Chapter 13
Letting Go of Control

It’s the weekend. Saturday morning, to be precise. It’s time to relax, unwind, and de-stress. At least, it’s meant to be. You’re lacking sleep. Your first coffee couldn’t come soon enough.

You spent your Friday night staring into space over dinner while you worried about Monday’s deadline. You ended up checking through all of the in-flight development tickets and reading the latest comments. Why hadn’t Ben replied to any of your requests for status updates? Does he not feel the same pressure that you do?

Later that evening, as you lay in bed, it wasn’t your book that you held in your hand, it was your phone. You were refreshing your email inbox again and again and again even though nobody on your team would be sending any emails at that time of night. But you couldn’t stop yourself. You needed to know whether everything was going to be alright. The itch needed scratching, but it was always out of reach.

Instead of getting that much-needed rest, you were wired. Was everything going to be ready on time? Was everyone else aware that this work really needed to get done? A restless night’s sleep followed. You dreamed of lines of code, of infinite errors while your code was compiling, and of being chased down the corridors of your old school by a man-eating bug ticket while the lockers flapped open and shot calendar pages in your face.

Now it’s the morning. You can’t stop thinking about last week. Did you have all of the conversations that you needed to? Did you make it clear what was needed? Was there anything that you could have communicated better? Would it benefit you to drop a bunch of emails into your team’s inboxes so that they get them first thing on Monday morning?

How are you meant to stop thinking about work?

We live in a world that bombards us with information, both inside the office and in our free time. Push notifications, emails, adverts, beeps, boops, and blips. As you will have learned by now, being a manager opens the door to more context switching, interruptions, and channels of communication than you would have experienced as an individual contributor. With time, you can feel attached to the input. You need it to feel like you’re doing a good job. It hangs around in the evenings and the weekends. It can override the desire to cook proper meals. It can prevent you from lacing up your running shoes.

As a manager, you do your work through other people. Those on your team and those that you influence can do more work than you can ever do, but they’re going to do it in a different way than how you’d have done it yourself. During times of stress, the urge to take back control and begin meddling and micromanaging is there. But you shouldn’t succumb to it. It’s easy to yearn for absolute control, but it will eat you alive.

This chapter is about letting go. It’s about putting space between yourself and your managerial work and proving that by doing so, paradoxically, it will make your work better.

Here’s what we’re going to learn:

• How to let go of tasks. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you get involved in the details of every little thing that your team does. You’ll drive yourself even crazier if you stress about every eventuality. We’ll revisit why it’s beneficial for your output for you to let go, then look to the Stoics for how to frame your relationship with your work so that you worry less.

• How to let go of your preconceptions for effective work. As much as keeping on top of every notification, meeting, and email is comforting and even addictive, it might be seriously messing with your brain. We’ll explore why. We’ll also look at how you should carve out time for yourself as a manager to unlock your creative thoughts, and why you should be stricter with your inputs.

• How to let go of work after work. To get better at your job, you’ll need to look after yourself. We’ll have a look at techniques for caring for your mind and body so that you can recharge every day and come back the next as a better manager.

We’ll begin by showing you just how essential letting go is for your success. But guess what? You’re already doing it.