It has been a little while since our last update on here. The reason for this is the usual: really busy with work, struggling to squeeze everything into what seem to be increasingly short days and so on.

Often I hear clients and supervisees talk about their frustrations around never getting to concentrate on, let alone complete, their to-do-list. 

“Because I feel like I’m fire fighting all the time”, they say.

Consider this: you come in to work early in the morning, poised with your hot drink and every intention to finally get all those jobs done, you log into your emails, and something catches your eye, or the phone rings, or your boss comes in with something new, urgent, that requires action.

Suddenly, that well laid out plan for the day seems like a distant memory.

THE TIME PIE AND PRIORITIES 

I always talk about our ‘time pie’ ? with clients. The total hours we have available in a day make up the whole pie. We get to decide how to split the wedges, how many there need to be and how big or small each one gets to be. The reality is that if an extra task is added to our list, and all the wedges are already taken up, the pie doesn’t get any bigger unfortunately. Which means that we then have to decide which wedge/s will need to be reduced, to make room for the new wedge. This exercise is made easier if we take time to prioritise.

But what should actually take priority? 

This is where taking a step back and re-evaluating can really pay off. To-do-lists and their priority levels are not set; they can change from week to week or even from day to day. An admin task which may have been pushed to the bottom of the list two weeks ago, may now need to be pulled back up to the top. 

The question we can ask ourselves is “what are the potential consequences of this task not being done today/this week?”. It may not always be that straightforward, but it is a really good start.

When things appear overwhelming and the day sets out to be a hectic one, the instinct may be to just run with it. But I would urge everyone to take those ten minutes, whenever that panicky feeling catches us, to pause, reflect, and do a prioritising exercise. It will help in more ways than we think.