Schedule Your Worries

“What can I do except worry? The engineering team are the only ones who can deliver the changes our customers need, but I can’t do anything meaningful to help them or keep them on track. So, I fret constantly about whether they’ll hit the end-of-quarter deadline.”

My coaching client, the CEO of a manufacturing consultancy, was finding it difficult to concentrate on the strategic goals and board-level priorities we both agreed were vital. Instead, he kept tormenting himself by enumerating all the disastrous consequences of missing a key engineering target. And those thoughts drove him to leap in and start micromanaging the project, poking his nose into every detail and frustrating and delaying the very team he wanted to help. Sound familiar?

The good news for him—and for you, if you’re stuck in a similar loop of delivery doom—is that you can take control of the situation, and yourself, with a few simple actions.

1. Value your worry
   You can’t, and shouldn’t, eliminate your anxiety entirely. It’s actually serving a useful purpose, reminding you about a very important initiative and giving you the energy to do something about it. What you’re going to do is to mitigate and channel your fretting into much more productive activities. So, the first task is to…
2. Pick a worry frequency
   Decide how often it would actually be helpful to think about and take action on the project. The manufacturing CEO I’m coaching, for example, can’t write code or test machines because he’s not an engineer. He can, however, give feedback on progress, connect the team to experts to resolve questions, and shift resources to keep them moving at pace. Look at the work that’s underway. Are there natural joints where your intervention will fit in nicely, like periodic credit control reviews in finance or forecasting calls in sales? Use these natural rhythms if they work, but also avoid being constrained by the current situation, and don’t be afraid to shorten the cycle. For example, I frequently get fantastic results by having software teams deliver new features for feedback every single day. The secret is to pick a frequency and stick to it, which means now you need to…
3. Schedule your worry
   Pick a specific time and block off that exact period in your calendar at the frequency you picked: Thursdays at 3 PM, every other day at 9 AM, every second Friday at noon. Give it an appropriate duration, the shorter the better. I often find leaders need no more than 15 minutes for effective worrying and intervention. If it helps, you can put this activity into the task tracker the team uses or on their Gantt chart as a dependency. However you manage it, what you need is a very specific block in which you’re going to contain your anxious energy and keep it from leaking all over the rest of your day. And to get help with that, you’re going to…
4. Brief the team
   The secret here is not to hold people accountable, which makes them want to hide under the nearest desk to escape your accusing finger. Instead, make it the norm for them to be accountable to you. Do this by explaining three things to the responsible group:- your goal (say, “improve customer service satisfaction scores”)
   – the constraints (say, “we don’t have budget for more staff”)
   – their freedoms (say, “you can change any processes you need to”).

   Then tell them you expect to hear about their progress toward the goal at the times you scheduled in the previous step, and that you will provide feedback and assistance then. After providing this “briefing and back briefing” (a simplified version of Stephen Bungay’s delegation technique from The Art of Action), follow through by leaving the team alone to get on with the task. Now stop worrying about it. That’s easier said than done, of course, which is why you need to…

5. Change your self-talk
   Now that you’ve trapped the worry on your calendar, keep it in its cage. Whenever you’re tempted to stew over the state of the critical project—or worse, start meddling—replace that thought with a reminder that you’ve scheduled time to address it. Don’t feel bad if you do catch yourself brooding or reaching out to send “just one question.” When that happens, just bring yourself back to reality by looking at the time clearly marked in your calendar, at which time it will actually be productive to think about the progress and problems. Then move on to something else.This is the hardest step, but also the most rewarding and powerful. In his book, Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman finds that changing how people talk to themselves in this way can have far-reaching effects on their performance, happiness, and mental health. See his book for practical exercises and techniques that can help you with these changes, so you can…
6. Enjoy your strategic freedom
   With your worry harnessed and put to good use, you will feel a weight lifted off your shoulders. You will finally be able to concentrate on all the other issues and opportunities that you couldn’t see with a cloud of concern fogging up your vision. That’s what happened to the CEO I helped with his project woes. He was able to start new strategic initiatives and address poor performance elsewhere in the organization, while still keeping his engineers on a short leash and ensuring their project made it to the finish line.

Put your worry in its place. Manage and make use of it instead of letting it control you and drive your team batty in the process. You have nothing to lose but your angst!

Written by Douglas Squirrel.

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