“If you have more than three priorities, you have no priorities.”
This mantra is one Danielle Bechtel, brand and marketing specialist at A Cloud Guru, keeps close to the vest.
Having too much work can result in poor performance across every project on a person’s plate. Anxiety, missed deadlines and rework are all potential outcomes of incorrectly prioritizing work or taking on too many tasks.
To manage her workload at the online cloud education platform, Bechtel assumes responsibilities she can realistically accomplish based on the business impact they’ll have over the following three months. She then breaks those priorities down into smaller, weekly goals to stay focused and prevent feeling overwhelmed.
And when stress does creep in, Bechtel recommends finding perspective, readjusting priorities to make room for more personal time, and venting.
What is the very first thing you do when your workload increases?
If I take on more than three priorities, I won’t do a good job on any of them. So I have to commit to a realistic workload I can do well. To choose my three priorities, I look at the business impact I can make in the next three months by completing these three strategic initiatives.
I break those three initiatives into smaller goals I can complete each month. I found that if personal growth isn’t prioritized, your career kind of just happens to you. So I choose two work goals and one personal goal. Not every initiative moves at the same pace, so goals for one initiative might be front-loaded, while initiatives number two and three happen in the later months.
Then, I write down the five things I need to do each week to reach all those goals. This practice gives me a system that makes it easy to gauge the relative importance of new projects. Are they more, or less, important than my strategic goals? How do they compare to the five things I said I would do this week? It’s important to be ready to ditch even the prettiest laid-out plan to seize a better opportunity. So sometimes, I throw it all away and start over. And that’s perfectly fine with me, as long as I’m moving forward.
Stress comes from a lack of balance.”
How do you manage your “to-dos” in a way that minimizes stress?
Stress comes from a lack of balance. It’s hard to walk into a job with the same level of energy every day, ready to rock through the same number of to-dos. So it’s important that I’m looking at the balance of my entire life. Using a hundred percent scale, how much do I have to give right now? If I’m at a 50 percent, what do I need to forfeit to give myself more space to be calm and stress-free? If I’m burned-out and I let myself get to 25 percent or lower, then my main focus is following routines to regain balance: eating clean, sleeping well and getting outside in the sun.
Having perspective is key as well. If I keep a wider lens on my life, I typically can see that a lot of to-dos don’t really need to be done. People waste so much time on short-term fires, fixes and mental dramas. If I’m working toward my major initiatives at work and doing my best to impact the world around me in my way, then I’m proud enough to say I did all I could at the time.
How do you know when to ask for help, and what steps do you take to protect your mental health when your workload increases?
I know to ask for help when I’m procrastinating. Listen to your instincts because they can tell you when you’re dragging your feet. If I’m doing everything other than the thing I should be doing, that’s when I know I need to ask for help. A lot of the time, I just need to talk it out with someone. That’s why it’s so important to have someone you trust that you can speak candidly to, and who won’t think any less of your abilities. I don’t always recommend this being a manager.
Being a younger leader, I learned that everything feels like a bigger deal earlier in a person’s career. Newer professionals simply don’t have enough experience to see how things have played out in the past, so their ability to assess the importance of a challenge is already working against them. It’s key to have a trusted mentor to ask, “Is this as important as I think it is?” I wasted a lot of mental energy thinking something was a big deal only to realize I just needed to ride the wave and let the moment pass.
