Less is More: Don’t Let Your Plate Overflow… Say No!

"STOP ADDING MORE TO MY PLATE!"  (says no one)

Stop!  Giving my over filled life one more task!  (says almost no one)

No matter how big you are your plate can (and will) overflow until you learn Less is More Thinking.

In the twenty times I have presented my session “Less is More” at teachers conferences.]  We will do this together in a book.

1.  Our session will begin with a plate full of mini chocolate bars. 

2.  A volunteer will comes up and hold the plate. 

3   We establish that teacher’s workload (plate) is full. 

4.  I will ask that teacher what items have been added to their plates in the last two years. 

5.  With each addition to the teacher’s plate, I begin dumping more chocolate bars into the plate. 

6.  No matter how hard the volunteer teacher at the front tries to balance all the additions to her plate chocolate bars spread all over the floor. 

7.  The plate has a finite capacity of what it can hold.  Teachers had numerous strategies to deal with the overwhelming number of chocolate bars:

When we finally stop there are chocolate bars everywhere on the floor.  The teacher is standing mystified what to do with a more than full plate of treats.

People have tried various tricks to keep chocolate bars from littering the floor:

A)  A football coach sized teacher put his arms around the plate.  This doubled the plate’s capacity.  The increased capacity was no match to my endless supply of more things to put on his plate.

B)  Another teacher quickly began to handout / throw candies to those in attendance.  This great organizer got a couple of colleague to help her.   She handed handfuls of chocolate to two of her friends who quickly distributed them to the group and returned for more.  While her friends were running their routes, the candy cup was still overflowing.  The teacher began throwing hand fulls of chocolate randomly to the crowd.  Not all teachers were close enough to receive the “delegated” chocolates.  Many of her delegated chocolate bars ended up on the floors of the front two rows.  Even if she had been more accurate with her delegating, she was not as fast at delegating as I was at pouring.  I had more to add to her plate if she can handle.  Her two friends were not as helpful as their planned had supposed.  They could distribute candy, but I could dump quicker than they could distribute. 

B)  Most teachers’ response to the overwhelming amount of chocolate I pour on their already full plate is to stand and stare.  Once teachers finally realize that they are not going to fit all the chocolates in the plate she stopped trying. 

What about the chocolate bars (students) on the floor?

1.  No matter how many students (chocolate bars) the volunteer teacher saved, there were many on the floor.  Once they gave up trying, I stopped poured.  Did I thank her for her diligent efforts? No!  I picked up a single chocolate off the floor and cried “This is my Johnny!  How come you let him fall?” 

There is never a reply.  Teachers are keenly aware that no matter how diligently we try to reach out, sometimes Johnny ends up on the floor.  Perhaps it has always been so – teachers could never save every student.   But when it was my child or grandchild, I did not care what else was on the teachers’ plate, all I cared about was why wasn’t my child saved?

2.  Stop – a word not said.  Not once in all the times I have done this exercise has a teacher said to me “Stop!  This is too much!  My plate is full.”  Why has no one said stop!  Why has no teacher pulled the plate away and defied me to continuing pouring when I knew full well all that I was pouring would end up on the floor?

Maybe it was because we all knew this was a role play.   Obviously, I was trying to teach a concept at the very outset of this session.  Perhaps saying stop would have foiled the lesson.

Maybe (more likely) teachers’ reactions were symbolic of the profession.  All of them tried to catch the more I added to their plate.   Most went beyond the call of duty trying to limit the mess I was making.  In the end, the teachers seemed to recognize the mess on the floor was because too much was being added to their plate – and they felt helpless to stop the problem.

 

 

 

What items have been added to your plate in the last two years? 

When ask this question to a session room full of teachers the answers are much the same every time.  See how this list (adapted from what teachers have said) fits your real world / real life experience.)

