My clients generally find their way to me when they’re just at that uncomfortable level of busyness. They’re still holding it together, but they feel that if anything were to go just slightly wrong, everything would come crashing down. And that’s a stressful place to be operating in.
Similarly, businesses know that their teams are overstretched and that they therefore would do well to find ways of supporting their staff. But ironically, they can’t or won’t find the time to address the issue and look for ways of doing less. The message is to do more with less, work smarter not harder (what a joke).
Whatever the circumstances, people are stretched to breaking point and there is no solution that does not involve taking time out: to acknowledge the workload properly in the first place, to observe how many plates we’re spinning, to articulate how we are feeling, to re-connect with why we’re doing this in the first place. And then we can start thinking about doing things differently.
So in this hamster wheel, we need to stop at some point and step aside for a while. We need to create some space to de-clutter our workload and diaries. The alternative, sadly, is not all that pretty and will often lead to burn-out and other serious consequences.
It’s precisely when you think you couldn’t possibly stop for 5 minutes, or that your team couldn’t possibly take half a day out, that it’s critical you do just that. At the latest, one year down the line, you’ll be grateful that you did.
Further resource:
If you find yourself overloaded and don’t know where to start, here is a free short course I put together with a few tools to get you going: Beat the overwhelm: getting started with de-cluttering.
For more, get in touch.