we can begin to not just eat a bigger slice of the pie, but share a bigger slice of the pie.