Too few hours in a day.
Too many tasks and projects waiting
for your time and attention each day.
No one can change that for you
except you!
As my
title suggests, I see a strong link between overload, productivity (or the lack
thereof), perfectionism, and assertiveness.
Here
are some of my thoughts:
Focus
on being adaptable and resilient, not on being perfect. Yes, we all wish to
prevent mistakes from happening. That’s a good thing and lets keep working on
that. At the same time I urge you to work on the other side of the equation:
acknowledging mistakes to learn from them and to move on – to move on wiser,
more adaptable, and more resilient than before. If you really need to be
perfect, than become perfect at learning from your mistakes and at
strengthening your adaptability. Not everything can be completed to perfection.
Not everything has to. Distinguish, choose, and adapt or die.
What
captures your attention controls your day. What’s controlling your day today?
Who is in control of your time and energy today? What do you focus on? What do
you allow to grab your attention and distract you? Is it a welcome distraction,
helping you pause and refuel, helping you take a step back, relax, and open up
creativity? Or is it a distraction that clogs up your already crowded agenda
and mind? Is it a distraction tied to procrastination, denial, risk-avoidance
or other interesting but often disastrous dynamics?
Don’t
over-think when you have to make decisions. Sure, you want to and need to look
at the pros and cons of a diversity of alternatives, but in all this analysis don’t
forget to learn to be comfortable with the fact that any of your options can
lead to failure. Know when enough thinking is enough thinking.
Practice
not just to delegate but also to ignore, whether for the time being or
completely. Every day there are tasks and odd jobs that cease to be a task or job
after I ignored it for a while. They either get done by someone else who couldn’t
ignore it, they can be combined with other tasks, or they cease to exist
because life and work changes constantly. How often have you helped a loved one
find something, spending quite some time on it, to only find out they didn’t
need it after all? How often have you prepared a document or resent something
that the recipient later found or didn’t need after all. Make sure to find out how
important and urgent a request is.
Yes, I
love the open-door principle, and I
love the closed-door lets be clear about when not to interrupt me principle.
And it doesn’t stop with the door, of course. My smart phone and laptop are
there to benefit me, not to continuously and needlessly interrupt and distract
me. It’s okay to not answer the phone immediately. Anyone remember the days
when a telephone was a heavy device standing on a table or hanging on a wall
with a long cord – If you weren’t nearby you wouldn’t hear it ringing and you couldn’t
pick it up? Sounds like good old days? Just don’t pick it up if you’re focused
on something that you made a priority. Just don’t be tempted to respond to the
sound alerting you to a new text or e-mail. Let it be, it will be there in an
hour or at the end of the day. Of course you can check who it is, especially
applicable for working parents who want to assure their children aren’t calling
in some state of great distress, or for people on-call in critical stages of
whatever business process. Just know when to resist the temptation.
Last
and most importantly, practice your assertiveness. Learn to say “No, not now –
it’s not urgent. I will work on that at x pm”. Learn to say “No, that is not
important although I’d love to spend time on this if I wasn’t so busy”. Learn
to say “I’m sorry, I miscalculated that. I have to give this task back to you
or to someone else” (or: I have to postpone this to a later time). I’m sure you
can think of variations to this theme of assertiveness.
Only
so much can get done in 24 hours, and hopefully sleep and relaxation with loved
ones is part of this time frame. Tame your perfectionism, practice the skill of
ignoring, know and influence what grabs your attention, become more productive
by being unreachable, and assert yourself – no one else can do it for you!
Any thoughts you want to add?
