Keep calm and carry on: Taming the siren call of overwhelm and overwork

If I only had more time, I would do so much more

Overworked manager putting in 60-hour weeks

It’s alarming how many professionals see overworking as a badge of honour. Here is the fact: if you are constantly overwhelmed and too busy – something somewhere somehow is wrong. 

Burning yourself out with the same routine works for a short while until it doesn’t. Alas, this is a common mistake we all make – I know because I’ve made the same mistake. Read on to learn more about my journey from an overwhelmed, feisty, flustered newbie to an equanimous professional with arguably more impact. 

Background

As a first-time manager in a VUCA environment, my days were unpredictable – I would come to work on Mondays, resigned to battling fires all week: an angry customer call, someone quitting, or some random task. 

My naive out-of-box strategy was brute force and meant working round the clock at an unsustainable pace. I plunged in enthusiastically – Late night call? No problem. Weekend meeting with an angry customer? Sign me on!! Some random surprise? Give me another!!! 

The early wins from this unsustainable approach beguiled me into doing even more – I was soon clocking in close to 80-hour weeks, but there was still more to do! I was warned about the slippery slope I was treading, but I ignored all the red flags. Eventually, I burned out, made avoidable mistakes, and had less impact. 

How I learned to stay calm and carry on

Over the years of working in different organizations, I’ve evolved a resilient strategy to handle chaos and pressure. 

My approach evolved through 4 phases: tracking, communicating, broadcasting, and focusing. The following sections describe the lessons learned at each phase.

1. Tracking: I started laying out my weekly goals in my 1:1; it was a way to itemize all the burning fires in my space and ask my manager for help. I did not communicate the challenges well enough, so I struggled with getting buy-in. This was an excellent start – it showed me the importance of planning my week.  
2. Communicating: When I moved from that team, I had learned my lesson about focusing on adequate communication. So this time, I used a much better PowerPoint template; it was also for me to track my progress and ensure I was focused on the highest priority items for the team. I was too ambitious and tried to do too many things simultaneously; it was also quite tactical since I was still honing my strategic nous then. While I rarely completed everything in my overly ambitious weekly goals, it was very effective and communicated my intent – my manager knew what I was working on and the overall direction.
3. Broadcasting: I continued the same planning approach but decided to share broadly with the team to facilitate alignment. Two articles influenced this: the weekly 15 – 5 and Don’t End The Week With Nothing. By publicly sharing, I sought to become more accountable and carry the team along. I switched to writing emails and dropped using slides, which meant more preparation time. However, the clarity and alignment made it a suitable investment, and leading a team spread across three continents meant I had to schedule these emails to arrive at the optimal time. A couple of my reports commended the clarity they got from the regular emails.
4. Focusing: Rather than listing everything I wanted, I started maintaining a prioritized list of things to do. This evolution has me relentlessly focused on the week’s top priority, making it easier to say no. This priority list helps me to filter out non-essential tasks, and it’s also a great way to track non-urgent tasks and ensure they eventually get done rather than fall between the cracks. Journaling has been a feedback mechanism to accelerate my learning and growth.

The Weekly 15- 5 Format

Section	Description	Why	Category
Top of mind	A section highlighting your top priority item for the week – typically should not be more than one or at most two.	Great way to communicate your focus to your leadership, team, and partners.	Required
Updates from last week	Summary of progress on last week’s tasks	An excellent way to show accountability and communicate progress	Optional
Important team information	Information about training, upcoming events, reminders, etc.News for the team: tidbits from past meetings, weekly syncs with essential stakeholders, and info to help the team meet its goals.	Awareness	Optional
3 Ps	People: Managerial information for the team, e.g. career discussions, rewards, etc. Process: process experiments, improvements Product: The product, e.g. engineering or roadmap etc	The goal is that if any of these 3 Ps are empty week over week, that is an early warning signifying neglect of a core managerial requirement. This is a good mechanism to initiate repair actions.	Required
Link to last week’s edition	Link to the last post	Posterity – make it easy for readers to follow the chain back in time.	Optional

The Work Journal

This journal lets me identify my learnings, feelings, and journey through the week. The ‘What I am feeling’ section has been revolutionary, allowing me to identify and break out of destructive self-doubt loops. It also helps with prioritizing and staying in control of my week and ensuring I stay focused on my top goals; it helps me recognize when I want to take the easy way out and avoid my top priorities for the week. 

