I met an old colleague yesterday and she said she nearly didn’t recognize me, I looked so much calmer than I did when I was working for a multinational business. Wow pressure certainly affects people differently, so lets look at ways to minimize the negative impacts.
When you’re managing in the middle of a business, there’s constant pressure. When everything is a priority, how do you remain calm and complete all your tasks on time? What’s the secret to focus under pressure?
The foundation of focus under pressure is being able to manage your stress levels and stay motivated even when you’re not because once you allow yourself to get stressed, you end up losing your ability to think critically.
Here are 5 techniques for staying resilient even under chaotic and ever-changing circumstances in your professional life
1. Learn to properly prioritise. This is not as easy as it sounds. Most of us have multiple competing priorities, and they all seem urgent. The best strategy is to figure out what your real priorities are through a process of clarification and communication. Stress typically comes from a lack of clarity in objectives or outcomes.
Make sure you make time regularly to think about your daily tasks and responsibilities and decide on what’s the most important thing for you to do. Confirm this with your seniors to ensure you share their clarity. Then prioritise your list based on this understanding.
2. Don’t try multitasking. Psychologists seem to agree that we’re fooling ourselves if we think we can get more done when we multitask, but the truth is, we actually aren’t able to focus on tasks, and we lose efficiency and focus each time we have to switch between topics and projects.
It’s so distracting that over the course of the day, it can actually take you 30 per cent longer to complete a task and you end up making more than twice the number of mistakes. So focus on a single task, make headway, stop and do another task.
3. Don’t always be available. Throughout the day, we encounter frequent interruptions that waste our time- email, sms, phone, people walking into our offices. Some research shows that on average, office workers are usually interrupted seven times per hour, which amounts to approximately 56 times every day, and this contributes to wasting over 2 hours per day.
When it comes to daily interruptions, you have three options: accept interruptions, cut them off or manage them. If you decide to accept, then give the interruption issue your full attention and resolve it immediately so it doesn’t interrupt you again at a later time. If you decide to cut interruptions off, turn off your email notifications or keep your phone on silent during this time. This way, you’ll have more control over others contacting you. Then set aside time to deal with these issues- and again focus on dealing with them at once OR put them off for a later time or delete the interruption. Last, if you opt for manage, you should allow a brief interaction between you and the interrupter solely to determine how to deal with the interruption and then agree what the next steps is and when you will deal with it, then you can go back to your work.
4. Communicate your plans when you’re not available. When you’ve decided that you need some time to be out of contact you should inform others of your plan. Industrial psychologist Sharon Melnick notes in her book, Success under Stress, that people’s addiction to digital devices has more to do with an underlying need to feel wanted and important than actually facilitating communication. Companies often equate dedication to professional work and being available at all hours of the day, with effectiveness at work, even though its often not the case. This dedication doesn’t mean that you’re actually productive—just that you’re available.
5. Identify time wasters. Pinpoint exactly what it is that makes you waste time throughout your day and ask yourself why you do them. For example, if you’re surfing the Web, ask yourself why you’re doing it. Is it because you’re bored? Or trying to brainstorm new ideas? Once you figure out why you’re doing these unproductive habits, you can begin to curb those habits and become a more productive person. Or schedule these activities consciously during the day.
In today’s work environment, you will always have too much to do and not enough time to do it. From emails to SMS, there’s so much technology at our fingertips that it’s easy to get distracted. As this technology as well as the ever present need to be “available” impinges on our time, and reduces our ability to be productive, our stress levels increase, we need to be able to focus on the most important things and eliminate what makes us least productive.
How do you seek to be more productive, what tips can you share with us?
Thanks for writing this, was useful to me