Staying Motivated When You Are Overloaded

We all have days where we feel completely overwhelmed with our workload, we arrive in the morning welcomed by mounds of work that get us completely demotivated before we start the day.

We've fallen victim to this vicious cycle too many times during our working lives. It’s one of those things you are difficult escape. Some days will be absolutely chaotic when the end is never in sight and the work continues to pile up and others are smooth sailing and an absolute dream.

Organise Your Desk

Chances are you've walked into your office and your desk is just piled high with paperwork, somewhere under there is your computer keyboard which you need to find to get the important reports done and check your emails.

A great motivational tip is to get organised. When you first arrive at your office, or better still at the end of the day, take a few minutes to organise your desk. Put the piles of paperwork into order; get the filing away to clear the clutter so that your keyboard is available for use.

Getting the papers off your desk and neatly into in-trays will make a huge difference to the way you work. You can even prioritise your paperwork, which is the next step to staying motivated.

A clean desk is a clean slate, leaving you ready to challenge the chaotic day ahead.


Prioritise

When you feel overloaded and overwhelmed, the best way to manage that is to prioritise your work. You will notice when listing the work you need to get through that not everything is urgent and needs to get done right now, giving you the opportunity to leave it until later. Indeed, some tasks that were on your list maybe don’t have to be done at all!

Prioritising is such an important part of staying motivated. If you have a clear list of what needs to get done in order of urgency, you can work your way through the list feeling achievement as each job is completed in a timely manner.

I always suggest with urgent tasks, put the harder ones first, completing the harder tasks first gets them out of the way enabling you to get on with the easier ones. I’ve always found this a great way to get my jobs done when they just keep piling up and there never seems to be an end to it all.


Delegate

Learning the art of delegation doesn't come naturally to many people, but when you are in a position where you cannot handle your workload; there may be times when smaller and easier tasks can be delegated to someone else.

This takes some of the stress off yourself, whether it’s a stats spreadsheet that need to be sent off or a few brochures that need to be posted, these are simple tasks you can easily pass onto another colleague who has some spare time on their hands to help you out.


Breaks

I cannot stress the importance of taking breaks enough. I have been guilty of shoving a sandwich down my throat whilst manically typing away with one hand. I think we all have done this when we’re overloaded, but surprisingly I soon learned that by taking breaks meant I was more productive.

If your workload for today is too much to complete, I'm not saying take an entire hour for lunch, but a half an hour walk around the office or neighbourhood, or a quiet sit down to eat your lunch is a must.

Getting back to work feeling refreshed will give you motivation to get going again. Often a couple of small five minute breaks during the course of the day can give you the strength to keep on going even when you feel there is no end in sight.

Targets and Rewards

Setting yourself simple targets is a great way to remain motivated. Start with your to-do list and work your way through it, setting small targets such as complete the first five tasks on your list and then you can have a fifteen minute break is a great motivational target that can keep you steaming ahead.

After the five tasks, take your break, have a nice cuppa, enjoy a slice of cake, eat your lunch, phone your friend, whatever the reward is you've offered yourself, do it, before heading onto the next target.

Remaining motivated when things are overwhelming is so difficult and soon we become despondent, which in turn actually reduces your productivity. Remaining focused, setting yourself clear targets and offering yourself rewards is the best way to achieve everything you need to achieve for today.


Stop the Emails

Whilst you can’t stop the phone from ringing, you can stop yourself from constantly checking your emails. I used to do this all the time, which meant my targets would fly out of the window as I found urgent emails that needed responses.

Set yourself times when you can check your emails. This way you can set your targets, be productive and when you do check your email at set times, you can add urgent items to your to-do list.

By doing this you aren't all over the place, you aren't flipping from one job to another, you are getting your head down, being productive, staying motivated and getting through the overload in an organised manner, which in turn leads to success.

-o-

You are in the position of a high-level executive and “with great power comes great responsibility”, but you do need to smile now and again! Smiling when someone walks past your office or having a good laugh with colleagues is a fantastic stress relief and helps boost motivation. Try it now!

