Over the past year, I’ve been struggling to keep my head above water. I have over committed – teaching three university classes, finishing my textbook, homeschooling my son, driving my other two kids around, cooking dinner most nights, staying healthy, assistant coaching two robotics team, participating in the search for a new Dean of our college and new chair of our department, submitting three research articles to journals, learning Russian for our summer trip, starting the Keto diet, consulting with a Fortune 500 company, maintaining a healthy marriage, attending faculty senate meetings – to name just a few. By 8 PM, I’m wiped out. Many weekends, I’m working to get caught up on the mountain of work that just won’t go away. I haven’t had a Sunday free of work in about 8 months.

Many of us deal with a similar set of over committed, mountain of work. Not all of us deal with it in a mentally healthy way. Here are some of the lessons I learned:

1. Define your hierarchy of values. One of the first lessons I learned was that every choice of time I make is a choice on what I believe is most important. Things such as a “clean house” often don’t make the list. It’s not that I don’t value a clean and orderly house. In fact, its current state is no where near what I would ideally like it to be. Certainly, there are times when the clutter gets to me and that’s when I will attack the clutter with a vengeance. But the value of a clean house just does not reach the same level of importance as many of these other demands. So, guess what, our house looks trashed right now and I’m okay with that. At least until I can some of these other commitments under control.

2. Learn to say “No” and “Yes, but…”. Last spring, my department chair came to me saying the faculty voted for me to represent them on the dean’s search committee and asked if I would be willing to serve. My answer was “Yes, but then I can’t serve on the graduate committee”. By agreeing to take on an additional responsibility, I give one up. I have used the “No” answer often (perhaps not often enough), but the “Yes, but…” is a great way to manage growing commitments. For each new commitment you take on, you give another one up. However, it’s critical not to say no to those values that mean most to you. That’s why I have not said no to cooking healthy dinners for my family or coaching my kids’ robotics teams. Those values are too important to me, despite the fact that it sucks a lot of time.

3. Reward yourself for achievements. When over-committed, the daily grind slowly wears you down. Unless, of course, you see yourself working toward something, then you can push through the pain and the stress for that end. When the end looks too far away, it’s critical to give yourself small rewards along the way. For example, when I completed the drafts of my textbook chapters, I took a week off from work. I still had more to do with instructor materials, but I needed that time to bask in the glory of a job well done.

4. Don’t let perfection get in the way of done. As I progressed through editing the final draft of my textbook, it became clear that I could fill whatever time was given me. There’s no end to improvements I could make. But as I told my editor, I can find an appropriate stopping point for getting this out by her target date. And I did just that. Many years ago, I was told when working on my dissertation “The only good dissertation is a done dissertation.” It may not be perfect, but it’s good. And good is good enough. The same holds true for my book. The same holds true with all our commitments. We should be proud of every project we finish, even if it’s not “perfect,” because finishing it is often the hardest part. If we let “perfection” stop us from finishing, then the commitment will never go away. That’s not an excuse for sloppy work. Rather, it places real tangible results as a criteria for success, not some intangible ideal. After all, we live in a real world with real needs that need real results.

With summer rapidly approaching, several of my biggest commitments should be coming to an end. My classes will finish at the end of April. Coaching the robotics team will end in May. My textbook is scheduled for publication in June. My trip to Russia will take place in July. And then, well, I have a backlog of things I would like to do, but I will have time enough to figure that out in August. I would like to hope that next year will be less full of commitments. But regardless, I will have plenty of things to do. As long as I keep these above ideas in mind, I should be able to handle whatever comes my way.