Somebody stacks the dishwasher, and the moment they leave the room, you’re quietly restacking it.
The right way this time. Obviously.
Or you handed a job over to someone, and then got impatient and ended up doing it yourself while you were waiting.
No judgement here, I’ve handed a job over and then done it myself while I was waiting more than once 😅
Many people would call that micromanaging, some people might even call that being a control freak, and most people hear those words and think it means you don't trust anyone. And if you've ever had a boss who hovered, or a colleague who quietly rewrote your email before it went out, or a partner who went back and did the job again after you'd finished it, that might be exactly how you felt about it.
Here’s what I’ve come to realise
The micromanaging isn’t always about trust. What is often happening is this. The moment the dishwasher is out of your hands, or the email goes out without your version of it, or the job is sitting with someone else, your body simply cannot stand the feeling of not being the one doing it! Your body wants the job back. That feeling is anxiety.
That anxiety usually runs on a belief that goes something like this:
If I don't hold everything together, everything falls apart, and then I'm the one who has to deal with what happens next.
Maybe, a long time ago, that was true.
Maybe you grew up somewhere unpredictable, and being the one who kept everything in order was how you stayed safe. Maybe the world around you felt chaotic, and gripping tight to whatever you could reach (the details, the outcomes, the people) was how you made sure nothing blindsided you. If life ever taught you that a dropped ball cost you something real (somebody's good mood at dinner, or a bit of warmth, or approval going quiet for a few days), then holding all of it yourself was a clever move.
And that way of doing things has probably worked well for you. It’s gotten you results. It’s led to your success. It’s meant that you’ve become the dependable one.
Here is what that costs you
But every decision costs you something. So if you hold every decision in a household or a team, all day, every day, your energy drains far faster than the work itself can explain. It has the potential to wear out the people around you too, because they can feel you hovering, and they can feel you taking the job back after they thought they had finished it. And a ten-minute job you keep taking back, week after week, stops being a ten-minute job.
You think you are saving time by doing it yourself. But you are paying for it in energy, and you’re also sending a message to those around you, which is that nobody else can quite be trusted with the job.
So here are three things to try.
1. Pause at the ‘twitch’.
The twitch is the urge to jump in. The urge to fix the job, redo the job, or check on the job one more time.
When that urge turns up, don't act on it. Put a timer on the urge instead. Ten minutes for something small (like the dishwasher, or an email you want to reword before it goes). A full day for something that is already sitting in somebody else's hands.
Let's say you send a task to somebody at ten in the morning. By seven minutes past ten, you want to have a quick look at where they have got to. That wanting to look is the twitch. The day version means you don't look until tomorrow. You let the ‘wanting-to-look’ be there, and you still don't look.
The reason this works is that an urge behaves like a wave. The urge rises, it peaks, and it drops, usually inside a few minutes, as long as you don't feed it by acting on it. The addiction researcher Alan Marlatt called this ‘urge surfing’. If you act on the urge, your nervous system learns the urge was right about the danger. If you sit through the urge once, your nervous system learns something new, which is that the dishwasher, or the email, or the job, can sit there without you, and nothing falls apart.
2. In that pause, ask two questions.
Once you’ve paused (step one above), ask yourself two questions.
The first question: does this job actually need me, or am I soothing my own discomfort?
That question is harder to answer than it sounds, because from the inside those two things feel identical. Both feel urgent. Both feel like "I have to do this now." So here is a cleaner way in. Imagine somebody else did this job to a decent standard. Not your standard. Decent. Would the outcome still be fine?
If the answer is yes, the job doesn't need you, and the only thing keeping your name on it is your own discomfort. Hand the job over! If the answer is no, if the job really would fall short without your judgement, then keep the job for yourself.
Staying on something that actually needs you is not micromanaging. That is your job.
The second question (this is the one that loosens the grip): if the job hasn’t been done perfectly, can I handle the consequences? Can I have the slightly awkward conversation afterwards? Can I fix the job later if it comes back completely screwed up?
The reason this works is that it takes the catastrophe out of the picture and looks at it directly. That is what cognitive behavioural therapy calls decatastrophising. The anxiety isn't really about the dishwasher, or the email, or the task. The anxiety is about a consequence you have imagined and never once looked at in the light. Say that consequence out loud, and it usually shrinks, because most of the answers turn out to be survivable and a bit boring.
3. Hand over one small thing today.
Pick one thing. Not the biggest thing on your list. The most repeated thing. The small thing, the a-bit-dull thing, the easy-to-explain thing that comes back every week. Those are usually the ones we would never think of handing over, because they only take us ten minutes to do. They are exactly the ones worth handing over, because you pay the cost of explaining them once, and you get those ten minutes back every week after that.
Then give away the outcome, not the method. Tell the person what "done" looks like, and let them find their own route to it. Handing over the instruction manual is the part that costs us the most energy. The method takes an hour to explain. The method is the part they will get "wrong". And the method is the part you will go back and quietly correct at eleven at night. Give them the destination, not the directions. Then leave the job alone. No hovering. No checking in after seven minutes!
Here's the bit you can't be told
Here's the thing I had backwards for years.
Most of us do hand things over eventually. We just wait until we are forced. Until we are ill, or away on holiday, or so completely exhausted and burnt out that there is no choice left in it. And then the thing gets done. It gets done differently. Not how we would have done it. But it gets done fine.
When you use these tools, you get to find out proactively that the world doesn't fall apart without you.
Because the reward isn’t only the time you get back. The reward is finding out that the thing you handed over got done, and everything turned out okay.
With love,
Chibs 💙
PS. Handing something over and then leaving it well alone is most of what we work on in Tired & Wired. There's a weekly live class. The first seven days are free, and you can cancel any time. You can check it out for free here → https://www.skool.com/chibs
If your problem is the daytime twitch, the one where you can't leave the job alone for ten minutes, this short meditation might help 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
▶ Watch: The power of letting go: A Guided Meditation | 'The Daily Striver' with Chibs Okereke
And if your problem is the 11pm audit, lying there running through everything that's sitting in somebody else's hands, play this one tonight 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
▶ Watch: Vagus Nerve Sleep Meditation | Unwind after a long day | 528Hz Solfeggio
