There are big Redcatco projects in the wings, new blogs to feed, articles to write and a fair collection of other things to be done too. Is it all making sense, or is it random, like stones on a forest floor.

Do you ever get too many things in your head at once? Perhaps it’s just me, although given the popularity of How to Deal with Being Overwhelmed at Work, I’m not so sure.

When we get overloaded things start to look random. All the gaps get filled, and the patterns that gave us a sense of order start to disappear. Randomness is a curious thing. I’m not talking about the mathematical science of it, but rather its effect on the brain.

There’s a nice review of Nassim Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness” here, which is a great read on the subject. Essentially we try and predict randomness. Its in our nature. Our brains see patterns everywhere, that’s how they work. The only way we can know if a pattern is valid is from its success in predicting future events. However, we rarely wait that long.

Some things that look random are actually patterns. I was trying to get a close up shot of a bee (in relation to “Do your employees dance“), when I realised that often life is only random until you study it carefully.

Getting the picture was either going to involve waiting at a flower and hoping to luck-out, or knowing where the bee was going to go next, and getting there first. After a quick trial, it was clear the former method was going to involve significantly more time than I had planned to spend. I needed to be able to predict the bee’s movements to get to the flower first. That or hope for a matrix-like moment of speed and dexterity.

After watching the bee a while, I came to the conclusion that they were pretty random critters. So much for my pattern-making brain. But then I got a little closer in, and followed one of the more industrious looking fellows. I was just starting get a feel for what he was up to, then ‘whoosh’, he was gone. Ok, on to the next. As I got closer and started to see the world from a bee’s-eye view (minus ultraviolet sight capabilities), I suddenly spotted the pattern. Click.

This bee progressed around in a very orderly spiral, until the lavender flower was cleaned out, then hopped on to the next. The randomness? Well, the bee could see which flowers had accessible pollen and simply ignored those that didn’t.

Have you ever watched someone and thought ‘why on earth did they do that?’ – it may well have been for a very logical reason, part of a well ordered pattern. Until you understand the motives and assumptions athe person is working with their actions will seem random.

Patterns actually make us productive. At least, productive people seem to follow patterns (as a tangential piece in The Economist indicates: “Every move you make“). It might be cause and effect, or simply a correlation, but patterns do bring a sense of order, and a sense of order helps to get more done.

So, how to get order and efficiency out of business overload? Take a leaf out of the computing book. I was writing up a webcast for BusinessTechFeed on Data Center Efficiency, which included a section on virtualization. A very useful technology for making more efficient use of computing resources. Virtualization lets you move from lots of under-utilized machines to one efficient, highly utilized one. The machine runs separate instances that each behave as a fully fledged computer.

Taking the virtualization concept across to productivity, rather than looking at your life as a whole (which is a good thing to do by the way, so don’t stop!), spend a while dividing it down into chunks. What are your different roles and responsibilities? Are there distinct areas to your life? Try writing down a set of objectives for each area, if that is something you haven’t done before. Now try slicing your time into segments for each of these areas. When you are working in one segment, don’t let the others invade it, unless it really is an emergency.

After a few days the technique should result in a fresh level of clarity and efficiency. When everything is thrown together, it feels random and things are hard to make sense of. Separating out the different things helps you to see patterns and order more clearly, and reconnect with their purpose. Remember those stones on the forrest floor. Let me put a few of them off into a different pile. Does the picture make more sense now?

Related Posts

• How to Write a Speech in 5 Minutes
• How to Deal With Being Overwhelmed at Work 2
• FOAF – Building Networks With a Friend of a Friend
• Best Practices in Social Media
• Do Your Employees Dance?

Not everyone is feeling on top of the world though. Apparently the UK has a crisis of management, with a lack of people with the skills to motivate and manage staff. It probably isn’t a surprise that one of the most popular posts here is “How to deal with being overwhelmed at work.” – perhaps a little of Guy Kawasaki’s “The Art of the Start” might be an antidote: Guy Kawasaki – The Art of the Start

Alltop reminds me of a great technique for dealing with overwhelm: The at-a-glance tool. Alltop gives an at-a-glance view of the best sites on a particular topic. That overwhelmed feeling comes more from what you don’t know, than what you do. The feeling that not everything is on the the RADAR at once, that more is lurking on page 2, 3, 4, … An at-a-glance tool lets you know you’ve got it all in sight.

