Girls about how not to burn out at work and everything to be in time
At the end of the year there is a peak in work activity and dozens of unfinished business cause panic from the fact that they will be transferred to the next year. We asked six girls who work a lot about how they find a balance between work and personal time and why workaholism and efficiency are different things.
You can be a workaholic and work effectively, you can work effectively, but not be a workaholic or not aware of it. You, for the most part, determine for yourself whether you are effective or not, and do not evaluate the work only by KPI. Everything is simpler on the part of the employer: he doesn’t care whether you are asleep or not, you work quickly or slowly, the work should be done quickly and well. Some employers, trying to save money, prefer to hire one specialist who would work for days and try to do everything. But in fact, this is wrong: one person, despite how quickly and diligently he worked, no matter how well he found the shortest ways to achieve his goals, he could not do the work for five people, and there are only 24 in days hours
One of the signs of effective work is the quality indicators of your activity. What big tasks did you manage to solve, what indicators did you achieve? Which employee will be more effective? The one that will pass this faster, more interesting and will achieve these goals, in passing, having dealt with a few more. It is difficult and unprofitable to be a workaholic and lead a team, it is even harder to lead a dream team, dreamy. Because sooner or later you unknowingly start to expect the same return from your fellow friends. You think that they, just like you, do not sleep, but think about the case. And this is unacceptable. Everyone has their own plans, business, this is their free time. This should not be forgotten. It's sad, but it's nice when your colleagues, knowing that five hours have passed, how everyone left work, and you still sit in the workplace, call you and ask how you can help.
Being a workaholic means losing a lot in your life: free time, hobbies, and sometimes friends, loved ones and health. From nights without sleep you become irritable, impatient, at night you wake up from the feeling that you forgot to do something important. In the night you read the mail, you understand that you are going crazy, and you go to bed again. But workaholics still love employers. Knowing you, they understand that you will never quit, you will not go to the hospital, if you will not die at all, you will never fail and you will not say: "I do not answer working questions during off-hours". You can rely on you, and you try to do everything as best you can: you work for the common good, and you appreciate it. As a result, they turn to you with new projects.
I think that people who work with other important parts of life (be it family, friends, or relationships) are sometimes not so smooth or they do not bring them proper satisfaction. When your fuse ends, you are disappointed in the project that you did around the clock, or even worse - in people, you feel that someone let you down, set you up, you're tired, you feel unwell, look back and feel horror. At this moment, you suddenly realize that all this time you have worked and missed so much time that you could spend on hobbies, on trips, to try something new, to meet friends, to see your family, to work on yourself.
It becomes quite sad when you realize that your contact with friends, loved ones or family is not the same. Closer to thirty it seems that you and private life worked, ended up alone. I once heard words from a loved one: "Please, come early, at least let's see a movie at home, have dinner together!" - and thought: "Yes, yes, now I will add another document and will come running," eventually returned to the night. Time is running out, you do not live up to the expectations of your loved ones. And with what you end up with, and most importantly - for what? It's one thing if you save lives every day, help those in need, but it happens that everything you do by and large helps other people to become even richer, while at the same time forgetting about their lives. What wealth would you like for yourself? It is unlikely that you will talk about your hydrangea with your former employer.
It is possible to do several things at once, but absolutely not necessary. You will do several things equally quickly at the same time or if you do them consistently. It is completely senseless to write dozens of papers, notes on the phone, reminders with to-do lists - anyway, you move beyond all of these lists. It is necessary to determine just a few important big things, having completed which you will understand that the day has passed efficiently. It is desirable that they take no more than half of your working day. The other half must be given for urgent tasks from the leadership, who always ruin all plans, and less significant ones - then you will manage everything and you will be pleased with yourself. And another important thing - I'm working on it right now: sometimes you think (this is very much in the style of workaholics), that you definitely have time for everything and on time, and you yourself call unrealistic terms. As a result, you boil, trying to catch everything, but in fact you do not need to do this: you just need to soberly estimate how much time you need for everything.
My personal red light for the state of "selfless workaholic" lights up when I lose my ability to sleep. It turns out that I am both in my head and body in working experiences without rest. Usually this state ends with a breakdown and rethinking. I know for sure that I am not the only one, but for obvious reasons, no one, of course, and, in particular, the girls do not advertise their depression. Once I missed a very important moment because I went out to talk on the phone (at nine in the evening, nobody died, just work). It was a good lesson, but nothing lasts forever.
