The Fire Fighter
Everything feels like a crisis to you and you spend much of your time putting out fires, leaving you without much time for your biggest priorities.
What to do: Identify your most important goals. List the things you need to accomplish within a given timeframe. Work on other items only if you finish your must-do’s for the timeframe. Also, try setting aside “work blocks” on your calendar to work on your highest priorities, and don’t let yourself schedule over them.
MORE IDEAS FROM THE ARTICLE
Getting sidetracked by minor concerns and are never quite able to bring the focus that you need to larger projects.
What to do: Build extra time when planning your projects. Also, physically block out distractions, like by isolating yourself, turning your desk to face the wall rather than the doorway or using noise-canceling headphones to help keep you focused.
You routinely fail to complete tasks because you underestimate the time necessary to finish them.
What to do: Assume as a rule that things will take longer than you expect. Start earlier than you think you need to in order to have a buffer for eventualities. Also, investigate how long past assignments took and why, and identify patterns there that can guide future decisions.
You often say yes to requests and commit to so much you feel overwhelmed and exhausted.
What to do: Keep track of what you need to do, how much time it will take and don’t accept nonpriority tasks if they are going to conflict with yours.
Your professional life is being affected because you often postpone working, find hard to start working or do low-priority work instead of high priority.
What to do: Starting is the hardest part. Divide your work into small tasks and schedule time to tackle at least one of them a day. Setting yourself deadlines may work too.
RELATED IDEAS
You’re very eager to socialize and every interaction with you becomes a long drawn out conversation - especially if there's an unpleasant task dawning that you'd like to put off.
Solution: Plan your day to focus yourself on work and get your daily tasks organized. Remind yourself that work and social are different spheres and that work comes first. (You may have to do this repeatedly throughout the day if you're an extremely social person.)
- Always saying “Yes” to requests, leads to an excess of work to manage and consequentially decreased focus.
- Lack of organization wastes mental energy with fending off mental fatigue, stress, and anxiety.
- Not taking breaks leads you to burn out, which brings down your interest and productivity
- Having bad punctuality leads to rushes to finish work and prevents you from effectively managing your time.
- Poorly defined goals leave your work without structure and prevent you from building a prioritized list of things to get done.
- Not having a to-do list, or having one that lacks specific times and actions, makes it hard for you to structure your day.
- Adopting perfectionist thinking leads to loss of control of your time as you focus too much on a single task and ignore others.
- Distractions make it hard to keep an effective workflow.
This is for the constantly over-committed - those who struggle to fit everything into a single day cycle.