We’ve come to the end of my series on reducing your sense of overwhelm and stress at work and I have saved the best for last. I debated sharing this one action that, if taken, will lower your helping professional stress-load more than anything else. I know that your job is crazy. I know that some days you feel like trading your briefcase in and selling hot dogs on a street corner. But I’m warning you that the final action step I’m about to talk about slays a pretty big sacred cow and I expect to get some unkind emails about it. However before I share what it is, let’s recap what we’ve learned over the past five posts (if you want to just get on with it, by all means scroll down).
In the first post of this series (which can be found here), I argued that the notion of ‘work-life’ balance is only a myth that causes us a good deal of grief. I suggested that we can only do one thing at a time and that we get into trouble when we try to multitask. Feelings of overwhelm (leading to procrastination, compulsions, and feelings of hopelessness) often follow when we unsuccessfully try to achieve the imaginary state of “balance”.
I then promised to offer five solid actions, that if taken, would guarantee your feelings of overwhelm would diminish and be replaced by greater productivity and a heightened sense of subjective well-being. That’s a big promise! But I’m just curious- have you tried any of them yet? After all, knowledge adds little if one does not learn to execute. It’s like reading diet book after diet book, expecting that simply pouring over those pages will melt the pounds away. Okay, I’ll get off your back for now… Let’s recap what we’ve covered:
Action Step 1: Get it all out of your head and down on paper. You can find that post here. Write down every little job, idea, appointment, grocery item, emotion, wish, project, and “to-do” item that has been clogging up your precious noggin. After everything is down (it may be hundreds of items!) develop a master action list. Also, if you are an “idea” person, I would recommend keeping a journal close by for you to store all of those brilliant (and often distracting) thoughts. Once you have a prioritized list, start knocking them off one by one.
Action Step 2: Park passion and pursue performance. That post is here. This is primarily a mind-shift, but it leads to a completely different set of actions. When we release the self-focused idea that we should be “living our dreams” or “following our bliss” and instead adopt a mentality that is focused on enhancing our productive powers in the service of others, the result is a calm but powerful impact on the world. True bliss follows from this.
Case in point: when I started a new position years back (even though it was a clinical counselling job that I had been dreaming about having for more than a decade) I quickly became dissatisfied. I started searching the online job ads EVERY DAY for a year and a half. I became obsessed with finding the actual job that would satisfy my every desire. What if instead of that, I invested those 15-20 daily minutes into finishing my Ph.D., or into a weight training routine, or writing love letters to my wife, or in prayer and meditation? What could have been different in my life if I had spent those 182 hours (or 5 weeks of full-time work) producing value instead of fruitlessly longing for something else? If you’re looking for a specific actionable step, try this: write down one thing you want to get really good at while at your present job. Create a list of the steps you would need to take over the next 6-12 months (including what resources to tap, who you can ask to mentor you, etc.) to make this happen.
Action Step 3- Systematize your work-life. Find it here. For a busy professional, systems are salvation. We require systems that allow us to free up our mental and emotional space for other things. Setting up your working life in a deliberate way is a bit of up front labour, I won’t lie. However, the more you learn to rely on habits and routines (aka: autopilot) instead of willpower to get your work done, the less of an emotional and psychological toll your work will exact on you. There are many work hacks specific to the helping professions that will save you a good deal of grief.
Action Step 4- Build good boundaries. That post is here. I would say that about 2% of people went into the helping professions because they wanted to make money or enjoy fame and prestige, or because it’s “just a job to pay the bills”. If I wanted a job that was solely about income I would have become an investment banker (sorry, investment bankers!). No, we got into the field because of a flame inside of us, large or small, that was stoked whenever we offered help to another human being. I would suspect that many of us (especially those of us in child protection or other “hardcore” helping jobs) also wanted to do something that mattered. We wanted to stand in the gap and make a difference.
The trouble is that what fuels that passion can also be recipe for poor boundaries. In turn, poor boundaries burn us out with a capital “B”. The number one issue I see is when social workers, counsellors, etc., start taking responsibility for items that belong solely to their clients. If you struggle with boundaries, I recommend sitting down and thinking about what you are and are not responsible for in your present position, and then vigorously defend your line.
