Time Management: Practice Strategic Underachievement

Do you nurture your work self by experimenting with new ways to meet the library’s mission? Are you known for your clever new programs? If so, like most youth services folks, you’re an idea person. We like variety. We stay current on kid trends. We keep it fresh.

There’s a downside to being an idea person, though: the alluring possibilities always exceed the time to try them. “There are never enough hours to get everything done,” we might bemoan to coworkers. We feel caught between what we need to do – like scheduling – and what we want to do: projects that move the library closer to our youth services vision.

This dissonance may cause us to feel perpetually behind. Or to struggle with uncertainty about whether we’re doing the “right” things. Each diminishes our energy and equilibrium, and affects our job satisfaction. What’s to be done?

Let me tell you about my new professional crush: Oliver Burkeman, author of the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Oliver (we haven’t graduated to diminutives yet) offers a number of intriguing ideas: Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity. Serialize. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete. 

The most interesting idea to me is this: Decide in advance what to fail at.

What? Plan to fail? The recovering perfectionist in me whimpers. But we all  inevitably end up failing at something, Oliver notes, simply because our time and energy are finite.

Practicing strategic underachievement, Oliver writes, means nominating in advance whole areas of our life (or in our example, work) in which we won’t expect excellence. It’s a variation on a practice I call “Getting a B.”

Those of us who grew up with high academic expectations know about the goal of straight A’s. Years ago, when my goal of “doing it all well” revealed itself as absurd, I learned the concept of deciding to “get a B” in certain areas of my work. As with Oliver’s strategic underachievement idea, I still do the task or project. I simply decide in advance not to use my finite energy to make my work on it stellar. I have even occasionally chosen (wince) to “get a C” on something – which is, after all, average. Sometimes a job just needs to get done so that more important work can be addressed.

In Oliver’s strategic underachievement, we decide to fail for a period of time in one or more areas. This is really the triage time management that we all do when one project ramps up (think summer reading/learning). The difference is that we deliberately make the decision to set a project aside. This conscious, logic-based decision allows us to avoid both distraction from the project on hold, and guilt that we aren’t working on it. Less distraction means more focus for the areas where we choose to spend our limited time – such as our new ideas!

What other time management tools or ideas have you found helpful? Please share them with us in the comments! For more from the ALSC blog on time management, check out this 2022 post by Liza Purdy.

Today’s blog post was written by Mary Fellows, Manager, Youth and Family Services at Upper Hudson Library System in Albany, New York, on behalf of the ALSC Managing Children’s Services Committee. She can be reached at mary.fellows@uhls.org.

This blog relates to ALSC Core Competency VI. Administrative and Management Skills.