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A few days ago I was chatting with the mastermind I run (for lawyers who are fathers who've been called for 10-20 years) and we were chatting about task overwhelm. Stuff is always coming up. Being pulled in a million directions can be enough to lay waste to the best plans. And it's not just about work - you still want to be the best parent and spouse you can be at home.

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So how do we do it? Some high level thoughts from the conversation:

  1. Prioritization - you've got to know your most important priorities, and then actually prioritize them.

  2. 80/20 and self-compassion - Accept that "perfect" is probably unattainable - put yourself in a position to succeed and trust that you're doing well enough.

  3. Streamline the process - create rules that will help you navigate the days more easily.

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It's these rules I just want to spend an extra minute with. Having them allows you to bypass the extra thinking (and willpower) that might otherwise be necessary to perform your best. For example:

  • If you're constantly saying yes to too many things, maybe one of your rules is to wait 24 hours before saying yes (you can say no whenever you want, but to commit to a new task you need to sleep on it first). If you're a junior and this isn't feasible, maybe you institute it only in your personal life.

  • Or maybe you've noticed that when you get a substantive response about a complicated subject within 10 minutes, you find yourself wondering how considered their opinion is. So you make a rule for yourself: respond immediately to say you're on it, but (where urgency allows) give it at least two hours before responding substantively.

  • Maybe you find at the end of the day you're constantly scrambling to finish the one (or more) things that ABSOLUTELY need to get done that day. You might institute a rule that you start each day with those things.

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See how each rule arises from the circumstances? There's almost no universal rules - you need to spend some time with your own work-flow and work-product (and what you WANT each to look like) in order to experiment with rules that might work for you. Then you need to experiment. Reflect, take a step, then do it all again. 😊

 

 

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