Exceptional Leaders are experts at creating rapport and trust

Interpersonal relationships work best if there is a base of trust and rapport, for instance, between a manger and his team, a salesman and his clients. First impressions are made usually in the first few seconds of meeting someone and can be hard to change if you create the wrong one! We have all had an experience of meeting someone and either instantly liking them or disliking and mistrusting them. Often, this has nothing to with what was said, more an ‘intuition’ or feeling. These instances show us how important our non- verbal impact has on others and if our visual cues don’t match the words coming from our mouths, the wrong impression can be created.

The ice skaters Torvill and Dean, are the best examples I can think of how our body language creates amazing partnerships. They have an instinctive rapport with each other and their dancing is faultless, all with body language and no words! Meeting the horses in our equine assisted development workshops is a very quick and easy way to learn about our non- verbal language and the impression we create. Observing the herd behaviour, you can see the smooth easy interactions and the fluidity of the horses together. They are so tuned in to each other they seem to move as if one body. By virtue of their honest and non- judgemental feedback we can quickly learn how to establish rapport and trust with them. This can effectively be translated into our human relationships both at work and in our personal lives.

You all have the skill of reacting to each other’s body language and can hone and perfect this using equine assisted development. You can use this same open, honest and interested to know you approach with the people you meet. Very soon you will find that people are instinctively drawn to you and will reflect your behaviour.

Leaders Cause Results!

True problem solving isn’t about getting someone else to come up with a solution for us. It is about training ourselves to come up with answers.

We all have problems thrust on us at some time in our lives, whether it is at work or at home. Clients used to contact me, share a problem, ask for my help and wait for me to give them the solution. This method may or may not be successful, and seems to me to be like a child putting their hand up in class and asking teacher for the answer. Great if the teacher is the font of all knowledge! However, I find it leaves another issue; the client remains a victim. Next time a problem crops up, they are in no better a position to solve the issue for themselves.

Our job as leaders is to guide people towards solving their own problems and nowadays with guidance, I elicit clients’ own solutions to a problem. (If you know you have a problem, you also must know at least one solution to that problem!) Once the client crystalises their thoughts and focusses on the outcome they want, they usually realise there is a way to overcome the original obstacle. Along the way, they have learned how to tackle problem solving for themselves.

The assistance of horses can help us all to hone this skill really quickly. When we take a problem into the arena with the horses (even if the problem is just a thought in our head), and try to burden them with it, the immediate feedback causes us to stop and think about our communication and the impact it has on others.

The horses wait patiently for us to adapt our thinking and develop new strategies. They consistently give honest feedback on our efforts which causes us to make changes within ourselves, to achieve the outcome we want. In this unique environment we can rapidly develop new beliefs about ourselves, and become proactive overcoming challenges.

Leadership is about guiding and influencing the direction of others and horses are very effective leaders in showing us how we can stop being victims of a problem. Instead we can take ownership of dilemmas and take action to cause the result we want. Once enhanced, these new-found problem-solving skills can be employed to cause others in your team or business to solve their own problems.

Enhance your Productivity - ‘Don’t Check Your Email First Thing in the Morning!’

I know what you did this morning...

Don’t worry – I’m not a stalker!  I bet I know what you did when you got into the office this morning after you took your coat off, got a nice cuppa, had a chat with your colleagues and then turned your computer on.  You checked your email, didn’t you?

Why did you do that?  Have you ever questioned why you check your email first thing in the morning?  Probably not.  I didn’t.  I was as ‘guilty’ as you of this habit.  But research and studies show that doing just that has a detrimental effect on your productivity.  Frequently checking your email throughout the day can also inhibit how much you get done.   

The following ‘good practice’* with email is based not just on research, studies and advice from experts in productivity, but also on my experiences and trial and error.  Not checking my email as soon as I start the working day has had a profound effect on what I focus on and what I get done in the morning.  So much so, I feel so chuffed with my output in the morning, that it sets a lovely tone and mood for the rest of my day! 

