It's easy to see.
There's more to work than me.
So I'm turning my attention,
to Who - not me!
So write the request.
Find the resource.
You'll achieve far more.
And increase your value.
For in the end...
The result is key.
Realistic Expectations
On how you get there
It's not about how you get there.
Reach the destination.
Set the expectation.
Follow-through and anchor.
There's more work that I can do. So why not turn your attention to... Writing a clear work order, and creating work for others to do?
Time to look through windows,
not mirrors.
Stress and anxiety can't live in the present moment. When you are overwhelmed, it's because you are not being present. You are stuck in the future and/or beating yourself up for the past.
The idea of being overwhelmed only exists in the future. And when it's in the future, it's only an idea - it's not real.
What's real is what you can do right now. And what you can do is limited by one thing. Multitasking doesn't work. I want to give myself fully to the task at hand.
When the requests exceed what I am able to do in this moment, I don't yet own it. It stays with the requester until I'm able to allocate NOW time to work on it.
What the requester can't see is what you are already busy doing. There's never any idle time. And if there is, it's because I'm taking a breath and diving under the surface.
Overwhelm is defined as:
give too much of a thing to (someone); inundate.
"they were overwhelmed by farewell messages"
...to have a strong emotional effect on.
"I was overwhelmed with guilt"
synonyms: overcome, move, stir, affect, touch, impress, sweep someone off their feet, strike, stun, make emotional, dumbfound, shake, disturb, devastate, take aback, daze, spellbind, dazzle, floor, leave speechless, take someone's breath away, stagger; More be too strong for; overpower.
"the wine doesn't overwhelm the flavor of the trout"
"bury or drown beneath a huge mass."
"the water flowed through to overwhelm the whole dam and the village beneath"
I like this better: "his teams overwhelmed their opponents"
Synonyms: defeat (utterly/heavily/easily), trounce, rout, beat, beat hollow, conquer, vanquish, be victorious over, gain a victory over, prevail over, get the better of, triumph over.
Yes, I can flip this and instead of feeling overwhelmed by time, I can overwhelm time with my productivity!
Making a list and printing it out. Using an Impact template to get clarity on the work involved, create a bridge to AuthorDock, and get a more accurate time budget.
What I need is a time budget.
I am looking a 5 x 5 Time Task Matrix and distinguishing between real work and pseudo work.
PS: The Japanese have a term for working until they die: Karoshi.
Last night I thought one day we may have AI to prioritize what to work on next. If you set a goal to have $100k in the bank, what tasks would AI assign to you?
If it's not going to matter in 5 years, don't spend more than 5 minutes being upset about it.
I recognize that I don't like rush jobs and right now, I have two clients that are rushing me. It's an immediate red flag and best not to take on any engagements where every request seems urgent. Heading up to Port Townsend on Wed does have be stressed out, but stop for a second - you are talking about really 3 days when you will be out of pocket - Wed - Fri. and know that the work will always be there. PS: It's a golden opportunity to lean on others to help handle the task. I create additional anxiety by putting time into a job before it's budgeted. My curiosity gets the best of me and I'm such a people pleaser, that I do the work without getting paid! What's that all about? PS: My estimates on labor don't take into account system snafus and account access issues (in the case where my clients forget their password or get locked out of their own accounts).
My Response-ability:
Yes, before time away from the office, I experience overwhelm due to rush jobs and feeling anxious about your upcoming trip. Remember, a constant urgency from clients is a red flag; consider declining such engagements. While Port Townsend may seem daunting, it's only three days and work will wait. Don't hesitate to lean on others for support during this time. Your tendency to invest time before budgeting causes unnecessary stress; prioritize setting boundaries and ensuring fair compensation for your work. Additionally, consider including buffer time in your estimates for potential system issues and account access problems.
This morning I had a ton of work to do, and I felt the anxiety building, the moment I woke up and started thinking about all that work.
Instead of getting moving, I watched my anxiety. It’s an interesting feeling of rising panic, of adrenaline shooting from my chest outward. My mind was racing, my heart was beating fast.
This happens to me from time to time — I feel like I have so much to do, and I start to worry. I’ve learned to deal with it (or have I?), so that while it still comes up, I now have trust that I’ll be fine. And that, in turn, helps it to go away sooner.
So what do you do when you’re overwhelmed and have a crapload of work to do?