GTD is also an excellent at-a-glance tool. Yes, there are multiple to do lists (it is a good thing to have buckets), but it collects everything that needs doing into one place. That gives a single view of what needs doing and the confidence that it is a complete view.

If you haven’t got that view already, start by taking a blank sheet of paper and writing down everything that needs doing. Keep going until everything you can think of is down there. Don’t be afraid. It is the first step to getting back on track, and it is going to be manageable.

Second, check out Scott Young‘s excellent post, “20 tips to survive when you’ve overloaded your schedule” – regular readers will spot familiar themes in this summary with my comments:

Stop the leaks:

• Work Your Calendar – block out time to cover your projects, to keep the excess out.
• Say No – don’t take more onto the to do list. Be firm.
• Use Your Network – get help and support, turn your network inside out.

‘Create’ more time:

• Get Up Earlier and Eliminate Time Sinks - Kill the TV, gaming and surfing. You snooze you loose.
• First Things First - always a winning strategy for productivity. Deal with the large rocks, watch out for the frogs.
• Exercise – If your workload is mental, make sure there is physical work to balance it.

Lighten the load:

• Lower Quality Thresholds – Think 80/20 or “good enough is good enough”. This isn’t the time to be a perfectionist. Next
• Explain the Situation – share the burden, although don’t fall into complaining.
• Triage and Defer – Don’t treat what will live without treatment and don’t treat the things that will die. If something isn’t going to make it, fast fail it, rather than wasting more time. If things can be deferred, defer them straight away.

Create a trusted system, like Getting Things Done, so that you can stay on top of things. Your attention is your scarcest resource, use it wisely so that you don’t go into attention bankruptcy. Control where you direct your attention, you control how you spend your time, and you will get the things done that need doing.

Related Posts

• Randomness, Virtualisation and Getting Things Done
• Want to Get More Things Done? Go Ahead and Stick Your Head in a Bucket!
• iPod to Go – The iPod as a GTD capture device
• Dealing with the Do Its That Just Don’t Get Done
• How to Write a Speech in 5 Minutes

I confess it happens to me sometimes. So, how do you avoid it and what do you do about it when it happens? There are a set of practical steps that you can take to get back on track. Follow this list and get back on top of things, and stay on top of things.

The first step

Talk to someone about it. Talking to someone else will bring some objectivity and balance. At the very least it will give a different perspective. Perhaps be bold enough to discuss it with your boss. Employers have a duty of care, even if it doesn’t feel like it. Trust me when I say that it is generally not in your employer’s financial interests to kill you off! At the very least, they would have the costs of training a replacement.

Being overwhelmed leads to high levels of stress, resulting in the fight or flight response. That is a useful if you are a soldier in a war zone, but not in the modern office environment, however war-like the politics may get at times. So, if you are feeling stressed, it can be useful to get out and run! At least take a walk or have a swim to burn off that extra adrenalin.

Get some rest, start with an early night. If you can, take a few days break. It might seem counter intuitive, but having a break means you will have more energy to tackle work when you get back. Even just that decent night’s sleep will help you regain a healthy perspective. Longer term, you may want to think about increasing your level of fitness by planning some regular exercise. If you are generally not sleeping, you might want to seek medical help. The source of stress must be dealt with, or the fight or flight response gives way to the general adaptation syndrome, and eventually burnout.

Invest an evening or a half day in catching up. The harsh reality is that it is going need an additional push from you to get back on top of things, but it is an investment of time that will be returned to you. Procrastination certainly isn’t the answer, even though your brain might want it to be.

If you are already working every weekend and evening, some serious intervention is required. If your employer views this as a mandatory part of the job, I would say book some holiday and use it to find a new job. Unless you love your job more than anything or anyone else, it isn’t worth it, life is just too short. If you are self-employed and have to work at this level, then pick an end date, write it in your diary and determine that you will step back the time requirements by that date. For the majority of people that sort of work regime is not sustainable in the long term – it will do you harm.

Modern work has no natural bounds

In the days of ploughing fields, you knew when you had completed the job and could head home. With today’s knowledge-based working there is a lack of clear endings, and inappropriate use of devices like BlackBerrys isn’t helping in defining limits. You must create bounds and agree them with those that define your work. These have been some of the best conversations I have had with managers and leaders. You will be surprised at the results – if you are not, tell me about it. When you need additional resources, ask for them. If you can’t have them, renegotiate the work load. Remember, you are not bonded labor. Slavery is illegal in most countries around the world.

