I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
~ Douglas Adams
Wow, did I underestimate the amount of work I had coming my way in the past couple of weeks. To an extent even that I totally ignored be an original, my twitter-accounts and all the goals I set for myself a couple of weeks ago. I simply needed the time for other things, both work and family related.
I had more stuff to do, than time to do it in. And whenever time is limited you need to make choices. One of the choices we make all the time, but often without giving it much attention, is the choice to focus attention and energy, or to divide it. The results are very different though.
Do you want to do some things very well and other things not at all, or do you want to do them all but in a half-hearted mediocre attempt? The former appeals to most people, yet the latter is the most common course of action. This is due to the fact that choosing NOT to do some activities, requires the ability to say no. And saying no can be hard.
How to choose what to do and what not to do
If you choose to do some things and ignore others, it’s best to choose this deliberately. This usually is my pitfall … I tend to subconsciously drop stuff. And although this works most of the times, it also causes an uneasy feeling of not having a total overview.
A simple tool I use to create that overview is the Eisenhower Matrix. A simple matrix that lets you rate activities on two scales, an importance scale and an urgency scale. You can plot the activities in there and quickly see the relative positions with regard to importance and urgency.
Usually it’s very obvious where the stress comes from. It’s having too many activities on the urgency side of the matrix. And things get on the urgency side due to deadlines, often imposed by others. Although deadlines are not the only factor creating urgency, caring for a child that’s ill for instance is also very much urgency driven.
Take care of urgent matters first
The 2nd quadrant of the matrix is the most important quadrant. It’s the high importance, low urgency quadrant. This is where a lot of the things we want to do reside. But if there’s too much stuff in the urgency side, you’ll never get to it.
This sort of was my case last couple of weeks. Deadlines seemed to pop-up out of nowhere, and they all landed around the first week of May. It’s an uneasy feeling when deadlines pop-up out of nowhere, and they did, mostly at my job as a teacher. I’m still in my first year of employment there, and you really have to have gone through an entire schoolyear to really understand and know all the different processes and deadlines you’ll have to deal with.
So with so many urgent stuff to work on, you really have only one real option: grind your way through it all! The important stuff before the unimportant stuff, and all family matters in front and in between.
Whoosh
Most of the deadlines have gone whoosh now. My time schedule is under less strain, and my mind is a lot clearer again. Time and space to write blog posts again, and soon I’ll restart my goals too. But first I have to get a new overview of all my current activities and plot them in an updated Eisenhower Matrix. Preparation is gold.
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Deadlines for me always conjure up pressure or a ‘have-to-hit-target’. The word itself has a harsh energy. To swerve it I do a ‘What Next?’ exercise. Have a look at what needs doing and simply decide, what next? It takes away the background stress of thinking about potential build up. And at some points “What next?” leads to a teabreak and a biscuit or a walk in the park. It’s a non-demanding approach for me which works. Each to their own though!
I agree that we have the power to choose what to do and not to do. It took me a long time to figure out that I can’t do everything that’s thrown at me and end up doing all of them well. But when I reached the point of burnout, I finally had to concede that I am no superwoman and that I need help or get out. So I started to learn saying NO. Once I got the hang of it, I don’t feel so stressed most of the time anymore.
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