While I generally consider myself an organized person, there are moments when I feel completely out of control. Times during which I get up each day and crank through a to-do list that is scattered across multiple open windows on my laptop, at least two different post-it note pads, my desk calendar, and one or two journals. Or I have 4 different projects going at once and I think about one while working on another and pop over to do something on that but then remember there’s something else I really should be doing.
Sound familiar?
The first step is recognizing that I’m in that place of chaos. Once that happens I can manage it. Depending on the depth of the chaos, it can usually be done in 15 minutes. I call this strategy a “personal step-back.”
The Personal Step Back
I adapted this strategy (including the name) from a manager I once had who used “step backs” to get aligned with the leaders on her team. When she felt unaligned with what someone on her team was doing she would say “I think we need a step back.” It was one of the only things I actually appreciated about this particular manager – step backs can be incredibly useful for getting on the same page. It gives space to zoom out, remind one another of overarching goals, and identify and discuss places of misalignment.
In this case my personal step back is about aligning myself with… well, myself. It’s really just taking a pause and getting organized. I like to use a whiteboard or a chart paper (call back to my teaching days, I think). I categorize the buckets of work I am trying to do. I think about their relative importance. I set some reasonable goals for each while looking at the big picture all together. Are these things, as prioritized here, going to move me towards my overarching goals? And then I set a plan for how I’m going to tackle these things in an organized fashion.
This might mean setting time blocks for particular projects. It might mean scrapping a whole bucket of work that is less important than the others. Or it might mean revising my goals and targets to be more realistic.
I want to be clear here – this is not rocket science! It’s just a reminder that every once in a while we need to hit the pause button and take ourselves out of the weeds. And sometimes it’s simply the tactile experience of writing with a marker on a chart paper that does the “stepping back.” This might take 15 minutes or it might take an hour – but whatever it takes, be sure you do it.
Then capture your notes somewhere that you can refer back to them later and check in on yourself. Mark your calendar as to when you are going to do that. It just might give you something concrete to celebrate. If not, it will give you the opportunity to step back again and revise your targets.
What do you do when you are feeling the swirl?
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