Are you a Do-Do?

Are you the kind of person that when asked ‘JUMP’ the reply is always ‘HOW HIGH’? And there you go jumping all along everyday at the beat of what others instruct you to do. Or, are you the workaholic that does a zillion things one after the other without reasoning the sense of all that work?

I go to a HRM class every other Saturday at Rice University where a wonderful professor, Mr. Davis, is always opening discussions about day-to-day HR matters. He empowers the class to be strategic on their thinking; therefore, more efficient in their decisions and definitely more aligned to the business needs.

He said something in one of the classes that has resonated with me since I’ve heard it. If you do a lot of things all the time, everyday with no strategic planning and no reflection (review) on the results, then you are repeating yourself constantly, so what happens when you just do, do, do stuff all the time? You become a do-do!!!!

Isn’t that obvious? Yes, you need that vision to align your action to and the space to check they are moving you on the direction you want to go. But lots of folks have become precisely a ‘do-do’ type of professionals and even worse, ‘do-do’ persons.

Organizations are laying off people resulting in much more work for those keeping their jobs and those who are job transitioning feel such a pressure that keep applying to job after job without thinking or assessing what resources are more effective in their search.

I can think of many disadvantages of being a do-do, such as:

1. Level of stress is much higher. I know someone whose health has been jeopardized a few times by the obsession of doing too much with no planning. Every week is the same story, level of stress, same old complaining talk of how time is never enough. How many trips to the emergency room will take for this individual to realize a CHANGE is needed?

2. Lack of joy. What pleasure is there to complete one thing after the other without celebrating any success, completion or closure of any of it? I couldn’t believe these days when I got a letter from my daughter’s school notifying the report card would be sent this Friday and reminding the parents the need to celebrate their kids’ achievements instead of focusing on what did not work on this period. Whoao! Are people even going so far in their obsession to do things that they do not even celebrate anymore their kids’ accomplishments? Then, where is the joy in the day-to-day living?

3. Routine kills creativity. If you assume your day is what you get and there is no sense to change any of it, can you imagine the level of boredom? Not counting the mechanical reaction towards every request to JUMP and keep JUMPING. There is a Charly Chaplin movie I love that makes a parody of a factory worker that does a manual activity with his hands all day and that when leaving work his hands keep moving on the same way no matter what he is doing or who he is with. Hilarious and sad, so are you out of ideas already?

4. A network disabler. Who wants to be around a ‘do-do’ or hire one? Yes, I know it depends on the job but when you have three interview candidates for a job and 2 out of 3 are ‘do-dos’ and there is that one that takes the time to reason and learn from previous experiences, who do you think will get hired? . Also, if you see someone who repeats itself all the time and no matter how long you see that person there is no change, what value would that person add to your network?

Now, use your ‘life brakes’, stop and start thinking on your vision, that strategy you need to make some sense of your actions and creativity to effectively achieve what you really want to have.

At the end, it is about how you decide to spend everyday what will make your life/job what you want it to be.

So, get rid of the ‘do-do’ spirit and awake the amazing person who hides beneath the covers of ‘too much work to do and too little time to think on anything else’.

Be an enabler of your life and career! BE!

Your coach,

Mariela