The year is winding down. Many organizations are near the halfway point of their fiscal year. This is the right time to take stock on your work and processes. You have time to improve processes for the second half of the year.
Where should you start when you take stock? You might start with the way you and your organization use time. Why? Time is the greatest resource your organization has and the one that you most likely squander. Before thinking about next steps, let’s think a little bit about the relationship between time and work.
Salary and Time
Most organizations give the most work to staff who work on a salary. Those people are paid a flat rate, and if they are exempt from overtime, their pay does not increase even if their workload does. In the short-term, organizations can get more work for less when they add labor to their salaried staff. The workload is often allocated based on prior performance. Work hard, and you might be congratulated with more work (and no raise.)
Often, workers find it challenging to mitigate overwork. They might not be able to explain their workload stresses to their managers. They might not have any colleagues who can take on some of their workloads. They might feel too cash-strapped or work uncertain to want to make waves. However, in the end, they will have to accomplish the work.
But, in considering the workload struggles, it is often that you are being required to work beyond what you were contracted for. In other words, you are not receiving immediate financial benefits from this extra work. You’re gambling your time away in hopes of earning future financial benefits. As they say in Vegas, the house almost always wins. Organizations will benefit from you working beyond your salaried requirements.
What can you do about overwork?
This is probably the hardest question to answer. You entered your career because you love the work. You want to do your best. You might have a long history of feeling successful thanks to hard work during graduate school. Overwork might be your natural inclination.
First, you need to reconsider your feelings about your workload. You need to be honest with yourself about all the work you do. What tasks have been added since your salary was negotiated? How have these tasks impacted your time? What is the benefit to you to do these tasks? Are these tasks worth it for you and/ or for your organization? Basically, you need to tally if the time you are donating to your organization is worth it to you.
Next, you need to decide when your time is being wasted due to your own poor habits:
- Email is the biggest suck of time. I am a reformed obsessive email checker. I understand the way that it can feel to have things lurking in your email. I also understand the spark you can feel when you see the number of emails increase. But, obsessively checking email is just a way of letting people chip away at your time and sanity. Check email at specified times in your day, like at lunch and at the end of the day. Follow through with this plan for a few weeks, and you will train your colleagues about your new emailing behaviors.
- Meetings are a time suck that you can’t completely control. When you run the meeting, come with an agenda and leave with action items. Immediately return to your space, finish any tasks that are easy to accomplish like emailing your notes back to the team. Basically, don’t let the meeting suck more time than absolutely necessary.
- Choose when you waste time otherwise you will waste time uncontrollably. Breaks are a great way to increase your productivity. This might seem counter-intuitive. But, think about running a long race. You will not be able to sprint the whole distance. You need to pace yourself. Work is the same way. If you don’t find a way to create downtime, you will instead waste time pretending to work. (Another useful analogy might be snacking. Avoid eating for a long time, and you will find yourself stuffing your face full of potato chips instead of a healthy meal.)
Managing for Sanity
Managing others is often the source of overwork. You are often assigned a series of your own work tasks plus the work of managing others. But management isn’t just an asterisk on one’s workload. Good managers understand the importance of investing time in your staff. Any task that requires more than one person takes exponentially longer than something you do alone.
How can you value your time but also value your staff?
- First, put in time at the onset. Set up systems that work for you and your staff. Give them the time they need consistently so that you don’t get burned down the road with a more time-consuming problem.
- Don’t ignore staff emails. Of all your emails, your own staff emails should be the most important to answer. Triaging those emails efficiently will save you time in the long run. (Also, communicate an email policy to your staff so that you know that they are communicating in ways that work for both of you. Consider asking staff to add “Attention Needed” flags to items that need your answer and “FYI” to the subject line of emails that are just notifications.)
- Systematize as many management tasks as you can. Do payroll the same every time. Create form emails as often as you can. But, do not systematize the personal things, like making personal connections to your staff.
- Don’t waste your time doing your staff’s job. Micromanaging feels bad on both the receiving end, but it actually feels bad on the managing end as well. Micromanaging can occur for a number of reasons. You might not be confident in your staff. If this is the case, reconfigure how you communicate expectations to the staff and how you evaluate success. You might be micromanaging because your staff is accomplishing their work using a different process than you use. In this case, if the work is accomplished well, you need to let go of your need to control the process. Remember, the variety of solutions signals a staff that your department can fix many different problems.
Conclusion
Overall, you need to be an advocate for your time. You need to analyze how you use your time and understand why you make those choices. You also need to understand how and why you are using your time with your colleagues and your staff. Your time is a resource that you cannot get back. And, your time is worth more than you probably earn.