Issue #002 — On the cost of doing too much, too well

Dear reader,

I want to talk about the cost of doing things too well.

A friend of mine — a freelance designer, six years in, full calendar — told me last week that she has not taken a real weekend in eight months. Not one. She said it the way people confess things, with a small laugh that was not quite a laugh.

Here is what I notice about people like her, and people like me on the worse days. We are not bad at saying no. We are bad at noticing that we should. The ask comes in. We have capacity. The work is interesting, or the client is kind, or the rate is good, or all three. We say yes. Then yes again. Then the calendar fills with yeses we agreed to one at a time, each defensible on its own, and the body of them is unsurvivable.

The cost is not visible at first. It is a slow accounting. Sleep that thins out. Sentences that come slower. The quiet erosion of the thing you were good at, traded in monthly instalments for the appearance of being someone who delivers.

I am not against working hard. I am against the lie that working hard at the wrong volume is the same as being competent.

A practice I am trying: at the end of every month, I look back at the last four weeks and ask one question. What did I say yes to that I should have said no to? Not to flagellate myself — to learn the shape of my own bad yes. Mine has a tell. It comes when someone is disappointed in me, even slightly, and I want to fix it. I have started naming it out loud when I feel it. "I am about to say yes for the wrong reason." Sometimes I say yes anyway. But the named yes costs less.

The work I am most proud of has always come from the months I did less, not more. I do not say that as a brag. I say it because nobody told me, and I wish they had.

Take a Saturday. The whole one.

Yours,
Enova