Finding the way back from work overwhelm
Blossom comes before fruit, but a zucchini metaphor doesn’t always apply. (Image by Antonio Jose Cespedes)
I’ve been with family for the last two weeks, making up for lost time. It’s wonderful.
The only problem is that I have only about three hours a day to work. (Yes, I guess I could have taken a vacation, but I didn’t plan ahead, so here I am.)
Working only a few hours a day is quite clarifying. I focus on the tasks that will cause a problem for me or someone else if I don’t do them. Everything else, even the stuff that is important-but-not-urgent, gets postponed.
It is a decent way to get through a few days, but not sustainable. If I go more than two weeks without doing anything more than what I have to do, my urgent tasks will multiply. Then, I’ll be so busy putting out fires that I’ll no longer have energy for the deeper problem-solving and long-term planning that keeps me on track.
In fact, what I actually aim to do in my work is prevent things from becoming urgent. The practice that helps me the most to keep a balance between the urgent and important is to maintain daily and weekly routines that go right on my schedule.
For example, I dedicate twenty minutes to bookkeeping and CFO duties every day. I maintain my budget, track debits and credits, check my bank balances, and do some cash-flow planning. If this work takes less than 20 minutes on some days, fine; it might only take three if I’m keeping up.
Skipping this work has big consequences. Once, I missed a few days and happened to be poor timing: I overdrew my checking account and my payroll processor put a hold on my account. As a result, I had to file my federal taxes manually instead of with the click of a button. I saved a half hour over a few days, but I cost myself three, plus penalties and a lot of stress. It was not worth it.
Obviously, planning and follow-through are key. But inevitably, there are times when things fall apart due to vacation or illness or unforeseen problems. When everything is going well, I open my daily planner and virtuously chip away at my tasks and projects. But what happens when this pleasant order is disrupted? The plan I had is no longer working, and I need to recover somehow.
Even though the Eisenhower quadrants are useful, they might just be more overwhelming when I’m already overwhelmed. There are so many inputs coming at me that I might not be able to discern in the moment what is urgent and what is important. If I try too hard to manage my time in that situation, I start spinning and can’t focus on anything. In those moments when the plan has failed or I am facing a bunch of new challenges, I discard the quadrants temporarily and let go of doing it “right.”
We can make ourselves miserable by overthinking our choice of task. We can waste a lot of time trying to determine our highest priority or attempting to figure out the next step of a particularly thorny project. While this is sometimes necessary, you don’t win the game of pick-up sticks by immediately going for the one that’s buried under all the others. The easiest thing to do is to take the one on top or off to the side, and so it is with our tasks.
I find that allowing myself to do gentle and easy routine tasks in moderation, even though they might be postponable or delegatable, can help me to build momentum for the harder, more important stuff. Using this approach, I am now able to get myself settled and productive on a chaotic day, whereas I used to give up. These days, by tackling a handful of tasks regardless of their importance, I generate the clarity to get back into a higher-level self-management mode.
As I get better at planning ahead, the harder and weightier tasks actually become more easy and routine. Projects and processes that I used to procrastinate on now fit into a system, and that system is more robust and resilient. But when that system breaks down, I don’t try to jump back to where I left off. I grab for an easy task, and then another, and then another. It works in pick-up sticks, and it works for the CEO.
What about you? If you’re feeling resistance or overwhelm, can you find a task that will allow you to be successful? What can you complete that has low stakes and a high likelihood of follow-through?
