No matter who you are, or what you do, there will be times when your thoughts
will feel scattered. Too many ideas, competing for too little time. Your thoughts
simply go around and around and you can't seem to choose any one item on which
to focus. I call this painful state -- "the stall." You are so overwhelmed
with it all that you stop -- dead in your tracks. Your anxiety rises as your
productivity falls until it seems you will never escape.
How do I know so much about the stall? Well, it was what I was experiencing
right before I started writing this column. As you already know,
real life has a way
of intruding on our work and I am no exception. In fact, since I have so many
differing aspects to my work -- computer consulting, writing, volunteer projects
-- it seems to be a regular occurrence. The more you do, the more life will intrude.
This week my parents are in town on their yearly visit and I am sitting at my
son's baseball game as I write. Too many things pulling me in too many directions.
There is a way to breakthrough the stall, though and the fact that you are reading
this column at all shows that I found a couple of methods to do just that.
Do something
When you are stalled it is not important what you do. You simply need
to do something. If you want to get moving again, you have to choose
one task, no matter how mundane
and do it. Sometimes I find it best to pick a task totally at random from my
to-do list. Worrying about priorities and deadlines can just lead you deeper
in the stall. I don't care if your random choice happens to be "clean out
the cat litter," -- don't think about it, just get up and do it. Once you
complete this first task, you will find that the momentum will keep building.
Maybe you will choose another random task. You might even find that your thinking
has started to clear and you know exactly what you should work on next. Just
like getting a car out of a snow bank, once you get the car moving, keeping it
moving gets easier and easier.
Make a list
While sometimes we are hit with the stall because we have too much
to do, it can also happen when we don't know enough about what we need
to do. As a devotee
of David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology, it has been made clear to me
that if we don't have a handle on everything we need to do we can also end up
stuck. We can get lost in worry that, no matter what we might be doing now, there
is something more important that we have forgotten.
One of Allen's central premises is that of gathering all your "open loops" into
one, central trusted location, so you can feel reasonably secure that you know
everything you could be doing at any time. Of course, when I recommend this to
those who come seeking advice, I often see panic in their eyes when I suggest
they try to collect every single item they need to do. They say, "What?
If I gather up everything I need to do I'll just be more stressed. There's too
much. I'll be more stalled than when I started."
I can tell you from personal experience, though, that once you have
collected everything you should be doing, you will feel better.
It may sound counterintuitive,
but much of the stress generating by too much to do in too little time is caused
by being unsure of exactly what you have to do. If you know everything you
could be doing at any point in time, you are in a better position
to logically and
rationally select the best thing to be doing. Then you'll be able to pull one
task from the list and get to work.
Stop
There will be times, though, when none of this works. You have chosen
randomly, you have listed everything, but still the anxiety and
guilt of the stall will
eat away at you. In these crisis times, the best thing you can do is give
in. Take the stall as an indication that you are at your breaking
point and simply
stop trying to force your work...at least for a short time. Get a cup of
coffee. Listen to some music. Go for a long walk. Whatever it takes
to get away from
the pressure. You can't do this forever, of course. Eventually, you will
need to re-engage with your work, but you will come back to the
task refreshed and
better equipped to face the work.
Don't let the stall get in the way of your work. Randomly chose work
until you can gain enough momentum to keep moving. Get a better
grip on everything
you
need to do. Take some time away. Use these tools to get you out of the
stall, keep your work on track and your career moving in the right direction.
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