Doing the Most

This used to be me until this year.

I’ve always pushed myself to do more. I think growing-up as an intelligent student (so said my Mum) but not at the top of the class pushed me to try to out-work my peers. And it worked out quite well for me.

Then came 2020, the year the world moved online. I was no exception and fully embraced the Zoom life. At work, we moved our weekly staff meetings online. The only thing was that to ensure that we were all connecting despite this new work-from-home situation, we increased the number of meetings to THREE times a week!!! Even typing that now boggles my mind. Thankfully, we very quickly moved to twice a week, which we kept-up until this year.

For me though, in addition to all the meetings that were now on Zoom or Google Meet, which rapidly filled my days, I went webinar crazy, registering for as many as I could.

The end result was EXHAUSTION. The rest I had planned on getting was out of the window. The books I wanted to finish and the Netflix shows I planned on devouring left un-devoured.

Now, I was doing too much. My daily calendar overflowed with commitments that anyone in their right mind would know that they couldn’t possibly keep. Was I in my right mind? Apparently not.

I lived by the pandemic productivity maxim of “a crisis being a terrible thing to waste” and was determined to make my billions and do impactful work during this period. It was honestly a lot of pressure and gradually over the next two years, I wilted under the load.

As a Mama of 2 young children under 6, I struggled with carving time out to help them with their homework and get my own work done.

Finally, my incredibly brilliant daughter came home with an end-of-term report that was well below her typical performance. It was still a good result, but it was far less than I knew she was capable for and for someone who prided herself on getting things done by dint of hard work, I felt like I had somehow let my daughter down.

On reflection, it’s interesting that I felt like this, while her Dad was probably just happy with her performance or maybe didn’t think it was a cause for serious concern.

Not me. I prayed about it and looked for bible scripture to meditate on each day.

Finally, my mother told me that something had to give.

“You can’t do everything, so you are going to have to let some things go.” She reminded me that life moves in seasons and although she knew how committed I was to my work, maybe I had to focus on my daughter for now.

Over the next few weeks, I found a new schedule. I worked more from home and during the hours that my children were in school, I worked. Once it was time to pick them up from school, I packed up my work and that was it for the day. The afternoons would be for helping them with their homework.

I took things another step by moving my home office outside of the house to a space next door to my house. The process of walking from my house to my new office “to work” for what I know will be a period of about 5 hours pushes me to make the most of the time. I don’t faff around in anyway anymore.

I leave the office each day with activities that I could not get to, but at least I know that I got the most important tasks done for the day.

So in summary, my suggestions are:

• Decide what parts of your life are most important to you at this particular time e.g. spending more time with your children
• Have a plan for each week and each day. List out a few important tasks per day, because the reality is that you won’t be able to get through a list of 10 items.
• Don’t start the workday with email. This is an often-quoted productivity hack and it’s important, because you don’t want to start the day attending to other people’s agenda. Focus on your priority tasks first and then check emails later on.
• Have a hard stop. For me, school pick-up time has forced me to shut down my laptop at specific times of the day.
• Remember that work never finishes. For every task you complete and do well, chances are, it will lead to more work. As they say, “The reward for hard work is more work.”
• Commit to being fully-present in whatever activity you are doing at each moment. So if you are working on a report, focus on that and don’t try to do homework with your children at the same time.
• Schedule some fun things to do, such as lunch with a friend, a walk by yourself, losing yourself in a book. This helps you unwind and focus on other things outside of your core responsibilities. It also gives you something to look forward to.

There are actually a lot more things I could add, but I think this is a good start if you suffer from the urge to “over do.”