44. Managing Burnout, Office Disruptions and Task Management (Q&A)
Episode 44
In this monthly Q&A episode, I answer three questions submitted by Learn and Work Smarter listeners.
We talk about how to handle academic burnout, tips for managing disruptions at the office, and how to handle task and time management when your work depends on others.
🎙️Other Episodes + Resources Mentioned
Episode 03 → What’s an Admin Block and Why You Need One
Episode 04 → What to Do When You’re Overwhelmed
Episode 06 → January Q&A: Focus Tips and Job Skills
Episode 8 → Motivation vs. Discipline: Which One Matters More?
Episode 12 → Are Your Productivity Systems Broken?
Episode 21 → How to Plan Your Ideal Week (Weekly Planning Tips)
Episode 27 → How to Get Things Done with a Power Hour
Episode 43 → How to Focus When You’re Working From Home
✏️ FREE DOWNLOADS:
-
The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them 😉
44 Managing Burnout, Office Disruptions and Task Management October Q&A===
[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. This is episode 44 and it is one of our monthly Q and A episodes during which I answer questions submitted by listeners.
If you have your own burning question that you want me to answer on a future Q and A episode, then you can fill out the very simple form on learnandworksmarter.com. It is right there on the homepage.
Okay. We have three questions to get through today.
As always, I do encourage you to listen all the way through, because sometimes we hear others ask questions that we didn't even consider asking, but that are helpful to us too.
So today we are talking about burnout, managing disruptions at the office and how to handle task and time management. When your work depends on other people. You're ready to get started. Let's go.
[00:01:00] All right. We are going to jump right in with question one, which I am going to read. I have it right here in front of me. The listener asks, how should I regain my passion once I once had in studies, if I am currently in a burnout?
This is a great question. And I think it's a topic that I'll probably address more fully in a future episode.So thank you for that inspiration. So I want to start by making an important distinction between typical job or school stress and occasionally feeling overwhelmed. Okay. And full, actual burnout. They're kind of the same concept, but they are on different ends of the spectrum. In school, it is common and just part of the process to get stressed out and overwhelmed sometimes maybe, maybe sometimes [00:02:00] for even weeks at a time, depending on what season you're in, if you're taking hard courses, whatever activities you have going on outside of school, things like that. The thing with stress and, you know, your general variety of overwhelm is that we typically know what we need to do to feel less stressed.
Typically it is a matter of, I have too much work to do and not enough time to do it. And it can also be a matter of, of I have a reasonable amount of work to do, but it's just really hard. Okay.
And although that's a tough situation to be in, it has a solution and we are in control. We either make time to do the things, or we don't do the things. Right. Those are kind of our only two options. And in the case of being stressed by a task that's well, hard, we either figure out how to do it or we don't do it.
Those are our options for dealing with that kind of generic stress related to school.
I'm going to direct you to episode four, which is called what [00:03:00] to do when you're overwhelmed: practical strategies that you can use now. That is the number one most popular podcast episode that I have recorded to date, according to my analytics.
And so I know that it is resonating with people and you might find that helpful too, if you haven't listened to it already.
But burnout is much more extreme. Burnout often lasts much longer than your typical stress. Sometimes it can last for months at a time. It is not often connected to something specific like final season or having a bunch of projects due at one time or, you know, a hard test coming up. In other words, because it is hard to pinpoint exactly what's causing burnout, we can't always identify a clear solution. And it's also true that constant, regular variety stress can turn into burnout if you don't have the systems and strategies in place to learn how to manage those overwhelming periods in school.
So to sum it up, stress is [00:04:00] more short-term and burnout is a result of a cumulative buildup of short-term stress that just never seems to end.But there's some wording to your question that gets me thinking a little differently because you ask. How should I regain my passion I once had in my studies if I'm currently in a burnout- and that has me thinking that there's really two parts to this question. It sounds like you are burnt out. And it sounds like you've lost motivation for your studies.
And although they're related, I really think that they're two different things.And my thought is that the best approach is to address the burnout first. And then ideally that could help renew some of your passion and motivation.
We've talked all about motivation versus discipline back in episode eight. I'm going to leave that link below. But in that episode, I emphasize how tricky motivation is because it is an emotion. And that is just not something we can turn off or on whenever we want. So, what I'm suggesting here is that [00:05:00] we address the problem from the side that we have more control over, which is burnout rather than your passion.
