When you finally make room for some space, don’t be so quick to fill it.
Living with a Great Dane changes your understanding of personal space. As you can see from this week’s picture, Remington has given the subject considerable thought. Her conclusion appears to be that if space is available, she should occupy all of it—preferably upside down, with several legs going in different directions and her head hanging over the edge.
Clearly, Remi and I have somewhat different definitions of making room. But looking at her sprawled across the couch made me realize that perhaps we’re more alike than I’d like to admit. We’re both very good at filling whatever space is available. Remi fills hers with Great Dane. We fill ours with responsibilities, appointments, projects, expectations, and one more thing we somehow agreed to do.
What Happens After You Leave It?
Last week, I wrote about Leave It—recognizing when something that once mattered no longer belongs in the life we’re building. Sometimes that means leaving behind a responsibility, a role, a business service, an expectation, or simply a way of doing things that has run its course. You would think that once we’ve done the difficult work of letting something go, we’d enjoy the space we’ve created. Instead, many of us immediately begin wondering what we’re going to put there.
We finish a major project and take on another. We leave a committee and eventually find ourselves on a different one. We eliminate a service from the business and start thinking about what new service we could offer. We finally have an open afternoon and decide it’s the perfect opportunity to catch up on six things we haven’t gotten around to doing. Apparently, we aren’t very comfortable with empty space.
Accomplished People Are Especially Good at Filling It
Most of us have spent years developing our capacity. We know how to manage responsibilities, solve problems, respond when someone needs us, and get things done. Those abilities have contributed to our success, and other people have learned they can depend on us. But our competence can also work against us. When we have available capacity, we tend to think we should be using it, and because we’re capable of doing many things, there’s never a shortage of possibilities—or people quite willing to suggest how we might spend our time.
For much of our lives, the question has been, “How much can I accomplish?” I’m beginning to think there comes a time when we need to ask a different question: “What deserves my capacity now?” That change may seem subtle, but it represents a very different way of thinking about our time, talent, and energy.
Maybe You Don’t Need to Know What’s Next Yet
When we’re moving through a transition, we naturally want to know what comes next. If I’m no longer doing this, what will I do instead? If I’m stepping away from this responsibility, what will replace it? If this chapter is changing, what exactly will the next one look like? Those are reasonable questions, but perhaps we sometimes ask them too soon.
A little open space gives us the opportunity to notice things we couldn’t see when everything was full. What do I miss? What don’t I miss at all? What gives me energy? What am I curious about? What keeps getting my attention now that I’m not so busy maintaining everything I’ve accumulated?
This Happens in Our Businesses, Too
Businesses accumulate things just as lives do. We add services, systems, meetings, processes, responsibilities, and ways of working because each made sense at some point. Then one day we look around and wonder why everything feels so complicated. Our instinct is often to ask what we should add or change, when sometimes the more useful question is what we could simplify, delegate, redesign, or stop doing altogether.
Creating capacity isn’t about doing nothing. It’s about becoming more intentional about what gets the room we’ve created. And that applies just as much to our lives as it does to our businesses. The objective isn’t to have an empty calendar or an empty business; it’s to have enough room to make deliberate choices about what belongs there.
Remi’s Takeaway
I don’t expect Remi to become particularly concerned about how much space she’s occupying anytime soon. She’s a Great Dane, and I’m fairly certain she considers her size one of her more impressive qualities. Judging from this photograph, she also has absolutely no concern about whether she’s using her space productively.
Maybe there’s a lesson in that. Once you’ve decided to leave something behind, don’t be in such a hurry to replace it. Give yourself some room to notice what changes when you’re no longer carrying it. You may discover that what deserves your time, talent, and energy now is very different from what deserved them ten—or even five—years ago.
A Question to Consider
Think about something you’ve recently finished, delegated, stopped doing, or decided no longer belongs. What did you do with the room it created? Did you protect it long enough to discover what you really wanted, or did you fill it right back up?
I’m still considering my own answer. Remi, apparently, has already answered.
She filled the couch.