Cutting down on the "have to"s

I'm sure that it will come as no surprise that I have been thinking about my job lately. More precisely, I've been working on remembering what exactly I like about it. Since I've also been thinking about what I could be doing next, which seems to be completely different than what I do now, I was trying to figure out how it is all related. Quite frankly, even for a pattern weaver like me, it was a bit of a stretch. So, on one of my recent insomniac nights, I pulled out a few big sheets of paper and a Sharpie and did a mind map.

Mind maps are great tools for putting everything in your head onto a piece of paper. There is a description here that looks pretty accurate. Usually, you start with a central idea and then work out all of the connected pieces. I've used them with my project teams to brainstorm. They are also great for identifying relationships. I had to work backwards this time. I started with a bunch of pieces and then eventually figured out the relationship. Then I started over - with the central idea - and built out some new ideas from there.

The process was revealing. It turns out that all of my interests are related to limiting the number of "have to"s. For reasons that I can't quite explain, it seems that many of us have allowed ourselves to be loaded down with things that we feel we have to do - but they are not necessarily real requirements. I feel that I have to behave a certain way to be effective in my job; but other people behave differently and get things done, so it really isn't a requirement. Advertisements try to convince us that we need certain things, but do I really have to have that shampoo to have silky, shiny hair? Do I really want a promotion in a company if I have to work 50+ hours a week to show that I deserve it? To me, these are silly "have to"s.

The trick is to balance these silly requirements with what I (or you, or whoever) consider the real "have to"s. If the job I have is the only way to get the money I need to raise my kids, then whatever they say I need to do is now a real requirement. Unless...

It is the unless that gets me. Call it the "we see things differently" approach to life, but I believe that there are ways around this. Even some minor lifestyle changes could possibly make me much more indepent - which in turn gives me more choices about who gets to tell me what I have to do. Improving business processes so that I can go home on time, increasing my home's energy efficiency so that I give less of my money to SRP, being a smarter consumer, adopting a healthier lifestyle that allows less interaction with our dodgy health care system - these are all things that I have researched just to give me more options.

My job has been about just one small part of building a lifestyle with more options. My research has covered broad scope into apparently random territory - but it really is all along the same lines. I don't think that there currently is a job called "Have To Reduction Consultant" or "Independents Are Us", but I do know that some form of that is what I will continue to do for the forseeable future. And while the mind mapping that got me here won't necessarily cure insomnia for everyone, at least having some of these crazy thoughts out of my head is helping me to sleep at night!