So, like motivation, burnout can be tricky too. And everybody's situation is different, but at its core, burnout really does stem from feeling like there's no end in sight to the onslaught of things that you have to do and how little time you have to complete them. There's often the sense of never feeling done.
Never feeling satisfied, never going to bed at night because you feel like you just didn't do enough and there's always something else to do. And of course, all of that can lead to a dip in motivation.
Burnout can also come from this sense of, you know what you're working toward, but the payoff, the result, the degree, the promotion, the thing that you're working toward is so far away, and so all of the effort that you're putting in day to day to day doesn't have an immediate reward.
It has a long-term reward. But you're not seeing the immediate [00:06:00] rewards day-to-day and that can lead to burnout too, because you get the sense of like, why am I even doing this? You know why you're doing it, you're doing it for the degree, for the certification, for the qualification, for whatever the reason. Okay.
But sometimes we lose track of that when we don't have the immediate reward, you know, after we complete each daily task.
But I have a few suggestions here.
My first suggestion is to take a holistic look at how you're spending your time. How we spend our personal time and how those activities make us feel can impact how we feel about our studies.
Same thing for work. If you're a working professional listening to this, the advice applies for you as well. So every time I say studies just think work. Okay. But I think it's worth asking yourself if there's anything that has nothing to do with school that might be contributing to your burnout.
Are you working too hard in other areas of your life? Are some of your relationships burning you out? Are you not sleeping well enough? How is your health? Are you finding joy in other places? The answers to these [00:07:00] questions matter cause they could be contributing to your feeling of burning out. Another strategy I want to advise is to practice the strategy of deliberate rest. I know binge-watching TV or losing yourself in your phone can temporarily make us forget about our stress, but those activities are doing nothing for our burnout.
There's a case to be made for deliberate high-quality restful activities that don't have anything to do with school, but that help rejuvenate your body and mind.
No, I'm not talking about rest, like, you know, napping. Okay. If you want to nap too, but that's not what I'm talking about, but getting outdoors more, exercising, service to others, maybe pursuing a hobby that truly fills you. These aren't luxuries. They're essentials.
All right, now onto some more practical strategies.
I think that you would benefit from creating a weekly routine that is sustainable.
When we use time management strategies, like time-blocking, we can build in deliberate chunks of rest and breaks into our day.
Time-blocking also gives our tasks clear beginnings [00:08:00] and ends, which can make them seem more doable. Because if we sit down to a work or study session without a definite stopping point, we can easily become overwhelmed. And time blocking can help here. You may also need to consider if you are maybe doing too many things.
There's a very real possibility that we'll present yourself, present itself, if you do a time assessment. In episode 12, called “are your productivity systems broken?” I share some strategies for how to identify where your sort of weakest links might be.
In the show notes of that episode I include links to two free resources. A student self-evaluation checklist, and a professional self-evaluation checklist.
If you are indeed doing too much, then you have to find a way to do less. It's either that or slow down your pace. If you are burning out because you're doing too much too fast, then one of those has to give.
You know, I'm not sure what you're studying or what level you're at, because he didn't put that in your question, [00:09:00] which is fine.
But can you push out your deadline for finishing your degree if that's, you know what you're working toward? Can you take one less class each semester?
Maybe this isn't a long-term solution. Maybe this is just a temporary slowdown and you get back into sort of your regular pace down the line. But if you don't do something different now, your burnout absolutely it's going to get worse. But the idea is that if you approach your burnout, Recovery from a place of a non-school related perspective- so that means engaging in fulfilling activities, prioritizing self care, you know, exercising, eating well- and then also approach it from a utilitarian pragmatic task and time management perspective, which might involve time-blocking and slowing down your pace temporarily, then your burnout might begin to feed and some of your passion might come back.
But I do feel you because I've been burned out before too.
And I personally, what I do in these situations is I've gotten really good at recognizing them when they're just [00:10:00] beginning to knock on the door. I spot the warning signs and the strategy that I have found that works the best for me personally, this is only my personal experience- take it or leave it right- is to do a hard stop for a few days.