Okay now that we’ve reviewed, let’s ready the sacred cow!
As I mentioned above, I would reckon that you are defined by your big heart. You are willing to crawl into the trenches and get dirty for your clients. It just seems like the right thing to do. Remember, we are talking about reducing feelings of overwhelm. Reducing burnout. Keeping you in the game. World War I was a war of attrition and the men who fought overseas experienced real physical trenches. Many of those who survived came home shell-shocked; they were forever changed. Many knew they would die in those trenches and were prepared to pay that price. What most didn’t know, however, was that if they survived, their lives would never be the same. Simply being in the trench harmed them, even if they never took a bullet. Why? Because they watched their friends take bullets for them. And for every one terrifying thing they watched with their own eyes on the battlefield, they heard the stories of ten or twenty more they didn’t see.
Now, how do I say this? How do I convey this concept without sounding cold-hearted or cynical? Allow me to just come out and say it. If you want to survive in a helping field like social work, there is one thing you need to do- one thing that will protect you:
You have to stop caring with your emotions. You must remove your emotional presence from the horrific things you hear about.
I know that this is a tricky concept, so let me try to explain myself.
I am not saying you shouldn’t care, period. What I am saying is that you have to learn to care in a way that is sustainable.
Let’s look at this logically. Think about cognitive-behavioural therapy. We know that it isn’t the thing that happened that makes us upset- it’s the way we think about the thing that happened. We know that sometimes people have misbeliefs that cause them to experience unnecessary grief. We all know that if we ruminate on catastrophic thoughts (like maybe my husband will die or maybe my child will be kidnapped or maybe I will be diagnosed with terminal cancer) that our mental and emotional state can take a nose dive pretty quick. And that’s all imaginary!
Or perhaps we hear that our brother fell off the roof and broke his leg or that our daughter is getting a divorce. Even though these things aren’t happening directly to us, we are devastated because of the strong bonds we have. We naturally take on their emotions and grieve with them. This is totally normal and makes us human.
Yet helping professionals step into those traumatic stories all the time, all day long. If you are like most of your big-hearted peers, it means that you will be naturally inclined to stand closely with your clients. You’re compelled to deeply empathize with them and support them; to feel what they are feeling as though they were your family.
What makes this a problem is that the human heart can only withstand so much of this before it begins to truly suffer- this is what some have called vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress. I have argued in the past that experiencing this trauma puts us on the road to burnout quickly. That’s why the average lifespan of a child protection worker is only 14 months.
So when I say, “stop caring with your emotions” I mean just that. You may already notice that most seasoned older workers do this anyway. They say and do the right things and are very professional. They communicate authentic empathy to clients. Yet upon further examination you may observe a certain subtle detachment about them. If you watch closely, you can see that things don’t land very hard on them. They don’t think about their young client who was sexually assaulted when they go home at night. In fact, they rarely dwell on those things. Yes, they meet his needs at work. They act with compassion and understanding. But they disavow the weight of what has occurred.
You may be asking, “Ok, Mr. Smart Guy, just how am I supposed to do that? Turn off my heart? Not care? Yeah right!” I want you to know that I hear you and I don’t have any easy answers or turnkey solutions. What I can say is this: in high-trauma professions like social work, this dynamic takes out more good people than anything else. The really scary part? If you do acquire full-blown secondary traumatic stress, the recovery rate is only 50%. Those aren’t good odds.
I promise to go into much more detail about the steps you can take to protect yourself from vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress in future posts. But for now, think about how counsellors extinguished phobias in clients- through graduated exposure therapy. When you get thrown into a scary job, there’s nothing gradual about it- just a lot of exposure! Eventually, however, as you learn that you are personally safe from harm and that your extreme emotions are not needed, those heavy feelings begin to subside.
Think about becoming a skydiving instructor versus skydiving the first time. The very first time you jump out of a plane, what are you thinking? “I am going to die!!” Why would you think that? Because you should die! Jumping out of planes is not normal. Yet after many, many jumps, the fear disappears. Why? Because in spite of your actions, you remain unharmed over time. Your brain knows this and therefore doesn’t need to flood itself with fight or flight hormones. By the time you’re teaching others to jump out of planes it’s an emotional piece of cake.
