How to Get Sh*t Done: Why Women Need to Stop Doing Everything so They Can Achieve Anything - Hardcover

Falconer, Erin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 150116578X ISBN 13: 9781501165788

Publisher: Gallery Books, 2018

Synopsis

Erin Falconer, editor in chief and co-owner of the highly respected self-improvement site Pick the Brain (with over 1.8 million monthly page views), shows overscheduled, overwhelmed women how to do less so that they can achieve more.

Women live in a state of constant guilt: that we’re not doing enough, that we’re not good enough, that we can’t keep up. If we’re not climbing the corporate ladder, building our side hustle, preparing home-cooked meals, tucking the kids in at night, meditating daily, and scheduling playdates, date nights, and girls’ nights every week, we feel like we’re not living our best lives. Yet traditional productivity books—written by men—barely touch the tangle of cultural pressures that women feel when facing down a to-do list.

Finally, in the first productivity book by a woman in a decade, Erin Falconer will show you how to do less—a lot less. In fact, How to Get Sh*t Done will teach you how to zero in on the three areas of your life where you want to excel, and then it will show you how to off-load, outsource, or just stop giving a damn about the rest. As the founder of two technology start-ups and one of Refinery29’s Top 10 Women Changing the Digital Landscape for Good, Erin has seen what happens when women chase an outdated, patriarchal model of productivity, and in How to Get Sh*t Done she shows how even the most perfectionistic among us can tap into our inner free spirit and learn to feel like badasses, rather than drudges.

Packed with real-life advice, honest stories from Erin’s successful career, and dozens of actionable resources, How to Get Sh*t Done will forever reframe productivity so that you can stop doing everything for everyone and start doing what matters to you.

About this title

About the Author

Erin Falconer is the editor in chief and co-owner of Pick the Brain, one of the most popular and trusted self-improvement communities on the web. Pick the Brain has been named to over 100 “Best of the Web” lists, and Refinery29 named Erin one of the Top 10 Women Changing the Digital Landscape for Good. Erin is also the cofounder of LEAFtv, a video lifestyle brand for millennials. She has had a varied career that includes screenwriter stand-up comedian, political consultant, and is now proudly, heavily invested in the online blogging world. She lives in Los Angeles. How to Get Sh*t Done is her first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

How to Get Sh*t Done CHAPTER ONE

Defining POP (Personality, Opportunity, Productivity)

Freud once asked, “What do women want?”

Good. Fucking. Question.

What interests me most about this is that men seem to pose this question with great frequency, and yet it barely crosses the mind of most women. Or when it does, it comes laden with guilt—I can’t waste my time thinking about this when I could be, should be, getting more done! Women are, in the classic sense of the word, the very definition of productive. I can’t think of a species (other than the leaf-cutter ant) that has gotten more stuff done—let’s start with the creation and the survival of the entire human race, for example—and yet, somehow, somehow, up until very recently, women have been viewed, most jarringly from our own lens, as less-than. We have a constant need to prove our worth, when our worth should be obvious to anyone or anything living within a hundred-mile radius of planet earth.

We’re getting a lot done, right? More and more, every day, with every new app, and every new convenience. Except these modern conveniences (which particularly benefit women—I’ll talk about this later) should probably be used to free up time, so you can, you know, have a life. But instead, women being women, how are they being used? Oh, we’re saving time, all right. Saving time to get more stuff done.

Studies show that on average, women spend one to three hours more each day working than men, when you take into account unpaid work at home. That’s right: you’re putting in a full day at your paid job (although you’re only paid 80 cents on the dollar compared to your male colleague) and then you head home to clock a few more hours looking after kids, getting dinner ready, and doing laundry. And doesn’t it feel like the more we’re getting done, the more unhappy, manic, and stressed we are? Sure, there’s the initial high you get from making it through your daily to-do list. But it’s like a drug—that high is fleeting, and we’re left at the end of the day exhausted, with aching backs from all that leaning in.

It’s preposterous.

So why is this happening? How is it that we’re busier than ever, yet feeling like we’re not getting anywhere? Here’s what I think: many of us don’t know what makes us happy. Or that we deserve a happiness that’s worth investigating. Moreover, we’re not taking the time to analyze what course of action is the right one to bring out the best version of ourselves. Sure, we might have ideas about what we like, what gives us pleasure (“Friday nights with pizza, wine, and my girls” or “Watching my kids explore the world”), but we haven’t spent time zeroing in on what it would take for us to be truly happy and satisfied, what gives us energy vs. takes, and how those findings should dictate our future behavior. Without this sense of fulfillment—and real, intentional purpose—true “productivity” will be always out of reach.

