Escaping your
To-Do list nightmare
In this article, I want to discuss how feeling overwhelmed can be a very natural and indeed inevitable part of your working life. I offer you an alternative to the
distress and overwhelm caused by having too many things on your To Do list and too little time to do most of the tasks you’ve assigned yourself.
• How often do you deliberately arrive early at work just so that you can leave feeling as if you’re not leaving most of your work unfinished?
• Have you ever skipped lunch or worked back so that you could get through all the minor and major tasks at work?
• Do you ever spend time at night thinking about what you’ll say at the meeting tomorrow afternoon, or anything to do with work?
• Do you take time away from your family at the weekends to “just finish off” a project that’s driving you nuts?
If you work as a truck driver or a taxi driver, you may not have the same kinds of work demands, but have you ever taken on extra hours because you were offered the overtime, or
because you were forced into it?
If you’re a self-employed person, a plumber, a doctor, a counsellor, your paper work demands may be a bit reduced, and I only say may be. However, you still face the impossible task
of deciding when your working days begins, and more importantly, when it must end.
Yes, you’ve heard the saying:
On your deathbed, the one thing you won’t be saying is: “Oh, I wish I’d spent more time at work”.
That applies across the board. Even if your work is a great source of joy and excitement in your life, you can have too much of it.
I want to offer you a simple way to reduce some of the sense of dissatisfaction that many of us feel at work in any situation. That applies if you’re the local Rabbi, a full-time
father or mother, a teacher, plumber, doctor…or a designer. I’m talking here about
The tyranny of the To-Do list.
It can be a great idea to organise your daily tasks into a simple list. If you actually write down the major tasks you have to complete in a given day, you’re more likely to:
a. Remember them and
b. To do them.
The first may be correct. That’s why so many people in every walk of life seem to love the To-Do list. The second proposition is highly questionable. As you all know.
The danger of the To-Do list is that there is absolutely nothing about writing out a list of things you have to accomplish that guarantees their accomplishment. You see, to make sure
that the tasks are even started, let alone completed satisfactorily, you need that commodity that is non-renewable and over which no one on earth has any control:
TIME
I know that you know that – but only subliminally. The many people with whom I’ve worked over the years delude themselves that they have time for everything. You simply don’t. And
that’s a fact. I’ve counselled and coached so many highly motivated and successful people who talk about how dreadful they feel at the end of the day because they can only tick off
two or three things from their list of thirty tasks To-Do. That’s because they haven’t done two important management tasks. Note I don’t talk about time management. That’s because
there’s no such thing. All you can manage is your activity or what you do in a particular amount of time.
Your To-Do list is really only a minor management tool when it comes to allocating priority in the expenditure of your most valuable asset, your time.
What I suggest to you is this.
Instead of one long indiscriminate list of the things you know you have to do, please think about doing the following.
1. Write your list,
2. Look at it long and hard, and
3. Decide on the top three or four things for that day. After that you must then….
4. Estimate as well as you can how long particular tasks may take.
5. Based on that estimation, you may reduce the number of priority tasks for that day to one or two. Or, you may add another to the list.
6. The other tasks can be placed in a Follow-Up file or what I call Not so Urgent file.
Yes, there are still other things to do. You can delegate some of that work to another person. You can also take a long hard look at a few of your so-called essential tasks and just
ignore them.
My very best advice for dealing with a sense of overwhelm
It’s not great advice from someone delivering her advice via e-mail. My advice is simple and very effective. It's this:
In a normal 9 to 5 day, never open your email at work until 12 noon.
That’s right.
You feel nervous just thinking about it!
All those people expecting all that attention from you as soon as you hit the desk!
Go back to my very first e-zine. Part of the advice there was that to reduce the stress in your life there were six things you could do. One of them was to live with Death at your
shoulder.
So you won’t even open your e-mail, let alone respond to it before noon?
Will someone die as a result? I think not.
Will the Earth stop rotating on its axis?
Definitely not.
Is your e-mail so Life and Death that if I told you that you had a day to live, you’d spend the rest of it answering e-mails? No.
What will happen is this.
Your energy levels are at their best when you arrive at work. Even if you think you’re an evening person, or even if you’re tired when you arrive at work. It remains a biological
fact. You’re at your most responsive and creative when you first arrive at work.
If you use that creativity and energy to answer (often trivial and annoying) e-mails, you’ve wasted a great gift. Use your energy to do your real work. Of course for some of you,
e-mails may be a creative part of your work and may be energising to you. As always with advice from anyone, even me, apply it with the good sense you have.
Friends of mine who are in highly creative work environments actually lament how much of their life is taken up answering e-mails. And what a huge burden it is – even writing a
friendly line or two to five or twelve friends or well-liked work colleagues can sap your energy.
Make the decision. Or at least think about it.
No emails until noon.
A Totally New Concept in Anxiety and Panic Attack Solutions
