Fit and Healthy Online

Jo sent me this link recently.

http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/careerist/42691

Here's the article in case it doesn't open up.

Five Ways to Avoid Being Overworked

by Penelope Trunk

Posted on Wednesday, August 22, 2007, 12:00AM

In the information age, when almost everyone in every office is a knowledge worker, we're paid to process information. And since there's an infinite amount of information, there's an infinite amount of work. For everyone.

So your boss is probably giving you enough work every week to fill three weeks -- if you let it. If you work a certain way, it could also fill only three days.

My point is that people who feel overworked in some respects choose to be overworked. Here are five choices to make instead:

1. Force your boss to prioritize.

Because processing information is not an objective task, you can do a good job or a bad job or any kind of job in between. Which is to say that you don't have to do a great job with everything. You can't, right? Because your boss is giving you too much work.

So you have some choices. First, you can try to force your boss to prioritize. Say to him or her, "If you want me to do project z perfectly, then you need to get projects w, x, and y off my plate."

Maybe your boss will think project z is so important that he or she will clear your plate. But most likely, your boss will say, "Forget it. You need to do everything." This is an open invitation to start experimenting with cutting corners.

2. If your boss won't prioritize, do it yourself.

Please don't tell me you don't believe in cutting corners. It's the layman's term for prioritizing, and you probably perfected it as a way of life in college. In fact, cutting corners is what college teaches best.

Over the course of a semester, you were assigned sixteen 400-page books to read, plus you had to write papers about them. You also had to show up for classes to find out what was going to be on the tests. Of course, there was no way you could read all 6,400 pages you were assigned -- that would be impossible in the allotted time.

So you figured out what you could skip. You determined that the best way to get out of the reading was to go to the lectures, because professors lecture about what interests them, and their tests reflect their interests.

Now back to your workplace, where you have too much work to do. Here's how the losers handle it: They complain about being overworked. They keep accepting more work, and trying to do it perfectly, and complain. And their bosses keep dumping it on them and saying there's nothing they can do about the workload. Meanwhile, neither of them is prioritizing, neither of them is taking responsibility for the situation, and each is blaming the other.

If you boss insists on giving you more work than you can do, you should start cutting corners. Do everything very quickly, and ignore the idea that it needs to be done perfectly -- it can't all be done perfectly. Your boss refuses to prioritize for you, so you'll have to do everything as best as you can.

3. Get comfortable with ignoring some tasks.

For some of you, even doing things less than perfectly will take too much time. In this case, you'll have to blow some stuff off. So experiment and see which things can fall through cracks without anyone noticing.

You already do this. Someone at work sends you an email demanding a response. But before you have time to reply, another recipient does so, so you just delete the original message. Try this approach with work you're not a central force on and see what happens.

4. Stop complaining before it ruins your life.

I can already imagine the comments flying about this column. Some of you will say that you'd be fired for following the above advice. But what's your choice? You've already told your boss you have more work than you can get done in a day, and he or she didn't scale back. Do you want to continue to just complain about it every day? Probably not, because complaining is toxic.

Besides, do you really want to work 15 hour days to get extra work done for a company that doesn't respect its employees' time? Why should you give up your personal life because your boss can't prioritize?

Instead, take control of your life and create a situation where you stop complaining about having too much work. If you're fired for not doing all the work, you probably didn't want to work at the company anyway. And if you're not able to scale back, consider that you might over-identify with your job to the point that you're working harder than you need to because you can't imagine not being perfect.

5. Take responsibility for being overworked, then change it.

OK, suppose you love your work and you're happy working 15-hour days. That's fine. Just don't complain about it.

What I'm saying is that if you complain about having too much work you should look in the mirror -- it's your own fault, and you can change the situation by drawing boundaries at work. Be an adult by taking responsibility for your time, and complain only when you have a solution.

Star performers don't talk about being overworked, they talk about time management. The best time managers excel at it because they're good at figuring out what they don't have to do. The best time managers have the confidence to say, "I'll still be a star even if I don't do that task."