Here are the practices that work for me. I offer them to you in hopes that they’ll help you.
Anxiety is often rooted in the fear of what lies ahead, which is normal. However, at its core, anxiety signifies a lack of trust in the future. We doubt that things will work out as we imagine.
Through my own experiments, I have discovered that this lack of trust actually stems from a lack of trust in the present moment. If we believe that the present is not sufficient or that we are not enough in the present, we anticipate failure in the future. Nevertheless, I have come to realize that if I consistently act in accordance with my principles in the present, nothing truly catastrophic will happen to me in the future. Therefore, I choose to place my trust in the present moment and have faith that things will unfold as they should.
I encourage you to try this: take a glance at the moment you are in right now. Observe your surroundings and reflect within yourself. Quite frankly, this moment is perfectly fine. If it weren't, you would most likely be in an ambulance rather than reading this. And if this moment is fine, it is highly likely that the next one will be too, along with the one after that. We have a tendency to envision dreadful future moments, when in reality, they seldom materialize.
Ironically, in situations where we have a heavy workload, the most effective approach isn't necessarily to hastily dive into our tasks. I've discovered that taking a few minutes to engage in meditation can truly help anchor me in the present moment, which surprisingly turns out to be quite powerful. Instead of constantly fixating on the future, I can take a moment to reconnect with the present, with my own being, and my breath. This practice allows me to find inner peace amidst my responsibilities. Simply by stilling ourselves for a mere 3 minutes and attentively observing our breath, our body, and the sounds around us, we can consistently reorient our focus to the present whenever our thoughts wander.
With a lot of work to do, it can be overwhelming. But honestly I’ve found that I can’t do everything at once. I can’t even do two things at once. I can only focus on one thing at a time (though I can ineffectively switch back and forth between 2 or more things). So I should focus on the most important. The best way to do this is to make a short list of the most important things I have to do. What will make the most difference today? Not just the semi-urgent emails, but the tasks that mean the most to my life and career. This tends to be about 3 things per day, though go ahead and write down 5 things if you can’t limit it to 3. This list is what I focus on first. I can get to the small things later.
I work most effectively when I pick one important task and really focus on it. When I switch constantly between a bunch of tasks, I tend not to make a lot of progress. And the important tasks get pushed back, because they need more focus than the constant switching allows for. And the constant switching feels productive, even if it means you’re only doing little things and not the big things. So instead, I focus on one big task, and I give it my full attention. Sometimes other things will interrupt my attention, and that’s OK if it can’t be avoided. You can’t control every moment (or any moment perhaps). But to the best of my ability, I stay with the present task instead of allowing myself to constantly switch.
When I’m starting a new task, before I start single-tasking with this item, I pause. I ask myself, “Is this the most important task I can be doing right now?” Then I ask, “What is my intention with this task?” This just means, why am I doing it? What do I hope to accomplish? What’s my motivation? This helps me to understand the Why of the task, and keeps me motivated when things get hard. Often the Why is something like, “To help my readers with a problem” and this feels good when I’m doing the task. That’s a much better reason than, “Because it’s on my list” or “Because I got an email asking me to do it”. I might do the task either way, but with a solid intention, I’m more focused, more motivated.
Often we’re rushing to get somewhere, trying to make progress towards a goal, moving, moving. But where are we going? Will we be happier when we get there? Is that place better than where we already are? I’ve found that no, it’s not any better. Where we already are is just as great. This moment is just as good as wherever we’re rushing off to. We’ve already arrived. So I smile, and appreciate the moment, and this makes the current task not a stepping stone to something better, but something great in and of itself.
When we rush through a lot of tasks, they tend to accumulate in our heads as we work through our task list. These things running around in our heads cost us a lot in stress and thought administration. So by letting go of past and future tasks, and just focusing on the current task, we can be less stressed and burdened throughout the day. Read more.
This is something that stresses me out all the time. Trying to finish my to-do list. Trying to empty my inbox. These are meaningless goals. There’s an arbitrary number of emails in your inbox, an arbitrary number of tasks on your list. What does it matter if you finish the day with zero or three left? It doesn’t change your life. Letting go of these arbitrary goals, that don’t really help you, means letting go of the stress. So I practice letting go, and allow some emails to remain in my inbox, and some tasks to remain for tomorrow.