Efficiency, in my understanding, is inclusiveness and focus on one case. When you sit down and do all the work of the week in three hours. Having caught such a state, it is rather unpleasant to return to its usual speed, as in “Mario”. It’s enough for effective people to work, maybe three hours a day. Of course, it is better to be effective and to be able to manage time in order to distribute it between what is important and interesting for you. Someone is a family, someone is himself, an education, a hobby and so on. As a metaphor, traffic jams, when ten kilometers is ten minutes or three hours.
I think that efficiency is closely tied to the regime. Let me explain: when you teach yourself to brush your teeth, wash dishes and make the bed, you realize that each task has its time and urgency. Well, and there is something else with pathways in the brain - that, having tuned in to a presentation or a brainstorm, you don’t need to wait for the muse, it comes on schedule. When work tasks are more or less permanent, you can group them thematically: meetings for meetings, letters to letters, and planning and strategies to devote time when no one distracts or interrupts the thinking process. My advice: for this, use "airplane mode".
Work is an integral part of our life, and there are different periods in life. Any shift in one or another sphere of life leads to a loss of inner harmony. But this is not always bad, it is like any experience: the main thing is to draw conclusions. Workaholism is like mad falling in love. Something becomes at some point more important than anything else and absorbs you completely. If you understand this and clearly realize that you have such a period and why it is happening now, everything will stabilize at some point. You will go through it, you will understand a lot about yourself and you will be able to find harmony without setting priorities.
The basic principles to which I came recently in an attempt to move from workaholism to effective work, first of all, to clarify once and for all: no matter what happens now, no one will die, the world will not collapse, and the planet will continue to rotate . This is such a seemingly banal installation, which I personally always lacked, which led to panic attacks, self-flagellation and other unpleasant feelings characteristic of people suffering from perfectionism. Second, delegate. Only really delegate, and not to do the work itself by someone else. To trust those with whom you work, to be able to resist the desire to completely redo someone's work and stop thinking that only you can do everything as it should. Thirdly, there is nothing wrong with doing something on the fourth. Because chetverochka is also good, and in general, chetverochka or Pyaterochka are relative concepts, and they are only in our heads.
Of the more practical principles - one big deal per day. Set yourself one big task, concentrate on it and perform. It helps not to drown in a pile of tasks smaller and make a working breakthrough. Doing two things at the same time is impossible - this is a known fact. It is important to simply learn to learn how to quickly switch from one to another, but only when the first thing is really done. The main thing, in my opinion, is in principle its own attitude to work: to understand, realize and accept (or change so as to accept). And certainly not whining and not make a martyr of themselves. As you know, we only do what we want.
It seems to me that effective work is primarily aimed at a result, and workaholism is connected, rather, with a process - work for the sake of work, and not for the sake of result. Although in practice everything often mixes and turns into some kind of continuous chain of affairs with no end in sight. When I first started working as a journalist, I terribly liked to stay in the editorial office, write a lot and work hard: I learned a lot then, and I am pleased to recall these times. I don’t know if you can call it workaholism, but I didn’t have much enthusiasm. Over the years, it has become less, especially when I had to pass the text of the dissertation, which was completely unrelated to journalism. During the day I worked as an editor, and in the evening I returned home and wrote and edited until the morning. The next day, read the text and found in it a thousand and one typo and all sorts of ridiculous repetitions. And again, I rewrote everything, because my dissertation was an important stage in my life - I really wanted to write a text that would not be a shame to send to my remarkable scientific leader.
I could say that this experience taught me a more rational planning of time, but that would be untrue: I still do not know how to properly build my working day, I take fifteen cases at a time and I live with deadlines, although I understand that my work would be more effectively if I did everything in turn. I also terribly envy people who start their day at seven in the morning. Recently, I work from home and wake up at about eleven, despite all the alarm clocks and promises on the eve of "tomorrow I will pull myself together and get up at eight." My life would be much more organized and easier if I learned to get up early.
