Stop to Move Forward
If you're stuck at work and you want to move forward, sometimes the best strategy is to STOP. "How's that again?" you say. "I need to stop to move forward?"
Yep! I'm taking this from my own experience. When I'm buried with work, I'm not really in a best position to make good decisions and do good work. Ironically, when I'm overloaded, I am also under more pressure to deliver. Yet the pressure itself makes me work more slowly and less efficiently. I've tried every trick on the book to solve this problem, but so far, what really works is to pause, take a breather and take stock of what's happening.
Let's review the steps:
- Stop. Drop whatever you are doing and sit back.
- Relax. Take a breather. Do something not related to work. I keep toys on my desk and play around for a while to loosen my neurons a bit. My favorites right now are a spinning top and Play-Doh, but you can choose your own. You can also walk around your office or you may simply close your eyes and do some breathing exercises.
- Take stock of what's happening. When drowning in detail, it helps to dissociate yourself from the details and look at the big picture. It helps to ask these questions:
- "What should be my priorities now?" Is it money? Is it quality of work?
- "Which tasks on my plate can I delay?" Can you defer some tasks (usually those that will not cause a major impact if delayed). Maybe you can negotiate with some clients who are willing to delay some deliverables.
- "What long-term goals am I neglecting?" If you're stuck with one task and you feel your brain can do nothing more, distract yourself by doing something else. This is a good time to return to tasks that are attached to long-term goals. Long-term goals usually get neglected because they are not very urgent. But because you set them aside, you often postpone them until their deadline is over. So use the stuck time to attend to long-term goals.
To give our room a thorough cleaning, we need to empty it first. As Yoda and the zen monks say, "Unlearn you must."
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