Overdelivering is Not About Doing More. It's Actually The Opposite.

The Punchline First

If there is one thing I could leave you after reading this post it is this:

While it’s easy to say so, and the whole thesis seems deceptively simple, it’s definitely not an easy thing to do, and I catch myself constantly trying to juggle too many plates at once.

What helps me in such situations is reminding myself about the opportunity costs. Whenever you do something, you are blocked from doing something else. Even if that something else means resting or spending time with your closest ones.

Be kind to yourself, and treat your time the same way you’d like others to treat it.

The Backstory

One of the things I have been hearing my entire life is that I’m ambitious. Maybe even too ambitious. That’s a fact - can’t argue with that. However, I had always assumed that this is an inherently good thing, and I had never found the courage to challenge it. At least not until now.

I grew up in an emerging Poland that was trying to rebuild its economy in post-Soviet realities. There was no such thing as hustle culture. That was everyone’s reality. That was what you did if you wanted to prevent living in dire poverty.

On top of that, at some point my family fell apart, and I found myself growing up in a broken home. This hit my self-esteem hard and it took me decades to partially reconcile with myself. When I reflect on my life so far, I can see the tremendous impact it had on my choices, building the attitude of showing up, proving myself and validating my worth in the eyes of others.

That all became fertile ground for the self-growth movement, brand new in Poland back then. Instead of finding my way forward through therapy or other forms of self-healing, I started to feed my young mind with an idea of becoming successful by the standards proposed by self-proclaimed coaches and gurus.

I started preaching the hustle culture.

Even now, preparing this paragraph for the sake of this blog, I’m touched by how exactly that definition describes the way my life and my career - despite my huge love for my family - became synonymous.

With that mindset I quickly found myself always going the extra mile. Always trying to deliver on what I promised, feeling guilty if I didn’t invest 200% into it.

Overdelivering had become my default way of operating.

Overdelivering Works. Until It Doesn’t

The harsh part of the overdelivering is that when it comes to reaping the fruits of all your work-related activities, this is a pretty damn efficient strategy. It helps you stay visible, build presence, and in general drive your career forward.

But it comes with a huge price.

It tends to blur your judgment, making it easier to overcommit to things that eventually don’t really matter that much. And you only have a specific number of hours in a work-day. You cannot stretch it, so you face a trade-off. Either you start overworking or… underdelivering, which is exactly the opposite of what you wanted in the first place.

To put it simply, overdelivering works, but only in the short term. So yes, with a huge blast radius you will hit some great targets for sure. But there will be casualties.

What It Actually Costs

I was lucky to have good people around me - friends, colleagues, managers, sometimes all three at once. Some of them saw this coming long before I did. The uncomfortable part is how long it took me to actually hear them, and how many of these I only noticed once someone put them straight in front of my face (thank you, David!), or sometimes - once it was too late.

Let me tell you one story.

At some point I became so focused on being promoted that I gave up on all my health-check mechanisms. By pushing hard, heavy and in every direction I eventually got what I wanted, but it cost me a lot. I lost the joy of doing things. Every day at work felt like a real struggle, like I was always behind schedule. I was barely keeping my head above water, and the quality of my life went down with it.

In my case, it ended in a burnout I couldn’t push through, and time away from work to recover - something I’ve touched on before. Thankfully, being surrounded by caring and supportive colleagues, I had enough courage to admit it and seek help.

So yes - I overdelivered, and I got what I wanted. But when the bill came, I realized everything had been purchased with debt.

That’s the part I paid. There is another part that somebody else pays.

When you take every piece of work that comes your way, you teach people that your time isn’t valuable enough, that you will pick up anything just for the sake of doing so. Good leaders know how to pick the right battles at the right time.

Worse, you stop being a good colleague. Those low-hanging tickets are just snacks to you, as Will Larson called them in Staff Engineer. For someone more junior, the same ticket could have been a valuable lesson - and you’re stealing them out of that opportunity.

What To Do Instead

The hardest part for me was learning to say “no”. Not because I lack assertiveness, but mostly because I have this urge to improve everything around me. I’m not just a Boy Scout - I’m the entire Scout organization. ;)

But at some point it clicked. By trying to be everywhere, I’m effectively nowhere.

By trying to fix everything, I let my core initiatives slip away. By committing to too many things, I end up working overtime, and that debt accumulates quickly.

In simpler words - I’m hurting myself and people around me.

Since that realization I try to keep things simple.

• I try not to have more than one initiative on my plate.
• I answer “no” to every new commitment by default - even to ideas that come from me. If I pick something up anyway, it has to be worth dropping something else.
• I do the heavy-and-ugly first, instead of chasing the shiny little objects - which nowadays are easy to delegate to agents anyway.

That’s one half of it. The other half is about not eating everyone else’s work.

• Delegating isn’t enough. I try to make it easy for people to jump into the initiatives I’m leading in the first place.
• When I see something potentially problematic, I ask others whether they see it through the same prism, instead of just fixing it. That creates an opening for us to work on it together, or for them to take it.

And underneath all of it: every decision I make lands on somebody, not just me. My family included.

Wrap Up

Something I realized only while writing this article is that these are evergreen topics. Even though I improved a lot in those matters, I’m still careless about some of the points I mentioned.

It turns out I wrote this article more for myself than for others. I guess.

Nonetheless, take care of yourself. Nobody will ever thank you for the plates you dropped quietly at home. And there will always be more work waiting for you.