When work overpowers your life and it is work while you work and work while you play – that means no time off for Johnny; it is time to sit back and evaluate what is going wrong. Many employees around the world are prone to burning the candle at both ends and in the long run the results are hard hitting on their health, personal life and even career.
Is it just that the work at present is too much or is it that this is the norm – you are mostly in a fire fighting mode at work and the tasks at hand are taking control of you rather than being the other way around?
Until and unless the reasons are taken care there is a high probability that you will land in this situation once again sometime in future. Taking control of our habits is the first step toward getting us out of the “fire-fighting” eventualities.
Learn to say NO
When it becomes so overwhelming it is time to step back and evaluate the reasons on why you are this stage in the first place? Do you have more on your plate than you can digest? Are you in the habit of pleasing your boss and saying “yes” more often to the appointed tasks? Don’t think that doing more means you could be the good books of management and your co-workers; stress and work overload affects productivity and quality of work. What matters eventually is the quality not quantity. Your first step now is to learn to say NO to what you cannot accomplish in a given time frame or just is too much for you to handle.
Delegate Delegate Delegate
The second step is to learn to delegate – since you are completely overwhelmed and stressed out chances are you are not in the right mental stage to get all the work done in the time it is due and maybe the quality of your work might suffer. At this point it is time to delegate those tasks which others can do for you.
Break it Down
Once you are done with the evaluation stage the major task of course is to get the task done anyways. First break it down – what can be done and what cannot be done. And of course first list out what MUST be done. Once you break down the task and itemize them in your priority list the picture gets clearer. It is always a good idea to write your “sub tasks” down, anything in writing is more effective than
And yet again I want to stress the point that if you see this happening many times over then it is a habit – get out of it before it wrecks your career and personal life. Learn to say No and delegate tasks to your team right at the planning stage.