My boss asked me for something today that has nothing to do with my actual job, and I’m pretty sure I said yes before the request had finished landing. I didn't pause or ask to check what was on my plate. I just took it on.
What stuck with me afterwards was how the yes felt. It felt good, in a small and slightly embarrassing way, for about half a second: once again I’m being useful, easy, the person you can hand things to. Then the feeling passed and I carried on with my day.
However, I'd bet money nobody else in that room would have agreed that quickly. I see everyone else pushing back. They ask what falls off their plate if this goes on it. They negotiate scope. I've watched them do it, and I do the opposite. I absorb whatever arrives and tell myself I'll find the time.
Today I watched myself do it. Normally the yes is over before I've noticed there was a decision to make. This time I saw it from the outside. It was quick, there was no visible weighing, and it looked like a reflex with a reward attached.
I've always filed this under virtue. I’m a team player, I don’t make a fuss. It's a flattering description and I've let it stand. But the half-second after the yes doesn't feel like virtue. It feels like being paid.
The obvious conclusion is that I need better boundaries, and I've reached it plenty of times before. It never goes anywhere, and I think I can see why. Boundaries are what you build when you want to be less available, and I don't, quite. Being the low-friction one is the nearest thing I have to a professional identity I feel sure about.
That's a strange thing to feel sure about after twenty-odd years in marketing, because my confidence in my own skill has never kept pace with my job titles. I've been promoted above where I think my ability sits, and alongside every promotion has run the same suspicion: that I've been kept on because I'm easy to work with. Likeable, no trouble. The one who always says yes, if I'm being unkind. Say yes without hesitating and I'm renewing my place as the easy one.
It would be simpler if being the easy one had failed. It hasn't. I'm still here.
Seniority was supposed to take me out of this. Favours go to whoever will take them, and the more senior I get, the more reliably that's me.
It only works if I never say what it costs. If I'd asked today what falls off my plate, I'd have been the person in that room doing the negotiating, and the half-second wouldn't have come. So I skip the question. I know I'm already stretched thin, and I know it the way you know a bill is on its way. A week from now I'll have found maybe two hours for something that needs ten, and I can see the shape of those days from here. I said yes anyway, and the yes still felt good.
There's a second cost, and it arrives later. Somewhere in that week I'll start to suspect I'm not the right person to do this properly. By then it will be too late to hand it off without it looking bad, because I'm supposed to be the person who doesn't cause problems. So I'll end up working late at night to rescue something I could have declined in half a second. I've done it before and I'll probably do it again. The identity that makes the yes feel good also makes it impossible to admit later that I got it wrong.
A skills gap would be fixable. A course, a stern friend, and I'd be sorted. This is something I do quickly and on purpose, because a fast yes tells the room I'm the easy one, and a slow one makes me another person with a workload. I'm not sure who I'd be then.
Part of me reads all this as a character flaw, something to correct. Another part notices that I can see the cost and the reward both, and I still don't want to give the reward up. Neither reading feels complete. I keep switching between them.