Life Lessons from the other side of moving part 2
In part one, I focused mostly on the personal impacts of moving, so in part two, I will talk about what I learned about getting work done. I learned a lot about executing and bringing a large project to life. In no particular order, here are five things that you can apply in life or on the job.
The world will always need specialists.
Throughout the course of the move and remodel, we had painters, flooring people, electricians, plumbers, and some other professionals perform work. We needed each of these people with their specialties to achieve overall success. Can a plumber replace an electric outlet, probably? Can a general contractor fix drywall, of course, but they won’t do it nearly as well or quickly as the specialist who views matching ceiling texture as their gift.
I see a trend in the workplace to try and replace specialists with generalists. Or encouraging specialists to “evolve” but into a totally different skill area. Which isn’t an evolution; that is a transplant. Sometimes this makes sense if you have limitations (budget, headcount, or shelf-life), but it is not a long-term strategy for success. A specialist gets the work done faster, is more capable of making real-time adjustments, and they typically deliver better outcomes. If you are making a long-term investment (like remodeling your forever home or developing a new offering that your business needs to survive), it is worth the cost of paying for the skills of a specialist.
If you are a specialist, of course you should learn and evolve, regularly scanning to make sure your trade isn’t evolving faster than you can keep up or being replaced by technology or a different approach. But don’t let others diminish the value of your skills or tell you when it is time to move on.
Your specialty is your superpower; be sure to talk about it and how it can be used to help others. Don’t let others diminish the value of your superpower but also don’t get mad at people who don’t appreciate that value. It is part of your responsibility to talk about the value of your expertise. If you can’t share it in a way that others hear the value of it or recognize why they need it, that is on you. Need help getting your value heard, check out this helpful worksheet.
If you are working with more than one specialist, you probably should also invest in oversight.
In a world of specialists, project management matters.
I think I hit this point well in part one (link), but no matter how well you plan, things will go wrong or in unexpected ways. When that happens, adjustments are required. Adjustments don’t just affect one thing; they typically affect lots of things. If task A moves by a day, then task B moves, and task C also might be impacted. These changes require a lot of communication to make sure everyone involved can determine the impacts and make adjustments. Having someone who oversees all the moving parts and is responsible for identifying and communicating the changes is valuable. There is great value in ensuring everyone is rowing in the same direction towards the same goal, especially when something shifts mid-course.
Can you get to the end by just putting your head down and plowing forward? Yes, but that approach is painful for everyone involved, and it is not sustainable long term.
The bigger and more complex the project, the more intertwined the tasks become. It is valuable to spend time creating a plan upfront. It is exponentially more valuable to assign the responsibility of the planning to a specific person who manages the changes, reports out the adjustments, and communicates the impacts to keep everyone rowing in the same direction towards the same goal.
During our remodel had we followed this advice and leveraged the services of a foreman, we likely would have avoided a lot of the extra mental stress on ourselves, rework by others, and financial losses caused by the rework. It would have been less expensive to pay for the oversight than it ended up costing to manage the impacts of the lack of oversight.
Using a foreman was one piece of advice I wish we would have taken from our community…
Your community is a wealth of information and resources. I mentioned the specialists that we used above; none of them came from the phonebook, a rating service, or Google. We asked our community to give us recommendations of providers they had worked with in the past and that they felt confident in putting their name behind. This led to some of the best outcomes I could have imagined. We were surrounded by great workers who, in my opinion, knowing they were recommended, put in a little extra effort or at least treated us well.
Your community is valuable in part because experience is a great teacher. Your community has exponentially more experience than you could ever obtain in a lifetime. If you ask a group of ten 40-year-olds for information you have effectively leveraged 400 years of experience without getting any older. How amazing is that?
You need to be thoughtful in discerning what is shared with you, but 400 years of experience shared with you by people who care about you is more valuable than 400,000 generic Google results. Your shared experiences with your community and what your community personally knows about you will impact their recommendations and advice. It’s a customized recommendation backed by 400 years of experience. That should give you tremendous peace of mind.
Speaking of communities, they aren’t just good for recommendations…
My wife and I assumed that being a family of seven, we could easily handle the packing, moving, and unpacking process ourselves. We had in our minds labor to spare. But tasks start piling up. The unexpected thing, the thing that takes longer than expected, the thing that doesn’t get done because your labor doesn’t feel like doing it that day. Life as it tends to do just happened.
We became discouraged, overwhelmed, and emotionally spent. We were drowning in a growing task list and shrinking timeframe.
Despite the speed at which we fell behind, it was at a much slower pace that we decided to ask for help. The desire to admit we needed others was hard to swallow. For me, it was partially because I wanted to believe I could do it all, my prideful, independent streak.
Eventually, reality sunk in, and we asked our community for help. They showed up in droves and saved the day. People brought skills we didn’t have, quantity beyond our seven-person family, and positive energy that had been lacking. In a single evening, with the help of our community, we accomplished what would have taken a week to accomplish on our own.
No one who helped complained. Those who couldn’t help said no, and those who could did so with a cheerful heart. They were happy to repay or pay forward the kindness.
The quicker you ask for help, the sooner problems go away. Plus, you enable others to use their gifts which makes them feel good. Asking for help is often a win-win proposition.
One more thing, don’t underestimate the power of routines.
Routines simplify our lives in a meaningful way. You probably put your keys in the same place every day and know exactly which cabinet your water cups are in. You don’t have to waste mental power thinking about where to get your keys or a glass.
When you move, all of your routines are disrupted. I can’t tell you how many times I lost something that previously had a place. My wedding ring disappeared for a week, for example, because the cup it always sat in was in a box somewhere. Two things
First, pay attention to your routines. They matter and are helpful not just in executing the specific task that is part of the routine but in preserving energy (emotional and mental) for dealing with new experiences and higher-level tasks. You have a limited amount of energy each day; try not to waste it on the mundane.
Second, take time to consider if there are new routines you can implement to help create more opportunities to preserve energy and execute non-routine things more effectively. Are there things you do regularly but do them differently every time? Have you thought about how you
Receive emails all day long? Do you have a routine for checking and responding to them, or is your inbox a source of stress where you treat each new email as a unique event?
Wear clothes every day. Do you have a routine for deciding what to wear, or do you wake up every day surprised you need to put on clothes frantically deciding what to wear?
Eat dinner every night. Do you have a plan for what to eat, or do you end up in a panic and just grab (or order) the easiest thing?
In each of these situations, if you don’t have a routine, then you end up in a state of waste. Wasting time, talent, or treasure on something that ultimately doesn’t really matter. Routines help us to live intentionally more often.
Conclusion
We are finally down to owning a single home, and we can concentrate on establishing new routines, building new memories, and adjusting to our new normal. Hope these insights help you do the same.