A coach with 16 years of experience working with executives explains how professionals burn themselves out by believing they can multitask and overfilling their calendars. Multitasking fragments your work and drains energy. Most meetings are self-imposed and can be cut to restore focus, thinking time, and energy.
Chapters
So I wanna talk about the causes that even you are putting on yourself when it comes to being exhausted, burned out, stressed, overwhelmed. There's self-inflicted causes for it, and then there's obviously solutions to help you manage through it and to change the way you're going about things as well as passing that down to your team members, so then everyone is finding job satisfaction, fulfillment, and a work-life blend that really makes them high-performing, valuable, and important individuals to the business. In the 16 years of my coaching everyone from middle managers to senior executives, there are some common themes when it comes to What is creating a lot of the overwhelm? What is keeping them up at night? And again, as I mentioned, a lot of it is self-afflicting, and then others are things that if they can't control it, they need to at least manage the response to it. So let's walk through a few of those. One is many believe that they can multitask and they can do it very effectively and very productively and very efficiently. And I'm here to tell you, you can't. Multitasking actually, and other than maybe walking and chewing gum at the same time, it's a myth. It's something that we try to tell ourselves to feel good about being able to massively produce and generate a lot of activity and a lot of results. But we are kind of creating more of an issue for ourselves thinking that we could do multiple things at once and do both of them or all of them well, and more importantly, to get any of it done. Most of the observations I have from my clients and others when it comes to multitasking is the fact that they get a little bit of a lot of things done, but nothing ever fully and completely gets done. And if it does, it's taking a lot more energy, a lot more time, and a lot more resources to complete it. So when it comes to multitasking, what I prefer you to do is really just cull it down. And we'll talk about this in the, with the tips and strategies, but cull it down to focusing on one thing at a time, even if it is in little bursts, but one thing at a time and getting it to a point of completion. And if not completion, to a milestone that indicates value, indicates an impact to, toward the goal of completing that task. The other reason or challenge that individuals have is that their calendars are just way too full. And I have this conversation probably on a daily basis with my clients. I'll ask how much white space they have on their calendars and they just laugh at me. And one of their first responses is, "I have no control over my calendar." And I have to call BS to that as well. Sure, there are obligated meetings, obligated appointments that you have to have on your calendar. But I would challenge you that if I had 5 minutes of access to your calendar and you, I can probably wipe out about 25 to 30% of what's on your calendar that you're automatically putting on there and automatically showing up for and automatically consuming your, your time simply because of your, your fear or your need to be there, to understand what's happening, to control, to micromanage. You can continue with the reasonings, but at the same time, if you're doing your part as a leader, then again, you can pull that calendar down and create that white space that you need for sanity, for breath, for more strategic things, or just simply for a break that will reenergize you.