[* - Note that I used the term ‘good practice’ and not ‘best practice’.  I believe that there is no best practice in how you work and how you can improve your productivity, output and indeed your job satisfaction.  What might be ‘best practice’ for me, might not work so well for you.  Also, you may adapt and improve on a technique I have written about below that you find works much better for you.  As with all articles on ‘top tips’ and advice, treat it like a buffet – pick n’ mix what you think are good ideas, try it and then consume more of what works best (or indeed spit out what you don’t like – although I try not to do that in public at buffets…another top tip!)]

In a future blog article, I’m going to share some advice on how to deal with ‘Email Overload’ and a process to clearing out, and keeping clear, a daunting inbox full of tens, if not hundreds, of emails.  But in the meantime, with so many demands on your time and with multiple people wanting your attention, it’s no wonder you feel the urge to see what your email inbox has in store for you when you get into the office.  But try to resist this urge!  Here’s why…

We check our email way too often – not just in the morning.  A survey of over 2,200 workers in the UK and USA painted an unhappy picture of the obsession many people have with their email. 

Office workers now feel more compelled to check email outside of work to keep up and advance their careers. A fifth of Brits who check email outside of business hours do so because they feel they are expected to provide quick responses, even outside regular business hours.  But someone sending an email does not usually expect a quick response (see results of another survey of over 3,500 people below).  Almost half would like a response within a day.  If they wanted a rapid answer to an issue, they would have called you or come over to your office.  So, do you really need to check your email as soon as you get to work?

Survey: “When Do You Expect Email Replies?” “I expect a reply within 10 minutes. I know they've gotten the email, so they should respond right away” - 3% “Sometime within 30 minutes. Don't interrupt your flow, but get back to me ASAP” – 7% “I can wait about an hour; I've got other stuff to do too. Just get back to me sooner rather than later” – 9% “As long as they respond within a few hours, I'm happy. If it were that urgent, I could walk over to them or call them” - 27% “I expect an answer within the day. Any longer than that, and I have no way of knowing if they even got it” - 48% Other - 6%

Even though almost half of us don’t expect a response so quickly, paradoxically 45% of us are afraid to go without checking their email because they might miss something important.  In fact, 14% of the respondents to the survey who check work email outside of regular business hours cited that they do work email either before they get out of bed in the morning or while in bed before they fall asleep at night!  It’s clear that many people are becoming obsessed with checking email first thing in the morning.  But this bad habit will probably make you work less effectively.

Why?  It boils down to this: if you start going through your inbox first thing in the morning, you lose any chance you had of going full steam ahead on your important project or task of the morning.  You immediately start the working day by distracting yourself with everyone else's needs. 

As soon as you get to your desk, work on something important for 30-45 minutes (discuss with your boss what this is if you’re not sure), and only then check your email.  If you can stand it, wait even longer. Some days I personally don't check email at all until after lunch...and I have a iPhone where I can receive emails 24/7 wherever I am! 

As long as you're ignorant of everything else that's going on outside, you can concentrate on what you want to work on – and what’s important for you and your job role.  You don't know what fires need to be put out that you can’t affect anyway, you don't know about that the cakes that are in the kitchen, and you don't know about that funny video your colleague sent you.

In general, you should already identify what you need to work on when you start your day. If you start checking email, you will move to one of a million other things that supposedly need your attention instead, when they're probably less important.

Managing Expectations – letting others know

If what you have just read resonates with you and you are going to try not checking emails first thing in the morning, then it is a good idea to let others know what you are doing – especially your boss (if you have one)!  Your office is probably very close to them and so you might have already got a system in place to deal with urgent issues – usually the one that involves him or her barging in! 

