Fire yo-self

Every year, the Monday after the last day of the NFL regular season is head coach and GM firing day. Today is that day. (If you don't follow football, I'm sure this seems odd but look at it this way: at least it doesn't happen until after the holidays.) There's a running joke that a job like this always – as in 99% of the time – ends in being fired.

Frame that in your head – the idea that the inevitable outcome is being fired. We think of being fired as some form of failure, and maybe it is though maybe it's not depending on how you look at it. A coach can't magically heal injured players that are key to the team much less choose those players because that's what a general manager does. A coach can work a little or a lot to make the best of the players they have available to field, and some coaches are fortunate enough to have to do far less than others to turn that mix of uniquely skilled humans into something fantastic while other coaches where work themselves to poor health and still end up with a losing team.

Despite this, one or more decision makers are going to use their own, at times highly unique criteria to decide if the coach gets fired or not.

It begs the question, "Have you ever thought about firing yourself?"

Not at work (clearly that's called quitting), rather have you ever defined "Me Incorporated" with all your jobs and their responsibilities and realized you might be overwhelmed, might actually suck at one or more (sucking is complicated and quite often is less about being bad at something than it is about time, priorities, passion, etc).

Reasons I use for firing myself

Get some time back — When you're doing to much, everything you do sucks more than it could. It's not a really good idea to throw out something like "spend 30 minutes each day talking with my family" but what if your eyes weren't glazed over with two layers of wha while they stared at you, wondering where your brain went?

I realized I'm no longer who I thought I was, or my goals have changed — Responsibilities accumulate over time, often from past versions of yourself. What made sense five years ago might be irrelevant to who you're becoming or what you're building now.

The work involved far exceeds the benefit — Maybe you used to like the two hours a week you spent re-alphabetizing your baseball cards because it brought some level of zen, but now it's about us fun as cleaning the toilet. Since you still have to clean the toilet – and it takes far less time – guess what probably needs to go.

Reducing decision fatigue — Every responsibility is a recurring decision load. Fewer obligations means fewer daily micro-decisions competing for your attention.
Testing assumptions — Many responsibilities persist because "someone has to do it" or "people expect me to." Often neither is as true as we assume, and the world adjusts faster than we expect when we step back.

Preventing resentment or some other crappy attitude problem — Carrying things you no longer want to carry breeds quiet bitterness that leaks into everything else. (The Dunkin' Time To Make The Donuts guy comes to mind, and I'm unsure why because dude's getting paid and he still seems a little unhappy. Maybe he needs to quit and get a job that starts later in the day. Also, how good can a donut created by disgruntled hands taste?)

The hard part isn't usually identifying what to drop — it's giving yourself permission to actually let go.

To sum it, an idea or four on how to get yourself fully fired:

1. Mark your calendar periodically with a Fire Myself Day, a time to fire yourself from anything that might explode in your mind when you read this. Heck, maybe this is a reminder that you add every single day as a last check in before you head off to dreamland at night to lose part of that mental weight everyone should shed before their brain goes off for a rest (post explosion and resolution, natch).
2. Use my handy dandy list above, and ask yourself for each item on your list if it meets the criteria for being ejected from your life (or at least your thoughts).
3. Take all your candidates for canning (not literally 'canning' as in beans or corn), and determine what it takes to get them off your list (this could range from nothing to figuring out who's gonna clean that toilet (and what you'll have to give them to make it happen).
4. Make it so, but resist the temptation to fill that newly acquired time and mind space with anything new – at least for now.

Happy Fire Myself Day!