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Reading "The Subtle Art of not giving a F*ck", one thought stuck with me: "Happiness comes from solving problems". Or, put more directly:
"The path to happiness is a path full of shitheaps and shame."
What that means is that there is no such thing as a life without problems. We will always suffer from some problems. There are problems we care about and problems we don't care about. The problems we care about make us feel bad until they are resolved. The problems we don't care about don't matter to us.
The gist of the book is that we should choose wisely which problems we care about. We thrive from solving these problems, generating happiness in the process. We shouldn't try to make every problem ours, though, otherwise, we get swamped and unhappy.
This got me thinking about the problems in my (work) life and how to deal with them.
Ask yourself which problems you enjoy solving. First, I wanted to figure out which problems in my work life I enjoy. I enjoy creating a lot: adding features to a product, writing about it, researching, and writing a technical vision for a product. I don't enjoy people problems or working on urgent bug fixes or features, because the pressure quickly gets to me and I will forget everything until those problems are fixed. That means I shouldn't become a manager (people problems). Ideally, I focus on research and architecture. What kind of problems do you enjoy solving?
Make an allocation plan for your time. Next, I created a plan of how much of my (work) time I want to spend with what kind of problem. What are the projects that need my attention? What are the projects/tasks that I shouldn't be doing? I talked the plan through with my manager to manage his expectations and tuned it with his input. I now have an "official" plan of what I'm doing and not doing that I can point people to if need be.
Say "no" by saying "yes" slowly. If a problem that I shouldn't take on me comes my way, I try to say "no". I'm not good at saying "no", though. I tend to take on problems until I can't deliver on them anymore. Next time, I'll try the tactic of "saying yes slowly", which I read about in "The Coaching Habit". Instead of saying "no" outright, I'll ask questions like "why me?", "what makes me the best person to solve this?", "what makes this problem urgent?", or "what do you want me to drop for this?". If there's no one around to ask these questions to, I'll ask them to myself.
I'm hoping to get to a point where I get rid of the problems I shouldn't care about and only solve those problems that I care about. Let's see how it goes.
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