Before You Fill Your Calendar Again.
Clearing the backlog is only the first step. Now what deserves a place in your week?
So you recently found yourself overwhelmed and had a calendar full of appointments and meetings with no room to do any real work. Your emails and messages grew out of control, and you had a critical deadline that you only just met.
You cleared appointments, delegated emails and messages and focused all your attention on meeting your deadline. It worked.
The question now is: what will you let back in?
If you restart everything you stopped to meet the deadline, you risk bringing back the overwhelm that forced you to remove everything in the first place. (The “yo-yo workload” problem.)
To give you the space to meet your deadline, you likely reached out to meeting organisers and customers and temporarily excused yourself from your commitments. You then removed any tasks that did not support your priorities, and got on and did the work.
Okay, I’ve over-simplified that a little, but when you are really stuck, often you either take work home with you, or you renegotiate your commitments.
Yet, one question I would ask you is: how did this situation happen?
Not in a judgemental or accusatory way, but in a way to encourage you to stop and think about your overall commitments.
It’s relatively simple to perform a temporary fix on an overloaded calendar and task list (although not necessarily easy to do). The more challenging part is to look at what you are committed to and ask what needs to go more permanently.
Are there any meetings where your presence is more ornamental than useful?
Are there any projects you’re half involved in that are eating up a disproportionate amount of time each week?
Do you have any personal commitments that no longer inspire you?
Are you subscribed to industry newsletters that are not useful but you feel obliged to read?
Are there any responsibilities you’re clinging to for nostalgic reasons?
These can be difficult things to let go of, but if you were to, how much time would you get back each week?
The “my door is always open” danger.
I’ve long felt that the phrase “my door is always open” can become costly when being approachable becomes always available.
Perhaps you want to come across as being nice and approachable. But being available without any boundaries can create frequent interruptions and encourage your team to depend on you whenever they have the smallest of difficulties.
Helping your team is part of your work, yes, but being approachable doesn’t mean you need to be available every time a question comes up.
If every problem is coming to you, ask if your team wants guidance, a decision or permission to do something. You could then agree on set times when people can come to you with non-urgent questions.
That gives your team room to grow their own judgment and you time to work on the things only you can do.
How do you prevent it from happening again?
Clearing your immediate tasks is one thing, but your commitments are likely to generate more meetings, preparation time, emails and messages in the future. This risks placing you back at square one in a few weeks’ time.
For a longer-term solution, you may find questioning and removing some of your current commitments to be the best way forward.
Perhaps you were invited to join a project where initially your expertise was required, only to find yourself being invited to project meetings six months later even though your useful role in the project has long since passed.
Could you send or receive updates when needed and only attend meetings when there’s a decision to be made that requires your knowledge and expertise?
If you are nervous about removing a commitment, a good question to ask is: What would actually happen if I stopped or reduced this commitment?
It can be scary to approach a boss about being removed from a commitment. A way to do this is to have a talk with your boss and explain that a particular project you are helping on is diverting your time and attention away from the priorities you previously agreed on.
Then ask if you could either reduce your responsibility or be removed from it altogether.
The “temporary hold” advantage
One advantage of putting a temporary hold on a commitment is that you can question its future value to you before restarting it. It helps you decide whether you still want it. And if so, where will the time come from to continue with the commitment?
The goal isn’t to have a full calendar, a stuffed message inbox and a bursting to-do list. The goal is to have balance between work, rest and play.
Rest and personal space need space in your week also. If you’re frequently having to give this space away to catch up, then your current commitments still need adjusting.
Before you restart everything you paused, choose one commitment and review it. Could you stop it, reduce your involvement or change how often you get involved in it?
You don’t have to fill the space you gain with more work. You can leave room for the unexpected or just keep the saved time for yourself.
If you’re still dealing with an overwhelming to-do list and a full calendar, then my How To Get Back On Track course will help you work through a practical reset.