If you’re trying to be more effective with your time during the day so that you don’t work at night/weekends, you’ve likely tried to prioritize your work tasks.
If prioritizing your work/time hasn’t been working for you, maybe this is what it looks like:
You make lists of everything that needs to get done.
You try to look at what’s most important and prioritize doing that at the beginning of your day.
You tell yourself your going to do it – first thing.
After writing that list, all the work you have to do feels kind of overwhelming.
And, that most important thing might be something you haven’t done before or you aren’t sure where to start or it feels like a really big project.
It’s kind of overwhelming to start to think about it.
You get distracted.
There’s email, scrolling social media, talking to someone.
You don’t do what you decided was most important.
Then other things start popping up for you to take care of.
You tell yourself those things are more important than what you said you were going to do.
You start to feel guilty that you haven’t done it.
You are doing work that feels easier, even though it might not be urgent or important, like answering emails, attending meetings, technical work, crunching data, researching, looking up articles, reading …
You tell yourself – it all needs to get done, right?
You tell yourself – I can do the other work later, at home when there’s less distractions, more time and there’s less popping up.
You work afterhours to make some headway on the important task, but somehow it still doesn’t get done, other things come up and the cycle continues.
It’s time for bed and you’ve gotten work done, but not the important work.
All that’s happening here is that you are avoiding a feeling.
In this example, it’s overwhelm.
That’s it.
We can feel so guilty about this cycle and keep feeling out of control.
The important work doesn’t get done until we build up enough guilt or pressure to force ourselves to start to work on it to get it done.
But, once you learn how to create this awareness for yourself and process your emotions, like overwhelm, instead of avoiding them, you’ll be able to notice when this is happening, complete the task and prevent the cycle of overwork.
Being able to prioritize the work is not the problem.
Intellectually, you know how to prioritize your work or how to figure that out.
It’s the overwhelm underneath that you are avoiding.
When we solve for that, we create a sustainable solution.
This time and EVERY time you have a big project, something that’s new, or unknown or just feels like too much.
If you want to get to the root of the problem of overworking and create a sustainable solution for you, book a consult with me here: https://lnkd.in/g_-2zYmC
Melissa E Anders 