Lagging Behind

Time to clean house

Answers that are long due, a backlog of emails piling up, a few meetings here and there that are messing up with your schedule, training to resume, a bunch of things to execute before yesterday, and an additional set of tasks as cherries on the cake. And a certain level of stress, pressure, and anxiety as whipped cream.

Sometimes it feels like we’re - really - lagging behind. Well, today is one of those days for me. Yet, I didn’t want to add to the list of things that I had to do for my failure to post that Sunday note. So here I am, writing about my struggle, but more importantly, how to overcome that state.

First, acknowledge to yourself that you’ve fucked up and that it’s time to clean house. Don’t blame yourself too much. It’s just adding more pain to it. It happens. Be mindful that the world isn’t waiting for you. It’s moving on faster and better than you think. You’re just battling against yourself. So get to it…

There are things that you can do now before the end of the day. For me: inbox zero, thank you notes, answering a couple of important texts, prioritizing tasks, and adjusting my schedule to do those tasks next week. But you don’t start with that.

You start with the latter because it’s the most important part, to adjust your schedule in order to find more time and space to get things done within the next few days. Be careful; a rookie mistake is to postpone everything for the week after and feel totally overwhelmed there and then.

Don’t be afraid to say no, to turn a lunch into a coffee, and a coffee into a call, or even to cancel things because you don’t want to add that to the long list of things you’ve got to do already.

The second act is to list all the things that you must achieve or start executing next week. Don’t spread them too much. Find one or two slots during the week, not more. I suggest first things in the morning, otherwise, you’re carrying a mental backlog, that feels heavy, and you’re often tired by the time you must get to it…

The third act is to get back to the very first things: emails, texts…etc. Don’t think twice. Just get into the flow and keep pushing until you’re done with all that.

Note that often we feel overwhelmed, yet we fail to express clearly that feeling to others, and instead of coming clean and saying the truth, we come up with shitty excuses that people don’t buy anyway. It’s way better to say clearly that it’s not a good time rather than making something up when we’re adjusting our plan.

Let’s do it!