Choose What to Fail at

Burnt Out? Do You Have to Excel at Everything?

Let’s start with (what should be) the obvious. This is not a call to be lazy. This is not a message to embrace mediocrity. This is not one of those — I am as I am and everyone should accept me so I don’t even need to try — type of silly slogans.

This is about situations where you take on too much. Family responsibilities, work, hobbies, community duties, and the list goes on. When you chase productivity at the expense of your health and sanity. When you think if only you could squeeze this one thing into your schedule, your life would be amazing. When you cram more and more into the same amount of hours we all have in a day. When you seem to be doing a lot, and you constantly feel exhausted, you can barely keep up and most importantly, you don’t even feel happy or fulfilled. There are, of course, times when we have to put in the hard work and sometimes do the extra mile. With less rest and less sleep, when you clench your fists and your teeth, you give it your all. But this cannot, and should not be a permanent state.

With the pandemic, a lot of us now feel overworked and more prone to stress. Hopping from one Zoom meeting to another, with not even a minute in between, with increased e-mail traffic and the never-ending information flow, it is difficult to keep up. I remember the days when people used to talk about someone experiencing burnout — it used to be an event. Now everyone is burnt out. Perhaps we should pause and do a bit of a review.

I am one of those people who try to do many things in a day. I have a demanding job, family obligations, and hobbies that take a lot of time and effort. I also try to read as much as I can. It is tempting to start cutting from the sleep time, which I used to do, but since some time ago, I try not to (and neither should you — I suggest you read Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep — here is my article about this book).

Years ago, when I was a student, I read a book by writer Daniil Granin (let’s say the Soviet version of Malcolm Gladwell), called This Strange Life. Written in 1974, the book introduced the scientist Alexander Lubishchev, a philosopher and a biologist with multiple other interests (ranging from history to astronomy), and how he approached time management, a somewhat odd topic to review at the time of the book’s writing. Lubishchev left behind over 70 scientific works and over 12,000 pages of articles and research papers. His productivity was legendary, his output incredible. As a young man, Lubshchev decided to make an exhaustive list of everything he set out to achieve in his life. He then calculated the estimated time to do all of that and arrived at a figure of 200 years in total. He then started DELETING and ended up with 120 years still. Lubishchev then developed his system for keeping track of time (perhaps a topic for another article) and religiously followed it for almost six decades — perhaps the main secret of his impressive productivity.

Notice that he had to first cut almost half of what he set out to do. He accepted that to get anything done, he had to make some hard choices, particularly about what he is not going to do.

I have already gone through the phase of trying different time management techniques to cram as much as possible into my day and the disappointment over why that does not work. I am at a phase when I am starting to accept that I cannot do everything and be everywhere.

And so I decided to drop certain things. Pay attention, we are not talking about getting rid of time wasters like social media. I am talking about work, study, the things that I do feel passionate about and ideally would like to spend time doing, learning, and improving at. You have to take a conscious decision to not spend time on even some of the things you feel passionate about.

A version of this strategy is something I picked up from Robin MacPherson, a polyglot, who describes his 3-tier prioritized rotation system in his book How to Maintain Languages. Tier 1 activity is done daily, tier 2 has a fixed schedule and tier 3 has a flexible schedule. He does this to maintain multiple languages, but this can also be applied to multiple activities.

In my case, tier 1 is work, Brazilian jiu-jitsu (not daily, but close), Spanish, and reading. I decided not to have any tier 2 activities. If I have too much free time, I can do more of the above. But for tier 3 and beyond, with pain in my heart, I let go of the following:

• The first victim will have to be chess. No more spending time studying it, playing over master games, doing tactical exercises. The only thing I might do is an occasional online match or two (this is important, it is all too easy to get carried away) or a fun encounter with a chess enthusiast. The second I feel it is starting to awaken the competitive side in me, I stop.
• Next, languages. I speak a few languages fluently, but languages need maintenance. I am currently studying Spanish and it is taking all the time I can currently spend on languages, so my Arabic, which I always felt unhappy about not refreshing, has to fall into the background a bit. I might pick up occasional material here and there to read a bit so it is not completely gone, but no systematic work.
• Powerlifting/weightlifting. This used to be my choice of physical activity, but in the last few years, I focus on Brazilian jiu-jitsu and this will have to give way. I will still do short kettlebell workouts at home to supplement jiu-jitsu training, but that is it. Goodbye regular deadlifts and heavy squats.
• Finally, with a lot of pain, piano. Now, I will not be abandoning it completely. I will focus on maintaining my existing repertoire of several classical pieces and perhaps only try to add no more than one new piece per year. Again, it is easy to get carried away after a few consecutive sessions and to want to learn a bunch of pieces. Unfortunately, that’s just not realistic at this point.

Note that I am not completely abandoning these activities. It is just that I need to have more realistic expectations of how well I can perform in these areas. I will thus avoid disappointment, knowing that this is part of the plan.

Last week, I came across this concept in Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Burkeman calls it strategic underachievement — deciding in advance what to fail at. He suggests choosing “the areas in which you are going to bomb”, which will allow you to focus on what is the priority right now. This is essentially the flipside of Greg McKeown’s Essentialism. To make progress in some things, something else has to give way.

An important point that Oliver Burkeman makes is that even in the areas I choose as Tier 1, it is ok to take a break. “To fail on a cyclical basis” as he calls it. In my case, for example, after a few weeks or months of intensive training for a Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition, take a week or two off after the competition is over. During this time, I can switch to piano or something else that I have put on hold in the meantime.

You can also choose not to do certain things within a priority area that you determine for yourself. For example, when deciding on your reading plans for a year or a month ahead, decide about what you are not going to read. Focus on what you absolutely must or want to read and you will discover that your reading targets become much more realistic and achievable. Another example, you can choose which positions to focus on in your study of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and which positions you will revisit later. In something as complex as this martial art, you have to make sure not to spread yourself too thin and focus on specific things at any given time.

So there it is. Prioritizing some things inevitably leads to de-prioritizing others. Choose wisely, work hard on what matters most to you and be comfortable letting go of other things that perhaps matter less at this point in your life. And when things change in your life, or you feel you want to switch things around, feel free to revisit what stays and what goes. Good luck!