Life is an enterprise in problem-solving, except that most people don’t identify problems as opportunities; instead, they fear them, or, worst still, wish them away. Over time, we all develop our problem-solving quirks—ranging from the systematic to the commonsensical. The most predictable problems lead to the most assumed solutions, and the approach is seldom questioned.
For instance, what to have for breakfast is as much a problem as when to think about family planning or which insurance policy to adopt. Not every problem has the potential of leaving you scared, but you can soon be a victim of the problems that you have left half-solved. There are instances when there’s no beacon of best practices, no one to bounce ideas with, and you feel singularly responsible for your fate, and these are the moments that shape your life. This article talks about how to behave in these moments. For the sake of confidence-building, we will limit the discussion to the office.
The only commodity offered to us in limited quantity and in equal measures is time. And yet there are the ones who run nations within those 24 hours, and yet others remain neck deep into yesterday’s leftovers. Why? It’s not about capabilities, but about choices. It’s about what you ‘must do’, instead of what you ‘can’, and the more effective types are feverishly protective about their time. The successful ones know the problems they must go after, and this selection process is well calibrated and honed over time through repeat cycles of choices and consequences.
One way to look at problems is through the lens of time. They say, ‘time grinds everything to dust’, and it’s the most powerful instrument available to us to distil the vital few from the trivial many. Let’s classify problems on how time shapes them.
Assume you are shaving in the morning or cutting vegetables when you get a small cut. Now, you have a couple of options: put a Band-Aid, apply some ointment, leave it alone, or, if you are adventurous enough, go see your doctor friend. In which of the eventualities does the wound heal fastest? As you would concur, the resort doesn’t matter. The wound takes its own time and eventually ceases (to bother you). The only act of discipline is to leave it alone, which often is the most difficult part. Let’s call such a problem a ‘bruise’—one that heals itself with time or becomes irrelevant over time.
On the other end of the continuum are the situations where you dare leave an issue on time. If you go for your regular checkup and you are detected as having early-stage diabetes. If you leave this on time, what happens? You become diabetic. You need active intervention, constant monitoring, and, if need be, external support. Let’s call such a problem a ‘cancer’—one that aggravates over time.
You see, time has two entirely dramatic effects on different kind of problems – some spiral out and others peter out. The spiralling-out, cancer-kind of problems have a positive feedback loop, whereas the petering-out, bruise-type problems have a negative feedback loop. Now look at your last ten years of professional life and identify the share of bruises and cancers. I won’t be surprised if your hindsight judgement reveals a disproportionately high share of bruises, almost 98 percent, and a minuscule portion of cancer. (Believe me, if you are reading this article, life has been kind to you.) The more sobered veterans would rightly admit that there’s hardly been any cancer all this while, especially on the professional front.
But how does it look when a stinker lands on your mailbox, or you find yourself dragged hopelessly into an escalation, or your boss calls you in the middle of your weekend? It appears like a cancer. Your amygdala gets hijacked. The fight or flight response gets triggered, and you are desperately trying to douse the fire, just to realise that you have merely managed to displace it, instead of extinguishing it.
If you look at the same email, the same memo, the same question and your response, you will get convinced that you mistook a bruise for a cancer and dealt with it with your full might, taking your time and attention away from the most vital items on your agenda. In a way, somebody’s lack of planning became your problem, your cancer.
As a sobering exercise, revisit the last months’ worth of your emails, meeting minutes, presentations and calls, and you would most likely realise the futility of it all. But in the heat of the moment, everything looked like a vicious tumour, threatening to burst. The wisdom is to create a gap between you and the problem, especially a temporal gap. Look at a problem from a distance of time, cast it into the future, and examine what will happen if the issue isn’t answered. Is it just that I am in the office that I am obliged to act on it? What if I were in a hospital? Will the show stop running? Whose head will start turning? You then realise that most of your fears are conceptual.
You are incessantly mistaking a bruise for cancer, running helter-skelter and amounting to nothing of significance. It’s because of your inability, inaptitude or lack of courage to look at the problem objectively, from a distance. Haven’t you seen that your response to a 6 pm mail changes when you revert at 6 am, instead of at 6:05 pm, the same day? Most problems take care of themselves. Your real task is to identify the ones that may assume cancerous proportions, which requires you to look at incoming issues from a distance. Create a gap between the observer-you and the actor-you.
A simple hack is to treat all problems as bruises. A cancer is an exception, not the norm. And guess what? Through your self-fulfilling prophecy, you would realise that indeed problems have become bruises. This way, you will have the mental bandwidth and availability of actual time when a cancer truly shows up. By dialling down on your anxiety and bias for action, you become selective and deal exclusively with big-ticket items, and that’s your ticket to the upper echelons of the organisation. Hope you learn to live with bruises and be ready to fight cancer.