Eventually, you will be able to think and talk professionally about the horrific things you see and hear without carrying the emotional weight of those things. That is the nature of disavowal. It’s like any other icky job you can’t avoid doing like changing dirty diapers or taking out the compost bucket. You learn to dissociate from the disgust of it, while still getting the job done.
One final caveat. This is not the same as what can happen to those who have undergone extreme trauma. Victor Frankl described the experience of people completely shutting down emotionally while in concentration camps after undergoing unspeakable suffering. In that case, their entire emotional centers collapsed in an attempt to cope with their extreme condition. This is something qualitatively different. In our case we are talking about ways that we can preserve our hearts while at work so that we can be emotionally available for our friends and family when we get home.
When you learn this vital skill, you will be better protected from the scourge of repetitive stress injuries- not of your hands or legs, but of your heart. And the state of your heart is all that matters to me.
That’s the end of this series, but stay tuned- there’s more to come.
Wishing you all the best.
Category: Productivity
Zen And The Art of Paperwork (Drop the Myth of ‘Work-Life’ Balance and Save Your Sanity- Part 4)
When I was the tender age of 18 I traveled up north to try my hand at tree planting. Let me paint a picture for you- it is grueling, sweaty work. The job basically consists of slogging a large bag of baby trees up and down a mountainside, stumbling around to find suitable “micro-sites” on which to plant each sapling, digging a little hole and and planting them one by one. We would work from 6am until about 5pm, have dinner and then go straight back to our tents to recoup before the next day’s grind. I remember working 13 hours the first day and planting less than 100 trees. At $0.12/tree, minus $25 per day camp fees, that meant that after an impossibly hard day I earned about negative $13 dollars!
While toiling along, I noticed another guy who looked sort of like a Buddhist tree-planting monk. I would watch him float up and down the mountainside planting trees. He never seemed to sweat. He was always in a good mood. His work looked…..well, not like work. Even though he seemed to be expending almost no calories, he commonly planted 2000+ trees per day! I remember staring quizzically at his serene countenance one day, pondering his magical secret.
I eventually asked him to reveal his secret, to which he replied, “I have practiced these skills for so long that I don’t even think about the work anymore. My body moves along, and my mind is mostly somewhere else.” Since then, I have marveled in a similar fashion when watching veteran social workers and counselors serenely go about their days, apparently unbothered by the demands of their work.
Now, after obsessively interviewing these long-surviving front line workers, I have gleaned many insights which I plan to share with you in the coming months. These veteran helping professionals consciously or unconsciously do many specific things that not only keep them in the game, but keep them relatively at peace as well. But for today, I want to share about one little-talked-about attribute shared by most highly successful helping pros: they have developed and use systems for managing their work-lives.
They do not rely on their minds to do the heavy lifting their job requires. Here four basic tools effective professionals use:
- A day planner
- A to-do list
- A daily, weekly, and monthly routine
- A personal filing cabinet
Let’s quickly go through these one by one. If you have no tolerance this morning for technical “shop talk” you can just skim them. But fair warning- I’m going to geek out a bit on these.
1. The day planner
I know that this should seem obvious, but you would be surprised how many social workers don’t use their planners to their full potential. If, like me, you are required to report what you do- the phone calls you make, whether the client showed up or not, etc- then the day planner is not just about remembering future events, but keeping a running log as well. For example, I am required to electronically log every call I make to a client, every text, every meeting. At the end of the month, those stats are passed up the chain to the program funder to ensure my agency is meeting it’s deliverables. When I first started out, I would get to the end of the month and then have to piece together who called me. It meant going into my phone’s call display, looking in client folders for notes, going into my work cell phone for texts. It was a nightmare!
Now my day planner never leaves my side. Every time, I get a text from a client I write a shorthand note about it corresponding to the line for whatever this moment’s date and time is. This practice drove me nuts in the past because I perceived it as tedious, but now I see the light. Now it is pure zen. I am just the tree planter floating along. When month’s end comes, it’s all there. No crazy searching.
I also write case notes in my planner (I have a big 8 X11 one with one day per page). The notes go right beside the scheduled appointment entry. This forces me to be economical with my words and get to the point.
