Six Tips to Accomplishing Important Stuff with Less Stress
I recently ran a poll on LiinkedIn asking people what they were looking for in 2024 for their career. A full 60% of respondents said that they either wanted to accomplish more or experience less stress at work.
What is the best way to accomplish more with less stress? Managing and prioritizing your time is the place to start.
I’ve developed several techniques over the years that help me do this more effectively, whether it be in my role of chief product officer, running my coaching business, or tackling projects at home.
Do It Now or Task It
When your priorities start to pile up, the sheer weight of them can make you less effective and anxious. I have two rules for this.
For tasks that can be done very quickly - and you know need to be done eventually - do it now. It is tempting to put off small things that seem to be lower priority, but for me, stacking up these low priority tasks leads to low-level stress and frustration that eats away, even if none of it seems like it should.
But for something that takes a little more work, even if it is just a response to an email that requires some thought, I will pop it on my calendar to do some time in the future. I get comfort from knowing I have time reserved for it. These tasks are easy to move around to accommodate other priorities or meetings. And sometimes, when I find myself with a little extra time, I’ll peek ahead at my schedule and finish the task before its allotted time.
Is this better than a simple To Do list? I think so, because the To Do list itself is a cause of stress. A task on your calendar is not a To Do, it's just something you don’t have to worry about now.
Let It Sit
Do you find yourself working for someone with lots of “great ideas,” but who seems to forget about yesterday’s priorities? These managers can be tiring to work for, especially if you are a people pleaser. At one of my last companies, I had to convince my engineering counterparts that we could put a roadmap on paper and stick to it, making changes only when circumstances really did change, and not based on someone’s great idea of the day. Such was the precedent set by previous management.
My general tactic when challenged with a boss throwing off ideas as if they were confetti on New Years is to let ideas stew for a bit before acting on them. Managers frequently underestimate the power of their words. An idea from a manager merely brainstorming can sound like a mandate to someone who is attentive to their boss’s needs. This makes sense, but can also harm organizational productivity and priorities.
If you have a process in place to deal with changes to the plan of record (and you should), that is the most effective way to deal with these whims. It gives everyone a chance to think.
But if your boss has carte blanche, or if the idea is not covered by a change process, you would do your organization a favor and be more productive in the long run if you let the idea sit for a while before taking action. Frequently you will find that your manager has moved on from the idea, and you will have saved yourself wasted time - and saved the organization needless churn.
Prioritize - And Do Hard Things
How many times do we ignore the most important priority because it is hard?
To make the biggest impact at work, you have to do hard things. From personal experience, one of the hardest things I had to do at one of my last jobs (and didn’t) was to lay-off a team that was just not paying off for the company. There is nothing I could have done for the company that would have had as immediate an impact on our bottom line, and yet I put it off. The job before that, it was my own product I should have killed; it was not performing, and was the wrong strategy for the company. Laying off people and killing an entire product are painful decisions; but in the end no one was well-served by my failure to take action.
We can feel productive when we are tackling high priority work items, and getting a lot of stuff done. But if you are not tackling the highest and hardest priorities, you are just fooling yourself about your performance.
Was my stress any lower for not tackling these highest priority situations? Of course not. It’s no fun to have to manage an underperforming team or product on a daily basis. In the long run, I did not save anyone’s job - and in the end, I jeopardized my own job by not making the decision myself.
Break It Down
Some projects just seem downright daunting. Starting my coaching practice, for example, seemed like a year-long process at least.
Here are some of the inherent things I had to do to create a successful business:
Learn how to coach 😉
Get certified
Build a website
Get testimonials
Learn how to market myself
Learn how to sell my services
I also had to figure out external factors, mostly financial in this case.
That’s a lot to deal with. Even dealing with the external factor meant prepping my apartment for sale while preparing to downsize to a new apartment, a whole other project entirely that still stresses me.
You can’t boil the ocean.
One approach that’s worked for me is to think about the end goal and date - e.g. launch my coaching business by June 2024 - and work backwards. In my chief product officer role, I followed a similar process - think of the press release you want to go out, and work backwards from when you want to be able to send that press release.
So I built a project plan working backwards from June. I need to do these things in May, these in April, etc. As I got closer to today, I got more specific about the small tasks. Not everything went into the plan: I was ok still learning how to market and sell after June, but I wanted to accomplish most of the other items prior to launch. And then I created a plan, tracked progress, and continued to break work items into smaller tasks as those work items became closer. For those of you familiar with agile, there are a lot of commonalities, such as epics (buld website), user stories (give client a way to schedule meetings), and tasks (block calendar for times I am unavailable).
Similar to my advice to “Task It,” creating a plan means saying it's ok if I am not considering some things today - I will in the future, and it is not important for me to think about them today. Even if they are super critical to the success of the business.
Start
So what happened with my project to launch a coaching business?
You are reading this on my website, and you can see I have services and testimonials, and I even have some marketing in the form of blog articles. So what happened?
I started.
A friend volunteered to make a logo. I started to play with SquareSpace. And, oh my, I had to figure out calendar scheduling and accepting payment and, and, and….
And you know what? It all went so much faster than I had feared. I had a blast learning new things.
I enrolled at iPEC to get myself on the path to certification.
I just started to do it. And I trusted the process.
And then before Christmas I realized - I am ready to launch. I had been coaching without formal training for a long time, but now I had finally hung my shingle, and did it six months ahead of plan.
Celebrate 🍾
Many people - first and foremost perfectionists and over-achievers - lose sight of just how much they are accomplishing.
Take a step back and give yourself a pat on the back for all the little things you do. The little things - me figuring out how to offer packages on my website, for example - add up to big things. The simple truth is you are almost always doing small things if you have broken down your projects appropriately, and waiting for the “big day” when the project is done to celebrate can mean going through years of not celebrating for a particularly large project.
Appreciate the small things, and celebrate key milestones. People thrive on a sense that they are making progress. It is important that your team be acknowledged for their accomplishments along the way; it refuels them. And key stakeholders need to see that you are making progress for their own peace of mind.
It is not enough to wait for the last milestone to exhale. You must breathe along the way.
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Don’t Just Listen to me. Leaders have been thinking about productivity for a long time now, and have developed many good ideas. I’ve tried to select the ideas that both allow me to accomplish more of the most important things whole reducing stress. I’ve chosen to leave certain methods - like how often to check email - off the list, in large part because they are not things I practice although I believe in them in theory.
I hope these ideas were useful to you!