Top Ten Items Added to My Plate:

1	New Job	Change can be good – and new jobs can help us expand our horizon.   But even switching schools and teaching the same topics is more work than I imagined.
2	Job Creep: More to do at work	Wikipedia defines Job Creep as: Job creep is a phenomenon in which employers continually require increasing amounts of work relative to the normal requirements of their operations You were already busy at work and now here are 2 or 3 or 10 more things to do; all in the same time frame. Often there will be policy or procedure changes.   Almost never is a policy or procedure change less work.  Plus with the new work, does anything go off your plate?
3	Technology changes	Even if everything stays the same (which it won’t) new updated computer programs mean we have to re-learn what we did before.
4	Phone Stress	Thirty years ago a phone hung on the wall.  Now we carry it wherever we go.  (Yes, you could go down town without it, but I know you won’t).   The phone can create the 24/7 commitment to be in touch with work or family.  If we let the phone run out lives, it will.
5	Commute Time	Driving longer to work is a reality we face.  Adding 15 minutes to your commute means you lost another half an hour of your day.  Working from home is not a commute, but it changes the reality of how we work.
6	Ailing family member	Caring of an ailing family member adds time and an emotional roller coaster to our plate.   Parents go from being the care givers to care needers.   Problem by the time they need care they don’t want it.   One retired teacher  I knew was caring for a mom with Alzheimer and an aunt in a nursing home two hours away.
7	Personal Health issues	Today you are older than you ever have been.   Next month and next week you will be older still.   No matter our age we can have health surprise.  An emergency appendectomy can keep you out of work for six weeks.   A chronic fight with back pain, depression or other diseases can drain our energy even though we keep working.
8	Children and Family	How has your family situation changed in the last 3-5 years?   How will it change in the next 3-5 years?   Looking back we are always amazed at how “simple life used to be.”  We have no idea the joys and challenges we will see the next few years. At the of times our family can bring us great happiness, but with the investment of time.   Babies need more constant care than we naively imagined.  Teenagers in sports require several days a week for games.   As family grows there is more travel needed as beautiful grand babies bless your lives.   At the best of times children are a time commitment.   When there are hard family times, more time and more energy is consumed.
9	New commitment	If you commit to something new it will take time.   The gym once a week, a community volunteer, a hobby course.  To do any of these right takes time.   Since we volunteered we want to do them, but the cost for all of these is time.   (Maybe some of these we did not want to do as much as others.  I hate the tread mill, but I do it every day…most days.)
10	COVID-19	Everyone of the fifteen adults in my immediate family had their lives change because of COVID-19.   Look down your phone contacts and try and find one person whose life was not changed.   In time the physical changes that took place will go away.  What about the jobs that were lost?  What about the fear that isolation created?   None of us planned for a COVID-19 Pandemic when we celebrated news years 2020.

 

These top ten work stresses assume that

-you have a job that you enjoy

-your job pays enough to live on

-You are not working a second job

-Addiction has not ripped a hole in your life or the life of a family member

 

You answer:  What has been added to your personal plate?

1.

2.

3.

 

My guess is -  it took you less than a minute to come up with three items for this list.  (You probably mock me and ask why only three?)  Given more paper or space you could up that list to ten within a few minutes.  

My list of top ten things added to our plates contains serious issues that we all may have to deal with.  Yet, your top three are more challenging because they hit you in a different way.

The items added to the plate often includes many worthwhile and sound tasks.  Like the volunteer teachers in my session, the new and worthwhile tasks were added our personal plates were already full to overflowing.  Even when new ideas and commitment, we usually start when our plate is already full.

Family or personal wellness issues came up every time in my teachers’ sessions.   “This is about what is being added to your teacher plate, not your home plate,”  would have technically been correct.  Except in real life we cannot separate how one full work plate can become overloaded if our family plate is over full.

In the teachers’ session, family (and personal) health issues became the straw that broke the camel’s back.   The new ailment was not on our original time table.  Taking care of ailing family members takes more out of caregivers than you expected.

 

Your Homework Assignment for the next few days to ask these two questions:  (and then re-ask)

A.  What items have been taken off your personal plate in last year?

This applies equally to work and personal plates.  If (WHEN) either one overflows our lives are disrupted.

B.  What items can be taken off my plate?  

Wrong Answer!  I already know your first answer to question B was “Nothing can be taken off my plate.”   Wrong Answer.  

In our next blog post we will look at how / why to take items off of your plate.