2. The to-do list
I keep two lists, actually: one for the realm of work tasks, and one for home tasks. Do you know where I store those lists? In my day planner! The home list is there because throughout the day, items from my home-life just come up, and the list allows me to put the item out of my head until the end of the day. My practice is also to order work tasks from hardest to easiest, and tackle the hardest one first. These tend to be fairly short lists because of the next system. I learned that my Buddhist tree-planting friend had a similar structure. For example, he always kept every tool he used in the exact same place. He always did every step in the exact same order. This made the process mindless for him. A to-do list similarly frees your mind for other things, while ensuring meet your professional obligations.
3. The daily, weekly, and monthly routine
Routines are prescribed and deliberate actions that effectively remove the need for willpower. Routines are a procrastination killer. Conversely, a lack of routine feeds procrastination. Have you ever kept putting off that report until the deadline and then stayed late to get it done the night before? Not only is that extremely stressful, but it causes ongoing anxiety the entire time you’re avoiding the job. I have learned (though I’m not perfect at it) to schedule my common work tasks and then stick to that schedule. For instance, we have just seen how my custom is to enter every step I make into my day timer as I go along. My habit for writing my notes is that I write them in my car after each client session. I enter my mileage and expense receipts at the end of every day without fail.
I also answer almost every email the moment I read it if I can. You should only have to deal with an item ONCE. Not multiple times. I batch enter my notes onto the electronic case management system once per week. I typically do this on Thursday mornings. By performing these tasks on a schedule, I reduce the randomness of my job thereby reducing my stress levels. That way, when things go sideways (as is normal in the world of child protection) I can respond from a place of strength rather than a scattered place.
4. The personal filing system.
This may be the biggest time saver I have. Unfortunately, my world is still one filled with all manner of paper-based reports, notes, and records. I just don’t have the mental energy to handle large, unmanageable piles. So I have developed a two-drawer filing system comprised of just a few crucial folders. The bottom drawer contains all of my case files. Not the agency case files, mind you- just a single, thin file folder for each client containing their referral document, my latest report, and only the most crucial documents.
In the upper drawer I have only a few folders: one containing many copies of all of my intake docs, one with copies of commonly used referral forms, and one that contains the various flyers and print outs for social service resources that come across my desk from time to time. Aside from that, I have a small “inbox tray” on my desk that I empty every day. From the tray, those documents either go to recycling or into a file folder. Again, my goal is to only touch it once. Finally, I should note that I also have a similar filing system on my computer.
Okay, wake up!
I’ll forgive you if your soul escaped your body for the last eight paragraphs! The nitty gritty can get dry, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? I resisted the dry for years and the result was emotional chaos and suffering. I felt alot of unnecessary pain as a tree planter until I learned to be radically efficient with my trade. The same holds true for me as a helping professional. My hope is that you figure out and use some of these systems a good deal sooner than I did.
Here’s my main point:
Your work, especially the tedious parts, need to become automated through systems.
Think about the things you do every day that require no willpower and cause no stress, and yet are objectively boring or tedious. Is brushing your teeth fun? No. Is it hard, though? Not at all. In fact, you don’t have to even think about it. You go upstairs to prepare for bed and pick up your toothbrush- that’s it.
You see, boring is a strong emotion. It is actually a form of anxiety that emerges when we less-than-consciously say to ourselves “My life is passing me by. I’m missing out on something better right now.” Similarly, feelings of tedium arise when we get frustrated with the complex requirements of something that offers very little immediate return in exchange for our efforts. Yet they have to be done (teeth and paperwork). Now when we were little kids, brushing our teeth was hard.
If you don’t remember, look at your kids- they do a pretty bad job when they’re first learning! Sometimes they even lie and tell us they’ve done it when they haven’t. Why? It’s tedious! When you’re little it takes alot of mental energy to carefully brush each tooth in a certain way. Eventually- I mean after years of practice- we come to peace with the fact that we must brush every day. Our muscles learn to be very efficient and we can do the deed without much thought and it stops being stressful. In fact, we start to even feel good when we clean our pearly whites- we like how it feels, tastes, and we are satisfied with the knowledge that our dental hygienist won’t lecture us.