I mean, I get it. In life, we’re judged according to what we’ve done. And women are consistently assessed more harshly. A New York University study showed that women have to do much more than men to be perceived as equally productive in the workplace. So we keep chugging along. “Me? I’m great. I got so much done today!” We want to have spotless homes, healthy-yet-gourmet meals, executive-track promotions, well-behaved children, a robust spiritual life, spotless community service, hot sex, and, on top of all that, some time to relax. But herein lies the conundrum. If we continue to pursue productivity for productivity’s sake, women will continue to position ourselves diametrically opposed to satisfaction.

You may feel like the most productive person alive, but without a purpose, you’re just busy.
THE BACKSTORY

I think it’s important to briefly explore this history and just how we got here and our relationship to productivity, success, and happiness. In a 140-character world, said history goes something like this:

Old, like really old, productivity for women meant: have a kid. If you’d done this you could die happily, I guess, at around forty-five, knowing you’d been super productive and accomplished everything anybody had ever expected of you. Done.

Except, after a time, the subconscious questions started percolating: But if we’re just fulfilling a biological imperative, where is our individual worth? And then the questions just kept coming.

Jump-cut to today, when we have now spent many lifetimes trying to prove that we are not just the perpetuators of a biological imperative, but beings who are worth far more than even the sum of our physical strength or mental aptitude. Better. Smarter. Faster. Because women can do it. We’re not just baby-making machines.

And then the internet came. And the other shoe dropped.

Why?

Because now the tools of power had shifted and, for the first time in history, in favor of women.
A Quick Primer on the TOP (or the Tools of Power)

The original tool of power was physical strength. Men 1, women 0. It was followed up by pursuits of the intellectual (something women were long denied participation in). Men 2, women 0. But now, the new tool of power, and the ultimate power (right after sustaining the human race, of course) is information. And man, this might just be the upset victory for the ages. Access to and the ability to share information are growing at near the speed of light. WWW: three letters that would not only change the world but change the game. Having information, tools to communicate, and the ability to share ideas without the traditional, hierarchical structures that previously hindered women meant entire new careers opening up. Since these careers were no longer bound to traditional roles, the playing field was leveled. And we made strides. Major strides. Today I am surrounded by women who are successful, productive, inspirational, and very powerful. And yet still a fog hangs above us.
WHY?

From my perspective, a lot of us are just out there frantically collecting trophies or, conversely, just trying to make it through the day. Neither is particularly fulfilling. Our world, bookshelves, and Twitter feeds are cluttered with far too much analysis on how to get more stuff done, and far too little analysis on what is necessary to feel successful and fulfilled. I don’t mean that in a bullshitty, self-improvementy sort of way.

And I should know. I spend a great deal of time on my blog, lecturing people on detaching themselves from outcomes—telling them to act creatively, with integrity and with measure, to just be and do. But upon reflection, what am I recommending people do in this book? “Just go around being”? That feels a little New Agey, if I’m being frank with myself. The flip side, however, seems even less palatable: creating a rigid, endless, and impossible checklist of to-dos.

But where’s the happy medium between being and doing?

If you’re reading this book, I’m going to guess that you’re already busy. And you certainly don’t need me to tell you how to fit even more into your day. Which is great, because I’m going to do the exact opposite of that. In fact, I’m going to ask you to toss out most of your preconceived notions of busyness and success in order to help you truly get shit done.

With this book, I have, perhaps, lofty goals. A repositioning of the way we, as women, think about ourselves at work and at home. That’s a big thing. It’s an undoing, or a redoing, of a modern, utterly complex psychological history, wherein women have been defined by and become (a) what others think they should be or (b) a skewed version of what we think we should be, for far too long. We’ve finally come to a place where greatness is within our grasp: we’ve got the strength, we’ve got the tools—we just need to learn how to channel them in the right direction. I’m not talking about changing the rules. I’m talking about understanding them and then doing away with them entirely. I’m talking about releasing ourselves from the shackles of preconceived notions of who we are and what we should be and living in a conscious state, where only the answer to the very fundamental question below matters.

So here we go. What do women want?

And by women . . . I mean you.

How about we start by redefining productivity?

What I know is that the reworking of what feminine productivity should be is fundamentally necessary if a life worth living is to be achieved and sustained.

First things first: How is it possible to attain happiness, fulfillment, and a sense that we’ve been truly productive in our lives if we haven’t even asked the most fundamental question of ourselves?

Who are you? What gives you energy—like, real energy? Who makes you happy? And of course, what do you really want?

These questions are daunting, not only on their surface but in their depth. They are especially difficult for women to answer, because of our long history of repression (both external and internal).

Without a thorough analysis of who we are and what we want, even with the greatest power tool at our disposal we will just burn out. And that’s exactly what I am starting to see around me.

It is from this impending burnout—of which I myself was at the forefront—that I came up with the principles that could make true productivity possible. To be more precise, I came up with three tenets: personality, opportunity, productivity . . . and hence, the POP Effect was born.
WHAT IS POP?