This reminds me of Gina Trapani, who edits the Lifehacker blog. Gina and three other editors put out a publication that has more readers than just about every local newspaper in this country, and many national magazines. Surely she's a very busy person. But her productivity tips belie a Zen-like balance in which she isolates the most important things and lets other things languish if need be.

Want an example? In order for Gina to blog every day, she has to keep up with hundreds of other bloggers so she knows who to link to. These blogs come to her via direct feed. What does she do when she's falling behind and blog posts are piling up? She clears out her in-box and starts over. "If something's really important," she said at a panel I attended, "someone will email me about it."

This is great advice from someone who's succeeding in an area where most people would succumb to information overload. Clearly, the way to do good work is to know when it's time to not do it.

Penelope Trunk, The Brazen Careerist, is quite insightful about career matters and a visit to her website may be well worth the trip.

MY THREE PENNETH WORTH

1. Manage yourself

Ask yourself, 'What is the best use of my time right now?' This relates to one's internal locus of control; reorder your list of priorities.

2. Manage your boss

'If you want me to do this new task, what is it that you want me to remove from the current list of tasks (or put further down the list) of your priorities?'

I recommend you get on the front foot and take your boss out for morning tea once a month - and pay for it. The agenda - you and your work and your manager and your work.

(If you're a manager, take each of your direct reports out for morning tea once a month - and pay for it. The agenda, you and your work, and them and their work.)

3. Work out the difference between what matters and what doesn't

Reinhold Niebuhr's serenity prayer is a good place to start. There are many versions but this one appears to be the most widely recognised:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Most people only quote the first verse of Niebuhr's prayer. The second verse, modified for this article and without the Christianism reads

Live one day at a time;
Enjoy one moment at a time;
Accept hardship (as a pathway to peace);
Take the world as it is, not as I would have it;
Trust that all things will be alright
expect a reasonably happy life

4. Detect mustabation and refuse to be ruled by it

From Albert Ellis: - 'musterbation.' It consists of telling yourself that you have an obligation to do something different from what you are doing. Your automatic thought is that you or someone else should/must/ought to/has to do something.

Some of Ellis's basic premises:

• Accept responsibility for what you do.

• Use humour -- when you're unhumorous you take things too seriously

• Laugh at yourself and not take yourself too seriously, which is what emotional

disturbance is about

• Recognise awfulization; when people make things awful, they're using that almost

as a screen to keep from getting in touch with their genuine feelings of

disappointment.

• Like yourself even if you dislike what you do

The three main musts are:

• I must do well or I'm no good.

• You, must treat me well or you're worthless and deserve to roast in hell.

• The world must give me exactly what I want, precisely what I want, or it's a

horrible, awful place.

5. Think rationally

This is an exceptionally tough assignment. Here are 11 of Albert Ellis's irrational beliefs.

1.	It is a dire necessity for adult humans to be loved or approved by virtually every significant other person in their community.

2.	One absolutely must be competent, adequate and achieving in all important respects or else one is an inadequate, worthless person.

3.	People absolutely must act considerately and fairly and they are damnable villains if they do not. They are their bad acts.

4.	It is awful and terrible when things are not the way one would very much like them to be.

5.	Emotional disturbance is mainly externally caused and people have little or no ability to increase or decrease their dysfunctional feelings and behaviors.

6.	If something is or may be dangerous or fearsome, then one should be constantly and excessively concerned about it and should keep dwelling on the possibility of it occurring.

7.	One cannot and must not face life's responsibilities and difficulties and it is easier to avoid them.

8.	One must be quite dependent on others and need them and you cannot mainly run one's own life.

9.	One's past history is an all-important determiner of one's present behavior and because something once strongly affected one's life, it should indefinitely have a similar effect.

10.	Other people's disturbances are horrible and one must feel upset about them.

11.	There is invariably a right, precise and perfect solution to human problems and it is awful if this perfect solution is not found.

6. Keep fit and healthy

Many people feel shouse because their physiology is working against them. They look for a soft slow moving target to blame. Then the company screensaver slides slowly across the monitor in front of the - and the rest, as they say is history!

Work has got little to do with it.

You can see how well your physiology is coping by completing the Health, Fitness and Wellbeing profile.