Here are some sections in the work journal

• What I am learning
  • I need to track and see if I am improving over time. Stagnation creeps silently – you look back and realize that you just spent 12 months doing the same thing repeatedly.
  • Soft skills – How many decisions am I making?
• What I am feeling
  • This section is crucial to know what I am feeling and modulate my emotions. The art of writing how I feel forces me to engage the logical parts of my brain; even at times, writing this out and coming back to read helps me move on.
  • Examples of feelings?
    • Being laissez-faire: spotting issues and letting them be because of fear.
    • Avoiding crucial conversations because I don’t want to hurt feelings.
• Plans for people, products, and process
  • This way, I can track and be sure that I am paying attention to all the crucial parts and aspects of my job requirements.
• Appreciations
  • Things I am proud of
  • Things folks have complimented on
  • Makes it easy to write reviews eventually

Staying calm: Using the journal and 15 – 5

Start of the week

I begin the week by identifying what needs to be done – a quick scan of my journal, emails, calendar, Slack reminders, and workboards provides a panoramic view of the landscape and is usually enough to avoid surprises.

After that, I estimate and rank these tasks by significance – not everything needs to be done; I need to ruthlessly prioritize the most important tasks that align with the strategic intent and direction. I also set deadlines to ensure I have enough time to complete the most crucial tasks. The biggest benefit of this approach is that it helps me recognize when I’m avoiding significant obligations. 

Additionally, this approach has allowed me to make steady progress on important matters before they become urgent. At the end of this process, I know my most significant priority for the week.

During the week

My top priority is to complete the tasks outlined on my calendar. However, unexpected situations may arise, and it’s in such cases that the prioritized list shines. If a seemingly significant issue arises, I include it in the prioritized list instead of impulsively jumping on it.

This helps in two ways:

1. For non-urgent asks: Writing it in my tracker ensures I can get to it when appropriate. That removes the nagging worry at the back of my mind that I am dropping balls. I trust the process and tooling to help me stay on top of issues in an accountable manner.
2. For urgent asks: What’s most significant is that it surfaces the hidden compromises and sacrifices I’ve typically made unconsciously. By listing these priorities, I can make the decision process more explicit, and it becomes clearer what my priorities should be.

When something pops up, write it down and see if it needs to bump something else in priority.

End of the week

I review my journal and assess my progress at the end of each week. The entire week review is fast and takes about 30 – 45 minutes but has outsized ROI. There are two phases: one is the reflection, while the other is the housekeeping. 

Phase 1: Reflection

Here are some questions I ask myself:

• Am I making measurable progress towards strategic goals?
• Are there emerging risks to stay ahead of?
• What new things did I learn?
• What am I stagnating on?
• What should I change next week?
• Why do I keep pushing out a task week over week? Is this something I dislike doing?
• What am I excited about?

This technique has ruthlessly exposed the things I am avoiding and don’t enjoy doing – it’s hard to justify missing the same promise three weeks in a row – in situations like this, I force myself to do the task or question why the important task keeps getting kicked down the road.

Phase 2: Housekeeping

This phase prunes items that have not progressed in weeks. If I’ve yet to start on a task for 4+ weeks, it is probably unimportant, and I should let it go. It’ll surface again if it is vital. This also includes closing all the tabs with those ‘amazing’ articles I promised myself I would read someday.

Then, I try to automate commonly recurring tasks: creating new bookmarks, spending time on tools, or setting up reminders. 

Conclusion

The 15-5 and work journal are complementary tools that provide a healthy balance between short-term and long-term progress. The two tools provide a beneficial countervailing effect.

The weekly 15-5 is a great way to track progress and execution on a tactical level. At the same time, the journal provides the necessary checks and balances to ensure the tactical execution is consistent with the strategic goal. 

Similarly, the consistent stream of public communication in the 15-5 reduces the chances of your strategy (in the private journal) deviating significantly from reality. Closely monitoring the 15-5 should reveal trends that validate or disprove progress. 

This is especially important for experienced professionals since the feedback cycles are much longer. You want to know you are progressing steadily in the right direction every week; consistency over time is more effective than sporadic bursts of intensity.

I hope this approach helps you to identify and prioritise the tasks appropriately while maintaining a sustainable pace. I hope it helps you stay calm on the interrupt-driven days.

Share your thoughts in the comments!