The past few years have seen an unforgiving pandemic and global situation take a hefty toll on businesses, leaders and employees across the globe. Now, more than ever, the workforce is burdened with additional responsibilities and is logging more hours despite working from home and having access to technologies that were designed to streamline workflows.
While some may boast of incongruous 14-hour days and thrive off ‘living for the grind’ for many, always being busy means there is often an overabundance of tasks or important projects that require immediate attention. This quite often results in people feeling burnt out. In turn, burnout subsequently impacts motivation, morale, physical and mental ability, and engagement both professionally and at home.
Important vs. urgent?
Sometimes, you may be asked to address an issue, given additional responsibilities or take on additional projects, which becomes too much to handle and forces the response, “Oh, I’m too busy right now, you take care of it,” much to the chagrin of your manager and teammates.
When this happens, it is important to remember that not all tasks are equal and the way to really tackle an excessive workload is to effectively prioritise between what is urgent and what is important. Put simply, urgent tasks are those that have to be handled immediately whilst important tasks are ones that contribute to overarching long-term goals and objectives.
Perhaps, more importantly, is that people may feel as though they are unable to delegate or postpone urgent tasks as they feel overwhelmed due to mental impairment brought about as a result of the aforementioned burnout. Instead, a choice is made to plough ahead with these urgent matters which results in additional unnecessary stress and could even see the tasks ending in failure.
However, it is important to remember that just because a task is ‘urgent’ does not mean that it is a high priority, and cannot be delegated.
The secret to prioritising
Whenever you approach something in life, be it at work or at home, it is important to ask the question, ‘How important is this in the long run?’ Your intuition will immediately show you whether something is worth investing your time and effort into or whether you need to delegate and prioritise your time elsewhere.
Afterwards, get clear on what is the most important thing that you need to pay attention to at this moment. If you can’t shrink the horizon down to such a small scale, expand the scope —what do you need to accomplish this morning? Where is your focus needed this week? What project needs to be finalised by the end of this month? Eliminating things from your sphere of immediate attention is liberating and helps increase your ability to focus according to scientists.
Another secret to productivity is planning. Jumping into the workday without a strategic thought will always result in multitasking in a way that leaves you overwhelmed, frazzled, stressed out and unproductive. Take time to draft out a structure for your day/week/month with weekly and daily to-do lists to help keep you on track. Similarly, spending small amounts of time on large projects over an extended period can also assist in distributing your time and effort.
Another secret is to also think about the things that will not require your attention and to categorise them accordingly. Examine what is being put to the side and decide if it could be deleted, delayed, delegated or diminished:
- Deleted – something that can be stopped altogether such as research into a new product line because the timing is no longer right.
- Delayed – something that can comfortably wait for a while—perhaps a presentation that will be delivered in a month’s time.
- Delegated – a task that can easily be done more effectively and efficiently by someone else.
- Diminished – how can you make the task a lower priority? For example, could you virtually attend part of a meeting instead of the full thing in person? Could you write the most valuable parts of the report and leave the rest for later?
Adopting such an approach to your workload can dramatically alter how productive you are whilst greatly diminishing the feelings of burnout you may have. Effectively prioritising workloads can help you achieve your professional and personal goals whilst setting you up for long-term success so do not be afraid to try.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
