Where did my clients go?
A story about chronic exhaustion
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I have several clients who behave in such a way that I am surprised. We had a few meetings some time ago and now they “come back” to continue their work or talk about something new. But I don’t know the details, and I don’t know if I ever will because there are no meetings.
“Something important came up,” “Now I’m having a hot period,”, “I’ll get back to you as soon as I understand the subject,” “For now I’m running around with empty wheelbarrows because I don’t even have time to load them,” — messages of this type appear most often.
I want to ask if it is something important or urgent. And I also want to ask how this relates to the topics we discussed. These were topics tagged with “important”: repairing a partner relationship, changing a useless habit, or improving work in a department of a large company.
What is really going on?
Your energy follows your attention
The Eisenhower matrix and Steven Covey’s description of how a busy man functions immediately comes to mind:
“It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busyness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall. It is possible to be busy — very busy — without being very effective.”
Covey refers here to The Eisenhower matrix, where all the activities are grouped into four quadrants: important and urgent (quadrant 1), important and not urgent (quadrant 2), not important and not urgent (quadrant 3) and not important and not urgent (quadrant 4).
“Some people are literally beaten up by problems all day, every day. The only relief they have is in escaping to the not-important, not-urgent activities of Quadrant IV. So when you look at their total matrix, 90 percent of their time is in Quadrant I, and most of the remaining 10 percent is in Quadrant IV, with only negligible attention paid to Quadrants II and III. That’s how people who manage their lives by crisis live.” Steven Covey
