Under promise

There’s a saying in project management, or even the corporate world, that you should under promise but overdeliver, i.e. you say you can do something by the end of the week but you try to finish it even earlier, for example by the middle of the week, or even earlier, like the end of the day.

It’s a neat concept that help make you deliver on your promises, and make you seem reliable and dependable to your colleague. I’ve been doing it for some time and while I do not know what my colleague think of me, but it does help me to relax a bit and not to be too anxious in completing a task. It helps in planning your tasks, at work.

I however have a hard time doing the same thing at home, and also ‘to myself’. What I mean by myself is I tend to ‘overbook’ myself by committing and saying that I would be doing certain things, especially over the weekends, that I am almost impossible to finish. Even if I have the time, I won’t have the energy to do it, nor the interest in keeping the promise to myself. It is hard to tell the truth, it is most hardest to be truthful to yourself, since no one else knows if you’re lying.

Unless you write a post like this and you accept that you can’t keep your commitment, things that won’t affect anybody else right now, but will be very important in the long run. I’ve always had ongoing projects that will be useful for my career, or wellbeing, but these will almost always get relegated and postponed when it comes to doing them. I realise now that over the years, I underestimate the time and energy needed to do these tasks/projects and overestimate the time and energy that I have during planning. I overpromise and under deliver, to myself.

Recently however I realise also that these seemingly small tasks, actually takes a lot to be done. I am still learning and will write a post in the future, of how to manage them, but for now, it is good that I am conscious of my weakness (among other weaknesses) in this area.

Thank you for reading.