A Story About Self-Efficacy

It is 19:40 when I shut my laptop, and I could not tell you what I have achieved today.

The car park in front of the plant is almost empty. My car stands under the one lamp that has been flickering since the day I started here. I sit behind the wheel with the key in my hand and do not move. Outside, November drizzle; inside, that familiar feeling that weighs more than tiredness. I have been in motion for eleven hours and I feel as though I have carried a heavy sack across the shop floor all day and set it down again in exactly the same spot.

I go through the day. Nine meetings. An escalation call with the plant in Poland, two job interviews, a standing meeting that ran forty minutes over. In between, the constant fire from chat and inbox, questions I answered while walking to the next room. I have put out fires, smoothed things over, signed things off, calmed people down. My step count looks like I have been hiking. My impact looks like nothing.

As head of logistics I believed for a long time that my worth was measured by how many balls I could keep in the air at once. The fuller the calendar, the more important the person. That is how I learned it. That is how I have done it for years. And that is exactly why I sit here in the evenings more and more often: empty, without being able to say what of.

My eye falls on the notepad on the passenger seat. Right at the top, for weeks now, the same sentence in my handwriting: “Rework the night logistics concept.” The one thing that would make our area look different a year from now. The one thing I never find time for, because the urgent eats the important every single day.

I think of Regina, who trained me twelve years ago. A quiet woman with a way of saying things that only unfold their full meaning later. “Andrea,” she said once, when I was proudly telling her about a day full of meetings, “doing a lot is not the same as moving a lot. Don’t ask yourself in the evening how full the day was. Ask yourself what is different now.” Back then I thought it was a clever line and put it away. This evening it sits in my hand like a stone. Heavy and useful.

What is different today compared with yesterday? I look for an honest answer and find none. I have kept the operation running. I have not moved anything forward.

The next morning I come in before everyone else. The hall is still quiet, only the forklift chargers humming. I do something that feels almost forbidden. I block out the time from six until half past seven in my calendar. No title that sounds inviting, just two words: “Night logistics. Undisturbed.” I turn the notifications off. My thumb hesitates over the switch, as if I were about to miss something important. I turn them off anyway.

Ninety minutes. I calculate, I sketch, I throw things out. Twice I want to jump up because it occurs to me who else I ought to be answering. I stay in my seat. At half past seven there is no finished concept on the paper. There is a first route that did not exist yesterday. A structure, three open questions, a next step I can name.

When Marek, my shift supervisor, comes in at eight, I turn the monitor towards him. “Have a look. Rough, but it has a direction. I need your eyes on the handover times.” He raises his eyebrows, sits down, reads. “You did that last night?” “This morning. Ninety minutes, before the phone started.” He nods slowly. “We need to stay with this.” Exactly. Stay with it. For the first time in weeks something feels like a beginning and not like another lap.

The rest of the day is no calmer. Chats again, emails again, one fire after another to put out in the plant. But in the evening, when I shut the laptop, the sentence on my pad is crossed out and a new one stands underneath it. I am sitting in the car again, under the flickering lamp. This time I know what is different today compared with yesterday.

Self-efficacy does not come from a full day. It comes from the one moment in which I let the urgent wait so that the important can come into being. It is not the number of meetings that counts. What counts is the mark that is still there in the evening.