Most employment contracts will have working hours written into them. Yes, I know that most companies delight in ignoring these. It is very short sighted of them. At least use these hours as a reasonable target. For the self employed, I suggest you make a contract with yourself and have your partner or friends hold you to it. Be reasonable with yourself and others. In the long term, a productive person working less hours is significantly better than an unproductive person working excessive hours. This is true for the company and the individual.

Get to a work rate that you can sustain

The only long term fix is to balance work inputs and outputs, a sustainable work rate. Without this, even after you catch up, you will find yourself behind again. With a fix in place, you won’t get behind, other than for brief periods of time. The final piece is to clear that backlog. Start by writing a quick inventory of what it is overwhelming you. It may not be as bad as you think. Look at the list:

• Can you renegotiate some of your commitments, to create some freedom.
• Look at the largest and most important. Can you enlist help or reduce the scope of the work?
• Are there any that feel like ‘impossible tasks‘? Break them down into smaller chunks.
• Would some of them benefit from some planned abandonment.

Once you have rested, through that early night or short break, book that block of time to catch up. This might mean getting into the office very early for one or two days, a trick which can be amazingly effective. You might choose to stay very late one day instead. Just don’t burn the candle both ends at once! Use this additional work time exclusively for that backlog list. With some focused effort, you will churn through it quickly. As you feel the load lightening, your daily productivity will pick up and you’ll soon be permanently back on track. Now you can focus on staying there, and enjoying life!

Related Posts

• Randomness, Virtualisation and Getting Things Done
• How to Deal With Being Overwhelmed at Work 2
• 5 Ways to Reduce the Stress of Choice
• Overwhelmed by the to do list? Get back on track and stay on track

eDragonu’s recent 7 tips to help you procrastinate in a more productive way reminded me of the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of an overly long to do list. But what do you do with a to do list that gets too long?

Imagine the to do list, like the diagram, as a container with inlets and outlets. Most discussion around productivity is usually focussed around the outlets. How can you get more done? Work harder, work faster, work smarter. Getting the thing done is the best way to get something off of the to do list, as long as that thing was the right thing to do. However, procrastination often stops us getting things done, but that is a topic all to itself. As the to do list grows longer and longer, it becomes harder to prioritise what is one there, and there is that creeping sense of being overwhelmed, which feeds any tendency to procrastinate.

There are two phases to recovering from an exploding to do list:

1. Shrink it.
2. Stop it exploding again.

Doing things isn’t the only way to get items off of the to do list, even though it is the best. Things can be deferred and moved into the diary for some point in the future. However, deferring something doesn’t actually remove it from the set of commitments. It is still there, although there is a temporary relief created by the illusion that it can be done later. Spreading things over time is a good way to reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed, but it can backfire if too many things are pushed out.

There are other ways to remove items from the to do list. One is to abandon an item. When something appears on the the to do list, it has crossed your ‘commitment line’. We have made a commitment to ourselves or to someone else to do something. If we truly become overloaded, then some of those things have to be pushed back over the commitment line. That involves going back to the person the commitment was made to, apologizing and renegotiating the commitment. What stops us abandoning things? It can create a sense of disappointment and a feeling of failure. However, there are times when abandoning something is the right thing to do. Priorities and goals may have changed, or the task may no longer be attainable, it could be part of planned abandonment.

A cunning way to keep things off of the to do list is to do them straight away. There are pros and cons to this technique, but it is very efficient. By acting straight away, you don’t have to worry about managing the task and procrastination doesn’t have a chance to set in. You just need to be sure that the task really was something that needed doing and the moment wasn’t needed for something else that was time critical.

My most recent realization has been to pay close attention to how do things get onto the to do list in the first place. Be careful what crosses that commitment line. Before taking on a commitment, understand how long your to do list already is. Can you commit to more, or is that going to result in a broken commitment? A commitment is a commitment, be it to yourself or to someone else, and it should only be taken on if you have the resources and the will to complete it. A short to do list gives you flexibility, but it takes discipline to get down to that short to do list.

To do list problems? Then do more and sooner, renegotiate when you have to and don’t over commit yourself!

What works for you?

Related Posts

• Randomness, Virtualisation and Getting Things Done
• How to Deal With Being Overwhelmed at Work 2
• How to Deal with Being Overwhelmed at Work