Is too much work damaging your career?
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Mostly we take a very positive approach to careers, providing ideas and thinking as to what you can to drive things forward. We have to recognise however that there are times that don’t feel so great, and you start to feel overwhelmed and lose direction. When that happens, what can you do to make a difference to your future?
It’s a question we’re going to tackle over a new series of articles aimed at helping some of our readers who feel stuck or in difficulty.
When thinking about workload – our advice is to always keep some gas in the tank. What we mean by that is if you are constantly working to 100% of your time or mental energy, you will find that your ability or desire to spot opportunities and add value quickly diminishes. As well as risking burnout, from a career perspective this is a frustrating place as it’s the extra (or the “name making”) projects that disappear. You feel tired and start to hate work – and focus on survival pushing your career onto the back burner.
We’ve probably all experienced this – I know I have. But what action can you take?
There are a number of strategies that can help:
Being too busy can be so overwhelming. You need to step back to a more strategic space – stop trying to solve the problem by working faster! Don’t go straight to your manager because the things we ask in points 1-3 will be the first things they ask – so do them proactively. You’re much more likely to get the support you need if you’ve first done a deep self-examination of your workload and priorities.
It’s a question we’re going to tackle over a new series of articles aimed at helping some of our readers who feel stuck or in difficulty.
When thinking about workload – our advice is to always keep some gas in the tank. What we mean by that is if you are constantly working to 100% of your time or mental energy, you will find that your ability or desire to spot opportunities and add value quickly diminishes. As well as risking burnout, from a career perspective this is a frustrating place as it’s the extra (or the “name making”) projects that disappear. You feel tired and start to hate work – and focus on survival pushing your career onto the back burner.
We’ve probably all experienced this – I know I have. But what action can you take?
There are a number of strategies that can help:
- Purge responsibilities. Sometimes when I get overwhelmed I sit down with my list of things that I am responsible for or that I am in some way committed to, and ask:
Do they really need to be done?
Do they need to be done as perfectly – can you do a shorter report or just make an update call?
Can the deadline be negotiated? For example, if you have to present a progress report on a project to a senior manager, is it really necessary to be halfway through delivery at that point? Or is it sufficient to have organised a clear contract for the project and a delivery plan with hard dates in the diary?
Am I’m still the person who should do it?
I find I’ll often be expending mental energy refusing to admit defeat on things that are six-months out of date – often thinking that “I can still deliver it” – when sometimes admitting defeat is a big relief! - Prioritisation. With the work that is left after your purge, ask if everything you are doing is really significant. Are there tasks in there that really aren’t as important as you’re making them? For example, if you take three hours a week to produce a report – ask yourself if anyone is actually reading it? Or the project that you have to spend hours pushing, ask yourself why you have to spend so much time pushing it – is it because there is very little support elsewhere for it, and if so – why is that? Do you need to involve a manager at a more senior level as sponsor, or is there no compelling business need for the work any more?
- Organise. After purging and prioritising, you have to organise. I don’t often recommend books – mainly because people never take you up on these recommendations! But if you in any way struggle in this area, I’ve found David Allen’s Getting Things Done profound and life changing. Helping me to log, catalogue and action all of my “to dos” made everything seem so much more in control. I realised that a lot of the stress was because I knew I had many, many commitments, which kept popping into my mind because I was worried I’d forget them. Having a system to capture all these actions and put them in an organised place meant that I didn’t have to spend energy remembering. I could do a quick scan a couple of times a week and know my situation instantly. I could see light at the end of the tunnel!
- Seek Help. If you know that you are clear and in control of your list of work and you’re doing everything you can to deliver – and there is still too much – it’s time to ask for help. You have two options:
- Downwards support – before you go to your manager, consider whether there are there things that you could delegate to your team or ask for help from colleagues. Can anyone help in some way? This is a good way of managing peaks and troughs of work – you’ll repay the favour when a colleague needs help.
- Your manager. Try not to go to your manager as a first resort, or with a list of woes or an “I’m too busy” storyline – this immediately adds a lump of work to THEIR agenda to get to grips with the problem, re-motivate you and somehow get the work done (not great if they are feeling overwhelmed too!) Instead, take your manager through the analysis that you’ve been through (above), and then have some clear decisions and make some suggestions that you think they could help with. Finally, ask them what they think you could do.
Being too busy can be so overwhelming. You need to step back to a more strategic space – stop trying to solve the problem by working faster! Don’t go straight to your manager because the things we ask in points 1-3 will be the first things they ask – so do them proactively. You’re much more likely to get the support you need if you’ve first done a deep self-examination of your workload and priorities.