Effective work for me is a clear solution to my work tasks in certain periods. And this is on condition that I have all the skills and competencies. Workaholism is the solution to a huge number of tasks in a short time. For me, the most important and terrible thing in workaholism is a huge personal responsibility, which makes you take on everything, even for what you, in fact, do not know how to do. I can keep several things in my head at once and make decisions quickly enough. I think this is a useful working skill that can come in handy at any job. Plus, I have a main rule: I never put off matters that can be solved in five minutes. This is the simplest principle that helps not to keep in mind a bunch of small matters.
For me, the family always comes first. And if the employer does not understand this, we are definitely not on the way. But if you are a responsible person, you will give priority to the family only on important and truly urgent matters. Everything else can be settled. On the dark side of workaholism, I dug in twice. One time it happened when I got into the marketing department of a large American company, the second time - in a small edition. In the first case, workaholism was the result of youthful maximalism and lack of working experience. My sleepless nights and masterful presentations were lost in the general flow of work and did not seriously affect the general state of affairs. I could do 50% of the amount of work and would still remain the boss's favorite, but I wanted to prove to myself and the world that I can and can do everything that I am asked to do. But rather quickly, I became a person whose main topic of conversation was work. Then, for the first time, I sincerely got angry at the contractor and shouted at him, but after I almost cried because of the sales data for my brand, I realized that I had to quit while I had at least something alive left.
The second time workaholism was more deliberate. I strongly fell in love with my publishing house and at a certain moment I faced a certain situation. Either you somehow do it, or no one will. What did my life look like? At two o'clock in the morning I answered work on Facebook messages, worked on weekends, holidays and on Friday evenings. In my free time, all I could do was watch the 20-minute series of TV shows (I was falling asleep from longer), drank wine before going to bed and sometimes went to one subway station from home to get a little fresh air.
Yes, the solution of my affairs (I do not share the work and home) is arranged in the following way. For each day or week I write a task list, separating them by priorities (urgent / not urgent, important / not important). This is the simplest matrix, which is written in each table on time management. As I do, I delete the completed cases. If something is not done, it simply goes to the next page. It is very important for me to work correctly with mail, I only work in Gmail, where I use various tools to scatter emails that contain important information on my tasks. For some projects that involve a lot of people, I like to use Basecamp or its analogs. And the most important rule that I made in my life: you should not immediately rush to do all the work. It's an amazing thing, but 20% of cases will be resolved without your help, they will simply be canceled, or everything will change in them. The main thing is to understand how much you need to start working on the project in order to do everything.
I do not consider myself a workaholic, although work has been around for quite some time since I began to earn my favorite work - I have been in a stable first place. I can do nothing, but work is me, and it is through work that I define myself. I am not a workaholic, because I know for myself that I am more or less functioning normally only if I do any kind of garbage with a certain frequency that is not related to work, relationship, or family. This same garbage Business Insider will never include in the list of things on which successful people spend their free time. It happens, I sit alone locked up, play Playstation, I can spend hours choosing a hotel where I’ll stay for one night on a trip, or collect a basket on Farfetch in order to close the site forever with a clear conscience. It seems that workaholics are not like that. But I truly believe that it helps me to reboot.
In order to more or less evenly build a balance between work tasks, some legitimate free time (books, exhibitions, parties) and these senseless activities, I began to think a lot about how I distribute my time. At some point, for example, she made a willful decision not to check her mail and Facebook on weekends and late in the evening, unless, of course, the project or preparation for it is not in full swing. In the phrase "oh, we sat yesterday at work until one o'clock in the morning" I see not an enthusiasm for work and what is all cool, but a bad time management. Every time when I myself find myself in this situation, I start feverishly thinking what went wrong at what moment and what can be done to make it different.
I am currently working in a museum, and there are no time to work on several projects that are not related to the museum, but in general multitasking is another way to efficiency. Especially if it is associated with different types of activities. Do you write about the exhibition? Make an exhibition. Are you making exhibitions? Write a promotion strategy. You change the angle, look at the problem in a new way - and the head immediately begins to work better.
I, unfortunately, very poorly learn from the examples of others - I can only on my mistakes. Until something becomes part of my experience, it comes to me very badly. Therefore, it is difficult for me to say if there are universal methods suitable for absolutely everyone. Moreover, the answer to the question about efficiency is very floating: once you are satisfied that you are doing several projects at the same time, and once you are worried that you cannot devote enough time to one business. Sometimes you work for one result, but it turns out that they expect a little from you. Probably the only correct thing is to recheck yourself all the time and ask the question “why?”.
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