2014-03-28 09:17:46
Influencers | 28 March 2014
Are you crazy busy? Overworked?
Are you sure? It s a common refrain from friends or our own mouths that we
re too busy and have too much to do. For some, being loaded down with work and
other commitments is a badge of honour, a sign of importance.
But should we be glorifying busy? Are we really overworked or have we just lost
focus on the most important elements of our job? It s a topic LinkedIn
Influencers considered this week.
Are we really overworked or have we just lost focus on the most important
elements of our job?
Here is what some of them had to say.
Guy Kawasaki, co-founder All-Top, advisor to start-ups
Our two main metrics for success are money and power, and they drive us to
work longer hours, sleep with our phones and tablets, miss important moments
with our families, and impact our health, writes Kawasaki in his post Let s
Stop the Glorification of Busy.
But it s possible to make other choices, wrote Kawasaki. He offered 10 tips
from Arianna Huffington, founder of Huffington Post, for creating a life of
well-being, wisdom, and wonder. Among them:
Redefine success. There's no prize for working the most hours per week or
making the most money. At the end of our lives, we're all about the same amount
of dust, so the question is how much joy you've brought into people's lives and
how much have you made the world a better place, he wrote.
Sleep your way to the top. Get more sleep. Not getting enough sleep is
associated with health risks and higher stress levels. Every element of your
life can be improved by getting the proper amount of sleep, he wrote.
Find solitude. Meditation helps relieve stress and helps us tap our inner
voice. If you don't like being with yourself, how can you expect others to like
being with you? Kawasaki wrote. Many of my best ideas have come to me when I
am driving alone. I've often thought that my creativity has declined because I
do not take long drives as often!
But, even with the tips, Kawasaki wrote that it s a matter of personal choice.
The question is, are you ready to stop the glorification of busy and start
redefining success, he wrote.
Jeff Haden, owner, BlackBird Media
When you work double-digit hours and Sundays are no longer a day of rest,
feeling overworked can become the new normal, wrote Haden in his post Simple,
Objective Ways to Know You re Overworked. Even so you ll eventually hit a
wall, and when that happens it can take days and even weeks to recover the
enthusiasm, creativity and motivation you ve lost.
To alter this new normal , first you have to know the difference between
overwork and just feeling overworked. Haden offered some techniques from
professional mountain biker Jeremiah Bishop that apply to professionals, as
well, to ways to ensure you stay at your professional best. Among them:
Check your resting heart rate. Every day, before you get out of bed, take your
pulse, he wrote. Most of the time your heart rate will stay within a range of
a few beats per minute. But when you re overworked and stressed your system
sends more oxygen to your body and brain by increasing your heart rate. (The
same thing happens when athletes over train and their bodies struggle to
recover.) If your heart rate is up in the morning, do whatever it takes to get
a little extra rest or sleep that night.
Check your weight. Lose or gain more than a percent of body weight from one
day to the next and something s wrong. Maybe yesterday was incredibly stressful
and you failed to notice you didn t eat and drink enough, Haden wrote. Or
maybe you failed to notice just how much you actually ate. Lack of nourishment
and hydration can put the hurt on higher-level mental functions.
Haden wrote that is important to keep track of each of these over a period of
time so you develop a feel for what is normal for you. Pay special attention on
weekends and vacations, and if you notice a positive dramatic change it s a
sure sign you need to change your workday routine.
Jon Whitmore, chief executive officer at ACT Inc
When I visited the CEO at Dickies, the clothing company, in Dallas in the
mid-1990s, she had this sign tacked to her wall and a smaller version sitting
on her desk (that said) The main thing is to keep the main thing the main
thing , he wrote in his post The Main Thing.
Whitmore wrote that he asked her why the signs were displayed so prominently.
Her reply, he wrote: It s so much easier to let yourself be distracted by the
little things. These easy-to-fix little things can keep you from focusing on
the often much harder-to-achieve main things.
It s a lesson for all of us Whitmore wrote. By fixing the little things, you
feel like you re really accomplishing things, that you re being productive and
effective, that you're a real leader, he wrote. But you re fooling yourself.
The MAIN THING is not being addressed. It s being pushed to the side.
That lack of focus and over-busy work landscape is exacerbated by technology,
he wrote. After all, he saw this sign in the mid-1990s when there was no
all-consuming Internet, only modest use of emails and cell phones, no texting,
no Skype, no Twitter, and no smartphones or tablets, he wrote. Keeping the
main thing the main thing is 10 times harder now.
But it s critical, Whitmore wrote. Yes, the small things need attention, lest
they become a main thing. But if you truly focus your concentrated efforts on
the main thing, you ll be surprised how many of the little things vanish
(because they weren t important in the first place), or the little things get
attended to much more quickly because you realise their insignificance relative
to the main thing.