Are you feeling overwhelmed again?

Questions to ask at the start of each week to help you stay in control of your time and workload.

Is the cortisol of corporate life eating away at your precious summer serotonin? Is your blood pressure rising back to pre-holiday levels? 

I'm going to give you eight questions to ask every Monday to help you handle the pressure, stay focused and feel in control of your work. First we'll look at why the responsibility for this sits with you. 

There's a trite saying that pressure must be healthy because pressure creates diamonds. Pressure is good, until we perceive that we have too much coming our way.  We get stressed when we feel we can't cope any more.

Where should the buck stop for stress at work?

Who should take responsibility for excessive work demands? Is it an organisational issue, or something within our own gift to fix?  

 In my coaching, I see a blend of individual and systemic responsibility. Organisations employing knowledge workers let them pile on the work, expecting them to figure out when to do it. Good performers get more tasks than their average colleagues. Some of us make it worse for ourselves because we like to please people and assume it is career enhancing to say yes to everything. (It isn’t. People at the top of the tree get there by being very picky about where they focus their time). 

Think of your workload as a factory production line. Are you already at full capacity so no further tasks can be added until you complete the ones on the line? Or are there glitches in the workflow that you can fix to speed up productivity: taming your email, cutting out distractions, improving processes, saying no to needless meetings and politics, skilling up yourself or others, improved communication with people down the line, negotiating deadlines, or staying off social networks?

 Balancing individual contribution with managing others is particularly tricky. If you are given a newbie to manage, who you are supposed to spend an hour a day with, that doesn’t mean you have to stay behind to catch up. Instead you (a) get through your own workload more swiftly or (b) delegate an hour’s worth of lower value tasks to someone who needs them for their own development.  

Don’t let yourself take on more and more until you crack: then you’ll be no good to anyone. 

 We can’t control our schedule, or what’s going on in the bonkers world around us, but we can control how we spend our time.

Monday meeting structure to stay in control of priorities and stop feeling overwhelmed.

Here's a series of questions I encourage my clients to introduce into their weekly meetings:

1. What were the highlights of last week? Any lessons learnt?
2. What three things need to happen this week for it to be a success?
3. What am I avoiding or making hard for myself?
4. What is it only I can do?  Who can I delegate to and who needs to be upskilled for this to happen?
5. Which stakeholder relationships do I need to invest time in?
6. What do I need to nip in the bud now, to save me a bigger headache later?
7. If I felt I couldn’t fail, what would I do next?
8. Given all that, what’s my greatest priority this week and when am I going to get it done?

Rattle through the questions. If you are a manager doing this with your team don’t do a post-mortem on last week. You just need to know which fires to fight first and what you can ignore for now.

This isn't indulgent.

Taking time away from the desk to think like this INCREASES productivity. A study at Harvard Business School found that when people added fifteen minutes of reflection into the end of their work day as opposed to working an extra fifteen minutes, their productivity increased by nearly a QUARTER in just ten days and when reassessed a month later that spike in productivity had stuck.* Successful happy people ditch Crazy Busyness and focus on what's important and satisfying.

 Share this email with your team and try it together next week. Do your meetings have to be first thing in the morning, when most of us feel most alert and able to tackle some real work? Can you push them back a bit?

Let me know how you get on. 

 Next steps:

 September is the new January – time for new intentions and habits. Top performers use coaches to transform their performance. https://www.zenaeverett.com.

Ambitious businesses book my highly interactive 90 minute Crazy Busy workshops to get more important work done in less time, break down silos, increase communication and make their people go home earlier after a satisfying day's work. How does that sound to you?  

Please visit https://www.zenaeverett.com and reply to this email for more information.

Warmest wishes, Zena

*Quoted in Derek Draper's excellent book, Create Space. My own book, Crazy Busy, will give you more ideas on where to cull needless activity.