Managing the "Overwhelm": How to overcome and take control of the chaos!

Managing the "Overwhelm": How to overcome and take control of the chaos!

Keeping all those balls in the air can be challenging and sometimes keeping up becomes too much to handle. As a manager, you are not only responsible for your own career and workload but the career and workload of others. Here are some helpful tips to manage the overwhelm.

1. First, start at the top! - Get clarity on expectations from your leaders for you and your team. This will help you focus and prioritize what you should get done first and then you can assist your team to prioritize their own workload. Once you accomplish internal goals and expectations from the top you can focus on subsequent tasks and projects.

2. No shame in asking. There is a stigma in the management world that asking for more time to finish a task or project is admitting you have failed at being a manager. This could be further from the truth. As a manager, you are responsible for delivering quality work. Asking for more time and a new deadline with a reasonable explanation and providing status updates is the responsible thing to do rather than delivering a rushed and incomplete product you're not proud of.

3. Is it really YOUR responsibility? Inherited tasks or taking on new tasks that you should not be doing or doesn't align with you, or your team's responsibilities, objectives or department goals are often a drain on resources and time. Take the opportunity to list tasks that aren't yours and make a plan to reallocate to other areas. One of the best business practices is to align the "right work with the right people".

4. Take control of the Chaos. Integrate process improvement and streamlining projects into your operating rhythm. Prioritizing efforts to find new ways to organize and improve tasks that create chaos and anxiety will help you and your team be in control of what and how you do the work and increase effective communication. Include a process or communication improvement section into the cadence of your staff meetings, allowing and encouraging your team to openly bring ideas to the table on how to improve their work.

5. Put on your oxygen mask first...yes this really does work! Don't forget about prioritizing your own self-care so you can then help others. Build "moments" of time throughout your day to take a break. Take a brief walk by yourself away from your work environment or walk around the office and check in on your team - remember "no shop talk". A brief moment for a 5-minute meditation or prayer or quickly playing your favorite song or hearing a quick joke (please! only clean jokes) from your favorite comedian bringing laughter helps the mind and body recharge and re-set. There are countless research articles on the negative effects of long-standing cortisol in the human body and how it can damage a person's ability to live a healthy life. Do you and then do for others. Afterall, you were not meant to live a stressful life.