This is all I mean when I speak of systems. They don’t even have to look the way I laid them out above. Once we have accepted their necessity, have practiced them (maybe for a few years or more), and they have become almost unconscious for us, they lose their malicious effect on our souls. If we persist we will find our paperwork zen.
What systems have you developed over the years that serve you? Let us know in the comments section below.
Why “Follow Your Bliss” Is a Dirty Rotten Lie (Drop the Myth of Work-Life Balance And Save Your Sanity- Part 3)
I need to level with you. You might not like this post because I plan on bursting a great big bubble today. But hang on, because if you dread getting up to go to work in the morning this could be the “one thing” that changes everything for you.
I have a long history of “following my heart” and then paying the consequences later. For this reason, I believe it has taken me longer than most to develop the internal fortitude necessary to live a productive and fulfilled life. Over the years, I have definitely consumed the “follow your passion” Kool-Aid. Here’s an example. When I first started college in the mid-1990’s I dropped out of three schools in a row. I had a 1.5 GPA. How does one acquire a magnificent GPA of 1.5, you ask? It’s simple. Register for five courses. Attend said courses for about three weeks. Decide that those courses are “not my passion” or “not what I want to do with the rest of my life” and stop going to class. Instead of digging in to get through the semester or simply withdrawing early with relatively little consequence, remain registered, earning five F’s. Then do it again… Then do it once more.
This is not a recipe for success, my friends.
It wasn’t until I became a parent a decade later that something in my mindset profoundly shifted. Suddenly, ready or not, I was categorically forced from “child” to “parent”. Everything wasn’t about me anymore. Now I was RESPONSIBLE, and the fruit of my labor was centered on other people. It seems that simply the mere recognition of that fact changed everything. I decided to go back to school and I haven’t received anything but an “A” since. Getting an education was no longer a matter of “following my bliss” but a very practical solution designed to support my fledgling family.
It’s said that at breakfast the chicken is involved, but the pig is totally committed.
There is something magical that happens when we take ownership of our responsibilities; when we decide that the buck stops with us and we know that we are squarely responsible for the outcomes. We must act, not to indulge our own fickle interests or build castles in the air, but instead to meet a commitment. That fact fuels us and motivates us to complete the tasks required of us, no matter how dreary or difficult. The secret sauce is a shift from self-focused thinking to a mindset that involves living up to our responsibilities.
So what does this have to do with work-life balance?
I would wager that many of us are dissatisfied with our jobs. If you feel this way, then statistically you are in the company of about 85% of North Americans who also wish they were elsewhere. Those of us in the helping professions are no different. Here is the problem though- that painful dissatisfaction leads to poor work performance, task avoidance, and a lack of ownership when it comes to our present position. In turn, weak performance makes us feel incompetent, guilty, and stuck. On top of that, our workplace disdain can lead to a great deal of last-minute insanity as we struggle to meet deadlines. Vocational malaise sometimes causes us to take on many other life-projects in an attempt to cover the pain of unfulfilled passion. We might also self-medicate with a host of habits and addictions. The ironic result is a messed up and stressful life.
So what’s the solution? How do we change this kind of insane and mucky state?
It all boils down to a single decision. Just one little shift can change everything. Are you ready?
Park your passion and pursue performance.
Wow, that was a cheesy line. But the concept is sound. Stop thinking about your job as a vehicle for fulfillment, because it’s not. I’m sorry, it just can’t be. In fact, no job is- that’s just a fantasy in our heads. Think about every relationship you’ve ever placed your hopes in. If I just find “the one” right person for me I will be fulfilled. We know that’s simply not true. What about other goals? If I just lose 35 pounds. If I just had my own home. If I just finished my degree or went travelling or bought those shoes or had a million dollars or….whatever. Lies. In the happiness game, externals count for very little. Fulfillment is strictly an inside job and it must be internally cultivated.
Let’s take a peek at the second half of my dorky line: pursue performance. What if instead of thinking about our job as place to make our dreams come true, we thought of it as a training ground for increasing our professional powers and capacities? What if we decided, regardless of the position we hold, “I am going to develop myself into the best __________ that I can be.” In my heart of hearts, I get the most upset and depressed not when bad stuff happens to me, but when I realize that I am doing a mediocre or even crappy job. When I know that I am not living up to my potential I get really bummed out. On the flip side, few things in life stoke my fire more than developing my competence and simply getting better. The bliss just follows.