By taking the time to analyze who we are and what really defines us—on the three abovementioned fundamental levels—we can finally begin to carve out how to be productive in life in a way that makes it all worth it. This is a system that allows for the kind of meaningful happiness and sense of satisfaction I’m talking about, by letting you really get shit done.

POP takes personality (P)—who you are—and combines it with where you are in life and in the world, as a woman, a.k.a. your opportunity (O), to create your very own definition of productivity (P). In the past, productivity gurus (usually men) have failed to take the first P or the O into consideration while urging us on to do more, more, more. But by using POP, you’re going to redefine what being productive means to you. Your notion of productivity may not end up looking like anyone else’s. And that’s the point. Rather than following conventional notions of productivity that merely cram more into your day, what we will be doing is simplifying or removing many tangible and concrete, seemingly important (but ultimately clogging) things from your life in order to make room for the far more important, intangible, esoteric, and most powerful things to come in—adding a feeling of clarity and levity and a true sense of accomplishment and purpose to your world.

Here are just a few of the items we’ll be shrugging off (and man, is it going to feel good):

 Traditional definitions of productivity. It’s a rigged system that was never going to work for you.

 Your current beliefs regarding what a productive day looks like. That packed Google calendar is not your friend.

 Impressing others in order to feel worthwhile. See “rigged system” above.

 Doing what other people expect of you. You know what they say about putting your own oxygen mask on first? That.

Each step of the POP System, and the philosophies that support it, will be examined and explained in depth throughout the book. But for now, a quick explanation of the concepts.
WHO ARE YOU?

(P for Personality)

If we’re setting out to create a sense of productivity that’s tailor-made for you, we’d better start by knowing who you are. More than mere navel-gazing, deep self-knowledge is essential before creating an action plan. Skipping this step, as so many of us do, can leave us with a life that’s full but that doesn’t feel like our own.

I’m going to give you exercises in order to bring you and your dreams and desires into sharp focus. And it’s all going to be based on a practice that may be new to you: self-reflection. In part, this new habit that we’ll be putting into effect is simple observation. But you’ll soon see the ways that it may shift some of your behaviors, particularly the ones that do you no favors.

To understand how this process looks, I spoke with Dr. Anita Chakrabarti. She’s a psychiatrist with an interest in self-development. She also happens to be my stepmother, someone I’m very close to and to whom I turn to for rigorous intellectual engagement. Helping people to know themselves is Anita’s life work, so of course she was one of my first stops on this journey.

Anita described the backbone of the trek toward self-knowledge as anything but a straight line.

1 We’re wild. We may spend our lives civilizing ourselves, but there’s something primal at our core. “The first thing we have to do is realize we have drives and instincts. You have to kind of accept that. Or at least consider it and give it some legitimate consideration. Because if you’re doing things that are unconscious, then it’s hard to make decisions. And it’s really hard to make good decisions.”

2 Take note. “The next step is trying to think and reflect about what you’re doing. To me, that is the most important part of this whole process,” says Anita. Your job isn’t to judge but to just observe your thoughts and feelings. “In dynamic practice, we call this listening with the third ear. It’s the part of your mind that is able to step back and kind of objectively and neutrally say, ‘What is it that I’m doing? What am I thinking? What am I feeling?’ ” There may be times in your life when you do this more actively, and go see a therapist, or there may be times when it’s less pressing. But it’s not a onetime exercise; rather, it’s something you want to practice throughout your life.

3 Think about it. Once you’ve started making observations about yourself, you’ll want to do something with that information. You can look for patterns in your life and also patterns in the world, in the shape of family or cultural expectations. “You can keep layering on the levels of sophistication,” says Anita. For instance, if letting anyone down gives you an uncomfortable sting of guilt, you may feel paralyzed or drawn to old habits of obligation and resentment. “But there’s another process where you say, ‘Yes, I’ve got guilt. I’ve actually seen that in a whole bunch of places. Wow, that’s really interesting. I’m going to keep an eye out for it because I might see it somewhere else.’ ” If you are able to isolate patterns in your emotions and behaviors, you can begin to ask yourself where those patterns were born.

4 Be complicated. Part of this process is realizing our own complexity. “We’re going to ask ourselves some hard questions, so we’ve become more self-aware and now we’re aware that we’re pretty confused.” And it’s okay!

5 Values. As much as you want to become an expert on your inner emotional workings, you want to also keep developing a knowledge of your values. Which is another way of articulating what you care about. The ability to maintain an alignment between you, your values, and your efforts is the secret sauce of productivity. “If you want to run a marathon, you can say, ‘It’s going to be painful and uncomfortable...

About this edition

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 150116578X
• ISBN 13: 9781501165788
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256