I would like to suggest that you can be temporarily too busy – and you’ll come up for air tomorrow or next week or next month – and you can be genuinely overloaded to the point where you are going under.
We could call these 100% loaded – with variations from one day to the next:
– and “120% loaded”, where you are losing ground. You might have good days but overall you are losing ground and your list of things to do is getting longer and longer. Whether it’s your fault or your boss is giving you an impossible task doesn’t matter – what is certain is that there’s a problem:
And by the way, BOTH of these are bad. You might think that 120 is bad while 100 is perfect, but I would suggest that really you want to be at 80% so you have 20% headroom for a) creativity and improving things and b) coping with peaks in demand without a reduction in service (customers, internal or external, having to wait a while for what they want from you). I call this “nicely busy”:
I would say that many people THINK they are at 120% but really it’s 100%. You ARE keeping up, overall, it’s just have 50% of your days are overloaded – you fail to finish your jobs to do list on half of your days. It’s pretty depressing and pretty stressful. You never know for sure that you’re going to get an easier patch in the new future when you can come up for air. it’s like in those films where someone pushes your head down the toilet and only lets you back out of the water just when you’ve nearly drowned. We don’t want to live our lives like that!!
So the first thing to do is to negotiate over WHEN you do things, so you can move some of the workload to later days when (hopefully) you’ll have a bit of time. This is “surviving at 100%”.
Next, you need to get the 100% down to 80%, so that nearly EVERY day feels good, feels in control. You do this by saying no to some stuff, negotiating to only do part of some stuff or to spend less time on some stuff, by delegating more, by improving your systems (spreadsheets, automating repeating tasks, AI, fewer time wasters, reducing interruptions, grouping similar tasks together, etc) and finally, being less fussy about unimportant tasks (it’s great to be fussy about important stuff by the way!).
And of course, if you are 120% then you have to get it down to 100% to start with, and then later to 80% – and to do that it’s the same list of options:
- saying no to some stuff,
- negotiating to only do part of some stuff or to spend less time on some stuff,
- by delegating more,
- by improving your systems (spreadsheets, automating repeating tasks, AI, fewer time wasters, reducing interruptions, grouping similar tasks together, etc)
- and finally, being less fussy about unimportant tasks.
These options are discussed in detail on my various time management courses, e.g. linkedin learning, and udemy.