I know that many of you suspect that you don’t really fall into this category. You are already focused on hard work and have been juggling many responsibilities for years. For you, work performance has never been an issue. Nonetheless, you may have felt that in spite of your efforts you continue to suffer from an existential malaise or feel trapped in your job. If this is your situation I would ask, “If I am truly stuck here for now, would my heart be better served by surrendering to that fact?” In other words, radical acceptance of your situation could be the most effective way of reducing your sense of suffering. But back to us dreamers caught in our existential angst….
Erich Fromm said that people learn to love the things that life demands of them (even the really hard things). In other words, when you persist with the hated requirements of your life, your brain will grow to tolerate those things over time, and eventually begin to appreciate those things. This is partly a matter of accepting the hard work of growth. Of doing the work. Overcoming is so much more powerful than avoiding, from a mental health perspective.
Think about the things that you are most proud of. Were they not all borne out of hardship or struggle? Think about the things you’ve gotten good at- did they not all at some point require you to dig down and do the work? Even little things. What about arriving home to a messy house after Christmas? The easy choice is to decide to take the kids to the mall for dinner so you don’t have to look at your war-torn kitchen. But does that result in an improved internal state? Hardly. You know that rolling up your sleeves and cleaning that place from top to bottom is the only thing that will truly make you feel better. We feel better because our brains are smart. They know when we are cheating and when we are overcoming. The same holds true for the assessments that need to be completed to work. Nothing is better for our emotional state at the end of the day that simply getting the work done. This is an entirely internal process.
My messy school troubles happened because I believed a lie. I was told that if I just “pursued my dreams” and “followed my bliss” that my motivation would follow. School would be virtually effortless because I would be living my passion. And yet as I reflect, this just isn’t true. Most of what I am proud of about myself happened because I chose to take ownership and do the hard work- even when it was tough and especially when it didn’t involve indulging my own dreams. It’s paradoxical, I know. When I find myself hating life and feeling overwhelmed, it is almost always because on some level I have demanded that my job or school (or family or friends) fulfill my needs in a way they weren’t designed to.
Feeling proud of yourself because you truly stood in the gap and overcame? Now that’s bliss.
Get Your Ducks in a Row (Drop the Myth of Work-Life Balance And Save Your Sanity- Part 2)
Let me get something out there right now. I could be wrong, but my guess is that if you’re reading this you’re not so much of a black and white thinker. As a helping professional you resist all or nothing language. You’ve embraced circular causality. You can accept multiple yet opposing points of view at the same time. I’ll bet that at your finest Rogerian moments you can even empathize with ax-murderers and Westboro Baptists. On top of that, you can manage the life narratives of thirty clients and remember each of their genograms. Your brain is simply wired for non-linear thought. Which is great…most of the time.
The last post introduced the idea that “balancing” tasks sounds good metaphorically, but not practically (btw, if you haven’t read that post yet, you can read it here). The reason for this is that our brains can really only do one mindful task at a time. The problem comes when we try to do many things at once or try to keep too many unfinished things in our heads. Can you relate? I spent many years “going with the flow” with no systems to help me order my life. What I mean is that if someone told me something that I needed to remember, I would just try to remember it. Appointment on Friday at 10am? Got it. Buy some eggs on the way home? Done. But then I became a social worker. My magical “flow” plan died a horrible death within weeks of receiving a child protection caseload.
Soon, feelings of overwhelm started to wash over me at work. My mind would spin from thing to thing to thing, as I unproductively (and hopelessly) tried to put out one fire after another. My world crumpled into a messy pile of unfinished stuff in short order. I began to procrastinate, distract, and dissociate from the mounting pressure of it all. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I needed a better strategy. That strategy is tactic number one on the list of actionable steps designed to chill us out and foster a sense of steady productivity. Here it is:
Write stuff down.