Now in terms of work, this means no content creation, no showing up online. No social media. I am hardly touching my phone at all. I'm still seeing clients because I do not let them down, but I am getting outside as much as possible. I'm reaching out to friends to go for walks. When I do this for, I don't know, like three days, I can usually find my groove again and become rejuvenated.
When I was in college, I did the same thing although honestly, at the time, I don't think I knew that's what I was doing. I had an aunt and uncle who lived about an hour away from my campus. And whenever I would start to feel burnout creeping in, I would just essentially show up at their doorstep.
Like, hello. They lived in Connecticut and I would go, you know, running on their beautiful streets. They'd make me home-cooked meals. I would snuggle their pets.
That [00:11:00] change of scenery worked like magic. That's something to think about too. I'd stay for two nights and then head back to campus at completely different person.
But this sort of hard stop for two to three days only worked if I caught the burnout early.
You may need more than that, which is, you know, why I gave you all those other more robust suggestions.
Thanks for submitting this question and I hope some of these tips help. Alright, we are moving on to question number two, which I also have written here.
All right. Question two. The listener writes: I work in an office most days of the week. One or two days a week I work from home when I'm in the office. I feel so unproductive because of disruptions from my colleagues, meetings and last-minute tasks that often throw off my day. I try to plan ahead, but I struggle to keep up with everything and I feel like I'm always behind. How can I better manage my time when so much of my day feels out of my control. I follow your advice having an admin block.
And I tried to do that once a week and it's helpful. Thanks so much love the [00:12:00] podcast.
Thank you. I like this question. And I like how I get to talk about this right after the last episode that came out, which was episode 43, which is all about how to focus when working from home.
Your question is kind of the opposite of that.
How to focus when working at the office. And I think that your situation is very real because for many people focusing at home is the easy part. But it's the chaos of the office that makes it hard to work. So a couple of different strategies, you can try.
First and foremost, I think. It might just be that the one or two days you work from home are the days that you plan to get most of your focus and cognitively demanding work done.
You didn't say in your question, what type of work you did. So I'm going to be hypothetical in my example, but let's say that every week you need to create some kind of report to share with your team. And let's say this report takes hours to prepare. Okay, well then when you're doing your weekly planning, this would be a task that you intentionally plan to do on the days that you are working at home. [00:13:00]
In episode 21, which is called how to plan your ideal week and weekly planning tips, I give you exactly how to plan out your week in advance so that you know what you are doing and when you're doing it.
That way, if you know, you're going to have time on Tuesday and Thursday, let's say those are the days that you're working from home to work on your weekly report, your expectations for how much time you'll have to work on that report at the office, will be more realistic. And you'll resent your colleagues less for popping over to your desk.
Right? Another strategy that compliments this one well, I think is to use some of that fragmented office time to your advantage by planning your admin blocks for when you're at your office and not doing them during your valuable focus time at home.
Okay. If you're listening to this and you aren't sure what an admin block is, listen to episode, episode three, it's called What's an admin block and why you need one for productivity.
I know my listener here knows what an admin block is, cause you said you're already using them. So my tip to you is to plan those admin blocks for [00:14:00] the fragmented sort of interrupted time that you have at the office. But for anyone listening who's like, I don't know what an admin block is, listen to that episode.
But essentially an admin block is a chunk of time that we set aside to knock out those pesky admin tasks that are related to our job. They're sort of the low cognitive effort tasks, nothing like, you know, Profound thinking or creative work, but it's more like filing things, going through emails, returning phone calls, you know, those kinds of tasks. Save all of those tasks for the office because, they don't really matter if you're interrupted or not. You can do them in sort of like 10, 15-minute chunks.
Alright, another strategy I want to remind you of is the power hour.
I teach you how to implement a power hour effectively as well as different use case scenarios for that strategy in episode 27. I will leave everything that I mentioned today linked below.
But a power hour can be helpful because we're giving ourselves a definite starting and stopping point to work on something that we have identified in advance. It's [00:15:00] one hour of concentrated work without distraction.
And I know you said that your issue is that you know, your colleagues are popping in and out. But I'm sure that throughout a work day in the office, you can find maybe one hour where you can fend off distractions and people. Okay, you can put up your away message. You could close your door if you have one. You could not answer your phone.