These are the things I try to practice. I don’t always get them right, and I mess up constantly. But when I remember to do these practices, my day is much better, I’m more focused, and my stress levels drop dramatically.
This morning I didn’t feel like doing anything. It’s a combination of overtiredness from a few days of hard work, and a lack of sleep last night.
I couldn’t motivate myself to do anything important this morning, which is a rare thing for me. And I just felt bad in general. I started to doubt myself, and wonder whether anything I do is worthwhile.
I sat here in this funk and wondered how to get out of it. Should I just forget about today? Should I just give up what I do, because I’m not as good at it as I thought I was?
That was definitely what I was considering. But I knew this mild depression was temporary, and so I thought about possible solutions. And then some of them actually worked — little tricks of the mind that can have a real effect on reality.
Here’s what I did that worked, in hopes that it might help you if these feelings ever come up..
I think we all have the tendency to put ourselves at the center of the universe, and see everything from the viewpoint of how it affects us. But this can have all kinds of effects, from feeling sorry for ourselves when things aren’t going exactly as we’d like, to doubting ourselves when we aren’t perfect. So instead of worrying so much about myself, I thought about other people I might help. Finding small ways to help others gets me out of my self-centered thinking, and then I’m not wallowing in self-pity anymore — I’m starting to think about what others need. I’m not doubting myself, because the question of whether I’m good enough or not is not the central question anymore. The central question is what others need. So thinking about others instead of myself helps solve self-doubt and self-pity.
We all have this picture of ourselves, this idea of what kind of person we are. When this idea gets threatened, we can react very defensively. People can question whether we did a good job, and this threatens our idea of ourselves as competent — and so we can become angry or hurt at the criticism. Someone can accuse you of lying and this threatens your idea that you’re a good person, and so you can get angry and attack the other person. My identity of myself as someone who is motivated and productive and has good ideas and so forth … this was getting in the way this morning. When I wasn’t productive, it made me despair because then I was worried I wasn’t who I thought I was. My solution was to realize that I’m not one thing. I’m not always productive — sometimes I am, but sometimes I’m lazy. I’m not always motivated — sometimes I am, but other times I don’t feel like working. I don’t always have good ideas. I can be many things, and so this identity of mine becomes less fragile, more antifragile. Then it doesn’t matter if someone thinks I didn’t do a good job — because I don’t always do a good job. I make mistakes, I am less than perfect. And that’s perfectly OK.
I only have so many days left on earth. I don’t know how many that is, but I do know it’s a very limited number. I know that each one of those limited days is a gift, a blessing, a miracle. And that squandering this miracle is a crime, a horrible lack of appreciation for what I’ve been given. And so, I reminded myself this morning that this day counts. That I should do something with it. That doesn’t mean I need to work myself into the ground, type until my fingers are mere nubs, but that I should do something worthwhile. Sometimes taking a break to nourish yourself is a worthwhile activity, because that allows you to do other worthwhile things, but just sitting around in self-pity isn’t helpful, I’ve found. So I got up and did something.
It can be hard to get moving when you are stuck. This is how I felt in 2005 when I couldn’t change any of my habits. It was really hard to motivate myself when I didn’t think I would succeed, when I felt horrible about myself. But I took one small step, and it felt good. That’s what I did this morning — I took the smallest possible step. Just opening up a document, just starting a list, just getting out a notebook. These are so small as to be insignificant, and yet so easy as to be possible. And it showed me the next step was possible, and the next.
I’m still feeling tired, and so I’ll take a nap later. But I’m feeling better, because I took these steps.
I know some of you feel the same way from time to time, maybe more often than you’d like to admit. That’s OK. We all do. We are not machines, perfectly oiled and constantly charged up and ready to fire on all cylinders. We are human, which means we falter, we doubt, we feel pain.
And this too shall pass.
‘Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.’ ~ Helen Keller
Strategies for pursuing multiple interests and being a well-rounded, "Renaissance" person without becoming overwhelmed or stretched too thin. We all share a human desire to explore many different areas but BSOs (Bright Shiny Objects) become an obstacle. Here are some practical tips for managing one's time and energy across various pursuits.
Key Takeaways:
The main premise is that you can become proficient at multiple areas over time through prioritization, time management, optimizing existing routines, and mental resilience - but perfection in everything simultaneously is impossible. Strategic balance and commitment are vital for sustained progress as a generalist.