Not just some stuff. All of your stuff. Take 45 minutes and write every last thing down that’s in your head. Quantify it: the groceries you need to get, every to-do item, all of your work tasks, every random idea or goal. Everything. Just the simple act of putting absolutely everything on paper is almost guaranteed to offer you some relief, even though you haven’t actually dealt with any of it yet. Don’t believe me? Think it’s too simple? Just try it. The moment that swirl of stuff is out of your brain and onto paper, your mind can mellow. That basic act sends your deluged noodle the message: “I can let go of the burden of carrying all of this”. The result is almost always a reduced sense of overwhelm.
Now back to your snazzy non-linear cognitive abilities. They really are great…I mean it. When working with clients- talking through traumatic memories, discussing raw emotions, creative problem-solving- those mad skills of yours are pretty effective. However when it comes to the tasks of life, let’s face it: non-linear often falls pretty short. Thing to thing to thing just doesn’t work. Sometimes linear is better.
Here’s another linear concept- Step Two. After you’ve put everything down, rank them in order of importance. If your list is really long, pick out your top ten. Now choose one of those items and tackle it. Don’t choose two or three. Just choose one. Two or three is what gets us into trouble, because three equals “thing to thing to thing”. Decide when you will accomplish your ONE TASK. After and only after you complete your single list item, you may choose another. Wash, rinse, repeat. Keep it linear. Before long, you will have made a real dent in your list and hopefully your sense of well-being and personal efficacy will increase. It just feels good to chew through a tough list.
I promise you that getting your ducks in a row by putting your whole life on paper will reduce much of your stress to “water off a duck’s back” 🙂
Do you have a list-writing idea? Share it with us in the comments section below.
Drop the Myth of Work-Life Balance And Save Your Sanity- Part 1
Metaphors can be helpful. They help us explain complex things quickly. When I say “The ball is in your court” I am able to quickly convey the fact that I am handing over my responsibility for something to you. We aren’t playing tennis- I’m just letting you know that something is no longer my problem, and therefore you should probably take action! When I say “Don’t quit your day job!” I really mean “You aren’t super awesome at that.” When we speak of work-life and home-life, we use the word “balance,” which is also a metaphor. After all, we aren’t talking about a real scale- we’re using “balance” to convey a more complex idea. But there’s only one problem.
Balance isn’t real.
I mean, it’s real if you are talking about being on a seesaw. It’s real if we are speaking about the number in your bank account. If you’re talking about your ability to shuffle from the nightclub to the taxi on Saturday night, I’ll give you that too. Yet when we think about all the demands of our lives, from client meetings, to getting the groceries, to remembering to ask our partner to take the car in for an oil change, to the eternal parade of dishes, laundry, and kid toy cleanup, the metaphor of balance falls short. But why?
Simply put, we can’t do all of that stuff at the same time. In fact, human beings can’t really “balance” more than one action or thought at once. Instead we shift from thing to thing to thing. We may even be able to make that shift quickly- like having a conversation while making dinner. I am actually pretty good at timing out the spaghetti and the meat sauce and making a salad while asking my son about his day at school. But it’s not accurate to say that I am balancing anything. I am just doing many different things lined up in a quick series.
When I really think about it, I have noticed that my “multitasking” abilities essentially allow me to do one mindless thing and one mindful thing at the same time, that’s it. For example, I can stroll down the sidewalk (mindless) while talking with a friend (mindful). I can drive (relatively mindless) while listening to a podcast. If I try to do two mindful things at the same time, like watching Netflix and talking on the phone or doing my taxes or reading a blog post, I end up doing both poorly. It just doesn’t work.
So what does this have to do with work-life balance?
When most people say, “I need to have better “work-life balance” what they’re really saying is that either stuff from work is making them feel overwhelmed or crappy at home or that stuff from home is making them feel overwhelmed or crappy at work. Maybe they’re getting hit in both directions. The problem is that when we think of this problem as a “balance” issue, we are left with only a vague sense of what’s wrong. The metaphor actually masks the truth about the nature of the problem we’re having, leaving us with exactly zero actionable steps we can take to solve the problem.
In the coming weeks, I will present five actions that when taken will lower feelings of overwhelm, while increasing both productivity and subjective well-being. The ultimate goal of this series is to help you “feel less crappy” about all the stuff you need to get done so that you can enjoy your life.
What have you found to be so overwhelming about work in the last year that it has spilled into your home life? What family or personal things have you been unable to leave at home? Leave a comment below and let’s keep talking.