The Power of a Reset

Last week, I talked about how I had been preparing for the move and staging our new house for a quick settling-in period. What hubris! 

You never fully appreciate how much you own until you have to pack it, move it, and unpack it in a new space. While I organized most of my personal effects within the first few hours after the move, our collective belongings took several days to sort. It wasn’t until yesterday evening that the house finally felt settled enough.

An upside of the move is that it created a couple of accidental experiments. First, we took four days off from television because it was packed. As a result, the kids didn’t have their evening music videos, and Erin and I skipped the evening news. The kids didn’t complain, and a break from the national headlines was surely worth it for the adults. 

Due to a quirk in the move, most of the kids’ toys and books are still in boxes because they will go into the area the painters have been using to stage their work. Again, no real complaints. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t notice if 50% of the items disappeared. 

I contrast those reactions to what would have likely occurred if I’d proposed canceling the cable or discarding 50% of the kids’ toys—revolutionary protests. Those decisions would be experienced as a loss, something no one likes. But because we were “forced” to take on the radical solution, we got to experience the benefits of a new regime without the pain of thinking about the change. 

(I’m pretty sure my wife still hasn’t realized that the new house doesn’t have cable TV. Shh—it’s a secret. :)) 

The experience made me think of an anecdote from Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao’s The Friction Project about how Dropbox employees “were wasting so much time in meetings that they kept missing crucial deadlines, especially shipping dates.” To fix the issue, the Dropbox leadership team asked IT to remove “nearly all standing meetings from employees’ calendars and made it impossible for them to add new meetings to their calendars for two weeks. Employees were notified via an email titled ‘Armeetingeddon has landed.’”

After the initial purge, leaders provided guidance to help people align the meeting culture with the strategy—for example, “schedule meetings if (and only if) other forms of communication won’t cut it” and “invite only key stakeholders, not spectators.” As a result, they developed a much healthier meeting culture: “people scheduled fewer meetings, meetings were smaller, and people routinely declined invitations.”

Now, imagine if the Dropbox leaders had proposed that everyone drop non-critical meetings. Everyone would have agreed to the concept for everyone else, but how many meeting leaders would claim that their meetings were critical, thus trapping people into attending? There would have been way more friction in the process and way less change. 

The power of the reset, which you can apply to meetings, activities, belongings, and other obligations, comes from changing the status quo, shifting the question from “Is this worthless enough to discard?” to “Given everything I have to do, is this worth adding?” It also lets you experience the emotional benefits of operating differently, making the change process easier.

Finally, like with the experiments I mentioned last week, resets are ideal where the consequences for failure are low. We can always give the kids back most of their toys, restoring the cable (or signing up for Hulu) would only take a few minutes, and critical meetings can be rescheduled. The worst that can happen is that you have a radically lighter load for a few weeks!