Do you know someone who has too much to do, isn’t quite keeping their head above water, but never takes up anyone on their offers for help?
I know several people who are like that. They are very annoying, aren’t they? You know their load will be lessened greatly if they would just stop being so stubborn and share it with the people who are genuinely offering to carry some of it for them, but they just won’t.
And yet… I do exactly the same thing myself. I am one of those annoying people. And this is why I don’t accept help when it is offered:
1. You add to my cognitive load
Yes, it was nice of you to offer to take care of something, or suggest I give you some of my jobs to do, but that means I have to factor you into my day in a way I didn’t have to before – you become something I have to deal with and think about in a timely manner, rather than something I can come to when I have the time and space for you in my brain. You’re offering to do something for me, but if I take you up on that offer you become one of the balls I’m juggling.
This is the same whether you are a colleague offering to help me at work or a friend offering to make me dinner after work. Something I didn’t have to think about becomes something I have to think about. And from your side of things it may seem like a no brainer, but when your brain is too full, it’s a bit of a straw-that-breaks-the-camel’s-back kind of scenario. Sometimes your offer of something nice is just one thing too many.
2. The jobs get bigger and heavier when you have to hand them over
When someone offers to help with something, I actually have to give even more thought to what you’ve offered to help with than I did before. It’s amazing how much of what I’m doing is only half-formed in my brain, but still works for me. It’s like a scrawled note on a napkin – it means something to me, but I can’t give it to someone else like that. I have to make it more solid and actionable before I can hand it over, which feels like way more work than just keeping the note on the napkin and running with that.
3. I feel like I shouldn’t need the help
There is every possibility I could do all the things if I just managed my time better. When I’m feeling stressed out, I often switch off (mentally speaking) for chunks of time. I take little attention breaks – look at something that isn’t one of my jobs for a little while to let my brain just fizz for a bit instead of broiling.
But when someone offers to help, I feel extremely guilty about all of these little attention breaks. I should be getting through more work than I am – and I would be if I just got my act together. I feel like giving you some of my work to do is a sign that I’m failing you, somehow, because if I was doing my work better I wouldn’t be giving you some of it.
Oddly, this is also why I hate having the work I’m doing acknowledged. I know I could be doing better, so when you tell me I’m doing well, all I want to do is say “You have no idea how badly I’m doing right now, and how much I’m trying to keep that from you.”
4. I lose control of the outcome when I give it to someone else
And here’s one of the big ones. If I give someone some of my tasks to do, I should (if I’m being sensible) trust them to do them well and in a timely manner.
Sometimes I do trust them, but it turns out that something that was at one rank on my list of things to do is on a lower rank of their list of things to do, and I actually would have done the job better and sooner if I just did it myself. Then I have to snatch the job back again and run like heck to get it done.
Sometimes it would actually work out – I can give it to that person safe in the knowledge that they will do it their way, but do it well. But even if it’s not on my plate any more, it’s still on my list of things to worry about, only now I no longer have control over how it’s done and when. That’s just highly stressful.
And so even though accepting help is a smart thing to do, and seems a simple enough decision from the perspective of the person offering to help, it’s just easier for me to keep having too much to do.
And now that I’ve realised this is what I’m doing all the time, I can clearly see that it’s also exactly what my friends and colleagues are doing when I suggest they should accept help when it’s offered to them.
I wonder what the solution is? Maybe there isn’t one.