If you have one, put your headphones on to give the message that you're involved in. Something create a quick canned response for when people come over to your desk to chat something like, oh, Hey, can you just give me 30 minutes? Right. You know, for example, if you only have 30 minutes left in your power hour, Right.
Someone comes over and they're like, Hey, can we get, do you have time for a second? Like, you know what? Like, I'll get back to you in like an hour. All right. I'm just working on something. What is that person going to do? Be like, you know what? I really need your attention right now. Of course not. All right.
Cool. Thanks. I'll be back in an hour. Right? If, if they don't know that we're working on something they are going to pop in. That's just sort of like the way that office sort of politics works. But the reason why power hours are so powerful is that [00:16:00] the amount of work. Then you can get done in an uninterrupted, you know, turbo fire, 60 minutes is exponentially greater than the work that you'd get done in let's say like 10, six-minute periods.
And in both cases, we're talking about 60 minutes. But it's the interruption that is so disruptive. It's the stopping and the starting and the stopping and the starting and reacclimating ourselves to a task after we've been interrupted. That is the biggest threat to our productivity and to our focus.
You could also try implementing some version of office hours for the days that you are at the office.
We've talked about this concept before. I didn't make up the concept of office hours. Cal Newport talks about it a lot, but one of the most helpful episodes where I talk about office hours is episode six, which was another Q and a episode when someone was also asking about tips for focusing at work. They had a very kind of similar scenario to you.
In that episode, I explained how establishing some predictable office hours that you [00:17:00] communicate to your colleagues can be beneficial to both you and them. There's a little friction upfront when you're sort of educating people on your new mode of operation, but once that's over, like everybody wins. Again, nobody cares.
Like literally nobody cares if you're like, oh, Hey, you know, um, I am totally available for drop-ins and emails and phone calls and questions or messages, whatever, right, between the hours of 12 and three every day, right? No one cares. They're not going to be like, well, I would prefer it to be between nine and 12. Nobody cares. You obviously make exceptions for bosses and managers, but for everyone else, this is what you tell them.
And they're going to be like, okay.
another approach could be, to say that I'm not available on these days from 12 and three. And make it known that that's going to be your focus time at the office. And if someone drops by for a question or to chat outside of those hours, you're going to feel less interrupted and caught off guard.
All right. And then my final tip is to encourage you [00:18:00] to be bold.
Obviously we need to maintain professionalism, but I think this is a place where it's appropriate to be direct and perhaps a little bold. All right. What do I mean?
Could you ask your manager or your boss for permission to work one more day at home? You may need to make your case as to why this is good for your company and not just good for you, but you could prepare for that.
The second area where you could be bold I kind of just alluded to already with the concept of office hours, but it would be to tell your colleagues I can't talk right now. I am working on something. I will come find you when I'm done. Let's chat at four o'clock when I'm done with this thing.
There is nothing wrong with letting our colleagues know that we are working and we want to be helpful and accessible, but that a different time would be better, right?
This is just sort of all under the category of good communication. And I think it can be done tactfully and professionally in a way that really truly benefits everyone involved.
There's a lot of tips, but it was a great question. So [00:19:00] thank you for submitting it. Okay. And we are going to move on to our final question. Which I am also going to read. I got to take a minute to call it up on my phone.
Okay. This listener writes: how can I implement time management, task management and organization of my client work -I am a bookkeeper- when I am continually waiting on the client to provide me documents or information I require to complete what I need to do for them. Example, I have one client, his month was September; he's only provided me with the first three months of information.
And so that is not complete. So now when I get the rest of his information, I will be in a deadline to get his stuff done, which now affects my work for other clients.
Okay. So I know this question may seem super highly specific to this listener's unique situation of being a bookkeeper, but at the core of this question is something that each of us can learn from.
So regardless of whether or not you're a bookkeeper, or your job is vastly different, we are all going to find [00:20:00] ourselves in a situation at some point where we can't move any further in our work, on a task on a project, because we're depending on someone else to complete their part of it.
And so the strategies I'm going to share, although I'm going to answer them specifically for this listener in her context, can actually help anyone listening if you tweak them for your scenario.
Does that make sense? Like so much of what we talk about here. So I think the honest and simplest answer here is to give your clients deadlines that they need to submit work to you by.
