Feeling Overloaded from Jam-Packed Days? You Need Focus!

Pre-pandemic, about 85% of most people’s work week was spent in meetings, on the phone, emailing, and answering team-based applications like Slack.?

Since then, instead of filling our day with eight, one-hour meetings, we’ve made them shorter. So now we’re having sixteen, half-hour meetings.?

We’re trying to jam more work into the same eight-hour workday.?

As we devote less time to the same amount of work, we are more intense in those 30-minute meetings. We’re exhausted. We’re shifting our focus from one topic to another twice as frequently as we were before.?

Then, after we’ve attended to the emails and meetings, our to-do list is made up of items not just from eight meetings but from sixteen. We are not able to focus long enough to complete the tasks.

So, we do the work after work. We work five to eight hours more a week, leaching away time from our mornings and evenings.?

We are always on and overloaded, dealing with an untenable amount of collaboration.

Rob Cross, Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College and expert on collaborative practices for more than twenty years, walked me through his study of this work increase from his book Beyond Collaboration Overload when he joined me on the Disrupt Yourself podcast.

He shared that collaborative demands on workers have risen 50% in the last decade, yet the enormous cost—time, money, and employee well-being—is often invisible to organizations.?

If there were another expense in an organization that raised 50% over the course of a decade, the CFO would be all over it. We track expenses on our receipts down to two decimal places, yet we have no idea where more than 85% of our time is going.

The power of collaboration is undeniable. It can help us achieve great things, solve complex problems, and make us more productive.?

When we rely too much on collaboration, it can lead to ‘collaboration overload’ – a phenomenon that Rob has studied closely.

What leads to collaboration overload? We want to blame it all on external factors, but Rob has found that is not the case. Internal factors are also to blame.?

We all have triggers that cause us to jump in without thought about our workload —accomplishment, fear of being labeled a poor performer, FOMO, desire to be helpful—that cause us to overload ourselves.?

It feels good until it doesn’t.?

So how do we guard against jumping in when we are in the moment?

Rob suggests it’s learning to say no and having heuristics—mental shortcuts that can facilitate problem-solving and probability judgments in your mind—to help you protect your time.?

It’s giving yourself permission to focus. Just like individuals who are in the Sweet Spot on their S Curve? need focus to continue their climb, we all need focus to guard against overload.??

Because saying yes means saying no to something else—often the something we need to focus on to continue to grow.?

Rob offered a few suggestions to help us say no to yes, and more can be found in his book:?

1. If you are someone who typically says yes when you should say no because you want to make sure you are helping and supporting others, get very clear on your aspirations and what you want to accomplish professionally and personally. This allows you to cognizantly evaluate the tradeoffs when you are in the moment of a decision.?
2. If you are someone like me, who fears either missing out or being seen as an underperformer, Rob suggests we give a sense of our competing priorities. Explain that you want the answer to be yes, but you have X, Y, and Z that need to get done. Then, it’s a joint discussion about priorities.?

Technology has enabled us to be on all the time, jumping from one topic to the next, but that is not a recipe for long-term success. We need focus to move up our S Curves. We need focus to maintain a healthy balance at work. And to focus, we must say no.?

On April 18, Rob is releasing his new book, The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems—and What to Do About It, which he co-authored with bestselling author Karen Dillon. Cross and Dillon examine how we can make time for the things that matter and find ways to be our true selves in work and life by exploring the science behind micro stress—the small stresses creating big problems for our overall well-being.

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