5 Ways to avoid being overworked

5 Ways to avoid being overworked In the information age, when almost everyone in every office is a knowledge worker, were paid to process information. And since theres an infinite amount of information, theres 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 some 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 dont have to do a great job with everything. You cant, 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 wont prioritize, do it yourself. Please dont tell me you dont believe in cutting corners. Its the laymans 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. Heres 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 theres 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 cant all be done perfectly. Your boss refuses to prioritize for you, so youll 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, youll 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 youre 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 youd be fired for following the above advice. But whats your choice? Youve already told your boss you have more work than you can get done in a day, and he or she didnt 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 doesnt respect its employees time? Why should you give up your personal life because your boss cant prioritize? Instead, take control of your life and create a situation where you stop complaining about having too much work. If youre fired for not doing all the work, you probably didnt want to work at the company anyway. And if youre not able to scale back, consider that you might over-identify with your job to the point that youre working harder than you need to because you cant imagine not being perfect. 5. Take responsibility for being overworked, then change it. OK, suppose you love your work and youre happy working 15-hour days. Thats fine. Just dont complain about it. What Im saying is that if you complain about having too much work you should look in the mirror its 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 dont talk about being overworked, they talk about time management. The best time managers excel at it because theyre good at figuring out what they dont have to do. The best time managers have the confidence to say, Ill still be a star even if I dont 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 shes 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 shes falling behind and blog posts are piling up? She clears out her in-box and starts over. If somethings really important, she said at a panel I attended, someone will email me about it. This is great advice from someone whos succeeding in an area where most people would succumb to information overload. Clearly, the way to do good work is to know when its time to not do it.