It is unrealistic for you to cater to the procrastination tendencies and the delays of each of your clients because then you will never get your work done and they're hiring you to do a job and you can't do your job if they don't do theirs. Right.
I think in service-based industries like yours, it is perfectly reasonable and the industry standard to let the clients know that there is a deadline that they need to meet as well.
As long as you're clear with these expectations upfront, right, it shouldn't be an issue.
So, for example, let's say that you have a new [00:21:00] client, I'm assuming you might have some sort of. Maybe an onboarding process with your new clients, maybe contracts.
I'm not sure, but if you don't, I suggest you create one. This could look something like a really simple one-page document where you outline how things work. Kind of like a contract. Okay. I don't know what your specific deadlines are, so I'm kind of making this up, but let's say it's something like this was what would be on the piece of paper, the contract that you give them at the beginning.
Right? It says something like when I send you a form B you have three weeks to complete the form and return it to me. Then when you email them form B to complete, you would remind them of this deadline. A week before that deadline, you would remind them that the deadline is in a week. And there would be, hear me out and this is where it's important, there would be a consequence for not meeting that deadline. Perhaps a small, late fee might be applicable here. And that could make all of the difference in the world. No one wants to pay a late fee. Again, I don't know the specific deadlines that you're dealing with, but it sounds like your clients are expected to turn in paperwork to you [00:22:00] before you can move any further.
And I'm assuming that you are the one with the actual, very concrete deadlines. So the idea would be that you need to give your clients deadlines for getting you their paperwork well in advance of your very real, actual deadlines that I don't know, maybe they're related to filing taxes and things like that.
That's what I mean by very real deadlines. Right? You would keep track of the deadlines that you give clients perhaps in an Excel spreadsheet or even directly inside Google calendar. In fact, that's actually what I would do. I think. I would use a digital calendar. Right. Cause then you can set up reminders, could create email templates for yourself to make it easier for you to email your clients reminders of these deadlines.
So for example, you could create you know, a simple email template for their first reminder, for their second reminder, for their final reminder. In the email template for the final reminder, you would also remind them that there will be a late fee if they don't meet their deadline.
And honestly, I think your clients would appreciate this structure. People like to know what to do.
They like to know [00:23:00] when it's due. And they like when that structure is enforced, because it removes any decisions that they need to make.
To any of your current clients, you could send an email saying going forward, this is how we're going to work. All right. I honestly don't think that you are going to have any trouble at all implementing this sort of deadline and late fee system for your current clients, and any new clients you take on are going to have nothing to compare it to so they have nothing to complain about. This is how businesses work.
This is how client work works. I'm a client-based business too. Right. And I can't be taking last minute requests and be expected to drop everything because someone was late getting something to me. Businesses don't work this way. And I don't think that you should have a second thought about it. At all. All right.
So get clear on what your very actual real deadlines are. And then backtrack from that very real deadline. What's a reasonable amount of time that you would need to prepare for that final deadline? What's the deadline that you need all of your clients to submit their work by? And then tell them that. [00:24:00] And give him a couple of reminders to be professional and friendly. Okay.
And then tell them that there's a late fee if they don't meet that deadline. And make it a reasonable late fee, but one that's kind of stings enough like that they don't, that they are going to, you know, get their act together.
Make yourself email templates so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time you're sending out these reminders, put it in a simple one-page document.
Send it out to all your new clients into your current clients. It's like, Hey, just a few updates. This is how we're going to run business from now. Right. I think you'll be fine.
All right. My friends we've covered a lot today in your questions lately have been really awesome. As a reminder, you can submit your own questions for my next monthly Q and A episode at learnandworksmarter.com. There's a form right there on the homepage.
I already have some questions that are in the queue for the next month. So if you submit questions, but I don't get to them in the November Q and a, I promise you that I will still get to them. Please don't forget to like and follow and subscribe to the show, whether that's on a podcast app or on the learn and work smarter YouTube channel.
I work [00:25:00] really hard to put all this content out here for free and simple gestures, like sharing the podcast with someone that you know means the absolute world to someone in my position.
I appreciate each and every one of you for coming along on this podcast journey with me that I am having so much fun figuring out. And remember: never stop learning.
