Hard work is too hard on us

Burnout, overwork and the drive to ‘do more’ can be a never ending and dangerous loop. 

There are clever and ingenious solutions - or hacks - available to us, if only we’d take them up. 

A hack is a smart short cut, a streamlined process or focused advice to make things easier. 

So, if you knew of a better and easier way, would you take it? 

Some people like to see others do it first ... to see if ‘it works’. 

That’s what the diffusion of innovation curve is all about. There are always some trailblazers and early adopters who take a risk and trust their ability to cope with the new. 

And then come the early and late majority ... once the idea has been ‘proven’. By that time though, the trailblazers are often on to something newer, and easier. 

There’s another hack someone has uncovered or discovered!

Rather than waiting until more people have tried it and your risk is lower, jump in a little earlier. 

Play on the easier side of the curve for awhile.

You can wait to see how something turns out for others ... or run your own experiment, play your own game and live your own experience. 

It could be easier at the other end of the curve. 

What is the vital work?

The Pareto Principle suggests that 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes. 

‘The vital few’ - as the 20% part is often referred to - is worth finding. 

It’s worth finding in our efforts, our ideas, decisions, choices, actions and behaviours. 

So what would be your ‘vital work’?

What’s the stuff that’s really truly worth doing? Worth doing because it delivers such a return, you’d be crazy not to do it. 

But wait ... we can spend plenty of time dong anything BUT ‘the vital work’!

We dance around the edges, pffft about with busy work, rework things that are already done and stall and delay ... rather than hit the vital work with focus. 

If you can spend even a few minutes at your next meeting, in the team workshop or at the quarterly planning session focusing on the vital work, you’ll be spending time wisely. 

And a daily - or hourly - check of our to do list can also help reveal whether we are working on the vital, valuable work. 

Now ... we just need to identify WHY it’s valuable, why it’s vital. 

It probably delivers great impacts, results and outcomes. 

A hefty 80% of them!

The struggle of decision making

In the times of uncertainty we’ve been experiencing, it can feel too hard or overwhelming to make decisions. 

There are so many options, scenarios and what ifs that are possible

Try this 1-2-3 mantra I use with mentoring clients:


1. Find the path
A path helps give us more certainty of where we’re heading - even if we don’t know all the details or what’s ahead yet. It’s a direction marker. 

It may be a new path for you, or a path another has taken. 


2. Make a decision. 
What are you going to do? 

Our attention, energy and motivation is stolen by unmade decisions. To reduce overwhelm and pressure and move out of inertia, we can make decisions now we have a path. 

There’s less to fear about this because many decisions can be adjusted later (or reversed) if they’re not right for you. 

But make a decision. Making no decision on a path when a decision is needed saps our time, energy and attention. 


3. Take action. 
We can’t think our way through decisions. Action is the best way to work out if what you’ve decided and where you’re going is a good fit. 


You can step out along a safer, less uncertain path:

1. Find the path. 
2. Make decisions. 
3. Take action. 

Sweeping and drinking coffee

There they were, doing both things at once. Sweeping. Drinking coffee. 

Neither was being done particularly well. 

They’d spilled some coffee down their shirt. They’d missed some of the dirt and leaves and kept resweeping the same area, again and again. (Or maybe they didn’t realize they’d already swept that area.)

Juggling tasks can lead us towards overwhelm. We keep taking on more and more things - sometimes juggling two or three or more things at once. 

- The cyclist who was checking their phone and eating a banana. And riding. 

- The leader who was on two zoom calls at once on two separate devices - one earplug for each meeting. 

- The workshop attendee who was also checking their email and tallying up some data all at once. 


In our rush, push and drive to get things done, we think the juggle is worth it, that we can do it, that we’re smarter than the brain research, that it doesn’t mess with OUR brain. 

Yet it does. 

The more we continue to try and do multiple things at once, the more overloaded we feel, the less we get done. 

Of all the habits to unlearn and re-engineer, the juggle is one that’s so worth fighting off when it calls. 

6 ways we’re overloaded

We know what overloads and overwhelms us: information, overwork, deadlines, social issues, politics, uncertainty. 

While we need to keep a handle on managing our own overload, it’s important to consider others and how we might be overloading them...accidentally or unknowingly.  

Here’s how we overload:
1. Meetings are too long
2. Focusing on the work for too long
3. One person speaking for too long. 

These are about the pressure and expectation we have of ATTENTION. There’s no break and pressure piles up with no relief or release. 


And then there’s:
4. Rambling, unstructured information 
5. Too much context or background 
6. Lengthy presentation packs. 

These are about the quantity and types of INFORMATION. We expect we can keep processing, analyzing, digesting and synthesizing information... endlessly. 

All 6 of these overloads are “too much”: too much unreleased pressure and too much wrestling with information. 

Combined, they lead to the reduced engagement, slowed progress and increased confusion of overload. And exhaustion. 

Take each in turn and use it as a kind of gate, filter or checklist. 

We can’t expect others to ‘just deal with’ what we haven’t considered, constrained or refined.