🔒Retool your attitudes, avoid being overworked

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, then starting on the first one.

— Mark Twain

Easy for Mark to say. He didn't live in this hyper task-driven age. There's this counter-quote from some lost soul of the workplace: “They tell me to take on my problems one at a time, but I can't get 'em to wait in line.”

You don't have to be a high-ranking manager to be familiar with that suffocating sensation of overwork, the struggle against a tide of diffuse demands and distractions while new difficulties begin to unfold just outside your reach.

An added frustration can be knowing that everybody else is just as overloaded as you are. Even when capable co-workers would like to lend a hand, they have to just stand helplessly by, not knowing what they could do to help. You never had time to show them how — and now it's too late.

Here's news: You never have enough time, and you never will have enough time. That's the way it is because that's the way things are. And the way you are.

First of all, much of what goes on in your workplace is out of your control. Even if you're the boss, or a manager, you are as bound to standard practice as everyone else.

Also, there's so much work to do that taking time out for rethinking and reorganizing would just make things worse. And your standing in the place would suffer seriously as your co-workers and supervisors wonder what's gotten into you. Cooperation would become more difficult.

It's a workplace, man. Get it? WORK, not diplomacy.

Counterproductive attitudes

At base, though, in the most human of terms, we are closely bound to what we do and how we do it. If I am highly competent in my work, it is because I devoted myself to learning how to do it. I don't want to discard my hard-earned skills; I don't want to even entertain the idea that I must keep changing what I do.

It is a deep, powerful human attachment that I have converted into a firm conclusion about the nature of my workplace process. It's deeply personal, and I don't want it messed with.

Such an attitude is perfectly understandable, and is in fact the driver of commitment and the pursuit of excellence. The problem is that it is increasingly counterproductive in a changing world.

Its essential currency is the definition of tasks, and the metrics of excellence in the performance of those tasks. It specifies the activities required to produce a predetermined outcome. The more closely the activities adhere to the norm, the more assured the outcome.

So I do the work superbly and I succeed.

But, for the growing, ambitious individual, the model doesn't work — not in the fast-changing world of today and tomorrow. The purpose of the modern workplace is not to provide work, but to provide value. People are there to turn out results, and the desired results nowadays can be a fast-moving target.

So the definition of personal productivity is changing. What is the individual to do?

The solution is simple, but not at all easy. Simple because you will acknowledge its logic; not easy because you might well disagree with doing what it takes.

All you have to do is change your fundamental attitude toward your work.

Reframe your idea of who you are and what you do. Revise the way you set and manage priorities. Reduce, drop or hand off many or most of your favorite tasks. Learn to listen and persuade — and practice until you become really good at listening and persuading.

Become sensitive to the nuances of workplace process, and be attentive to retuning it as necessary. Study performance and embrace change. Collaborate. Problem solve. Patiently practice the long view and develop greater tolerance and flexibility.

Who you are in this configuration is a malleable asset, skilled at analyzing and engaging new kinds of requirements, redefining tasks to meet shifting circumstances, working smoothly in collaborative arrangements, often with professionals in different specialties.

The processes of individual input that you perfect include continuous mastery of change and the unexpected. Your results often cannot be measured quantitatively and individually, although your participation inspires and supports group excellence.

Redefinition of roles produces new ways of managing workload. It supports a more fluid assignment of expectations, so collaboration is more effective and overload is more effectively managed as a group challenge.

They tell us workplace demands aren't going anywhere but up. We can't rise to meet them with old-time skill sets.