Sometimes all the deadlines seem to come at once. Or your calendar is so full of meetings you don’t have time to get your work done. Or you get overwhelmed covering for coworkers who are ill. Or you have major stressors outside your work life, like your AC dies in the midst of a heat wave or an old injury starts giving you trouble.
Or like me, this all happens at once over a span of eight days.
Yeah, that last half of July was not fun.
How did I make it through all of this without dissolving into a puddle of tears? Organization, of course.
Here are the steps that helped me get through the week:
A purring cat can help calm you down with things get to be too much.
1. Take a moment to breathe. You’re not going to figure out a path forward if you’re panicking. That’s what I told myself shortly after the AC went out and I realized I wasn’t going to be able to do any of the things I had planned for that afternoon. It was a Sunday, and there was no way that I was turning on anything that created heat. I sat down on the sofa with my cat, Oscar (above), turned on the Olympics and moved to step two.
2. Reassess and re-organize your to do list. What are tasks that need to be done that day or in the immediate future? What can you postpone for later or just not bother with at all? It turned out that most of the things I had planned for the day the AC went out didn’t really need to be done immediately. Even writing my next Systematic Scribe post could wait. And I started out Monday by assessing my work week. This was easy since I had my planned tasks already set out in ToDoIst and the detailed magazine production schedule in Airtable. I quickly set about moving deadlines and ignoring non-urgent emails.
3. Time to delegate. This one is always hard for me, but there are almost always tasks that can be given to someone else. Coworkers and employees are usually more than willing to give you a hand when life has hit you hard — especially if you have a culture where everyone pitches in when times are tough. I’m particularly thankful to one coworker who immediately stepped up and took on an extra assignment on Friday to cover for my ill employee.
4. Pay your way forward. Identify the tasks that you can pay someone else to do. This might be assigning an edit to a freelancer, subcontracting to another writer or paying for grocery delivery. I ordered dinner one night from Uber Eats. I only had so much energy for dealing with everything in such an overwhelming week, and I was not going to waste it cooking dinner.
5. Turn down meetings and re-organize your time. You’re overwhelmed, and you don’t have time to sit in meetings that aren’t absolutely necessary. If you can’t turn down a meeting entirely, ask about moving it to a later time. This strategy gave me a free morning on Tuesday and time to tackle some of the must-do things for the week.
6. Admit you can’t do it all. This one can be hard, especially if you’re someone who prides yourself on meeting all of your deadlines. But the truth is, organzation can only take you so far. I’ve left tasks uncompleted for two weeks in a row now, and it hurts. But sometimes, it’s just not possible to do it all. (OK, most of the time.) Deadlines get missed. People don’t get timely responses. We perform at less than our best. It’s a reminder that we are human.
At least we get to discover this in a more private setting than at the Olympics, where missteps are televised to the entire world.
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To get to my new, pared-down to do list, some things had to go. And sadly, that’s the Systematic Scribe — but only for August. I’ll be back after Labor Day, hopefully re-energized and with a plan for the fall. In the meantime, catch up here on any posts you may have missed so far. And thanks for your patience.
— Sarah
P.S. If you’ve got a question, comment or idea for a future newsletter, please email me at sciwriter.sarah@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you. And if someone forwarded this to you (hint, hint), check out my first post and what you can expect from The Systematic Scribe.