To help control their email impulse in the morning, some people have adopted the discipline of checking their emails at set times during the day – e.g. at 11am and 4pm.  This is an example of ‘batching’ tasks (performing like tasks at set times, between which you let them accumulate), and your success with batching will depend on two factors:

1. Your ability to train others to respect these intervals and, much more difficult,
2. Your ability to discipline yourself to follow your own rules

As well as your boss, you might want to let others know of your new way of working with regards to email.  Just like any other way of communication, doing this face-to-face is often the best way so you can explain what you are doing and why.  You might even convince this other person to try it themselves!

Some people let others know through their email auto-responder (the ‘out of office’ message system).  An example auto-responder, which you can tailor to your requirements, is:

“Thank you for your email.  In an effort to increase productivity and efficiency, I am trying out a new personal email policy.  I am only checking emails at 11am and 4pm.  If you need anything immediately, please call me on 01555 555555 so that I can address this important matter with you. Thank you.   ~ Sue”

Be mindful that this out-of-office message will to everyone who sends you an email – unless your particular email system can send different messages to people within your business and other emails coming from outside.  You might not want people from other organisations knowing you are doing this.  In which case, you can just send a memo to those people that you would like to inform of your new email checking policy.  An example memo is:

“Dear all,

In an effort to increase productivity and efficiency, I am beginning a new personal email policy. I’ve recently realised that I spend more time shuffling through my inbox and less time focused on the task at hand. It has become an unnecessary distraction that ultimately creates longer lead times on my ever-growing ‘to do’ list.

Going forward I will only be checking/responding to email at 11am and 4pm on weekdays. I will try and respond to email in a timely manner. 

If you need an immediate time-sensitive response, please don’t hesitate to call me on 01555 555555 or pop into the office.

Hopefully this new approach to email management will result in shorter lead-times with more focused and productive work on my part.

Kind regards,

Sue”

-o-

Remember that all of the above are just options in the ‘buffet’.  They have worked for myself and many others, and they could do so for you as well.  You don’t have to be so drastic and do all of the above at once.  You could start by just checking your emails less frequently.  Try it and see!  

Executive Horse Power - Optimising Your Leadership

We are holding a free, half-day event on Thursday 27 March for business leaders at the Kings Equestrian Centre in Bromyard.

Our keynote speaker is Floyd Woodrow, author of “ELITE!: The Secret to Exceptional Leadership”, followed by Debs and Steve Adams, from Life Change Connection, who will run a Team Leadership Goal Setting Session. In the practical part of the morning you will experience Equine Assisted Development for yourself and understand how it can improve your leadership, communication and team building skills.

9.00am – 9.30am - Registration and refreshments

• Welcome and Introduction
• Optimising Performance and Leadership Skills
• Team Leadership Goal Setting
• Practical Session
• Discussion

1pm – Close

I hope that you can join us at this unique event.  Please RSVP as soon as possible, either by email to enquiries@executivehorsepower.co.uk or call me on 01497 820 520 to confirm your place.

Reminder!
We will be doing some more Equine Assisted Devlopment on Saturday 22nd February 2014
from 9.30 -12.30 at Clyro Hill Farm, Clyro Hereford HR3 6JU.
We're looking forward to hearing how you got on last month and showing you some more techniques with the horses!
www.emotionalhorsepower.co.uk
See you Saturday!

'Taking the Reins' by Harold Kurstedt & Tim Thayne

Taking the Reins is about management, supervision, and leadership. In solution-focused leadership, a leader recognizes, affirms, harnesses, and encourages further development of the strengths of those around him or her, while guiding the team toward a mutually-agreed-upon vision.

Many of our top industry producers fail to become superior contributors until they learn to be other-focused. Through conscious and consistent effort, a producer’s relationship competence can be raised to the level of his or her technical competence, resulting in a highly-valued leader, supervisor, and manager. 

Written for readers who want better relationships and success at the office and at home, Taking the Reins encourages:

• Management techniques focused on relationships,
• Supervision based on realistic expectations,
• Leadership through recognition of the strengths of others.

This is some excellent reading for all, and particularly supports the Equine Assisted Development here at Executive Horse Power.