Life happens. Your office to-do list is loaded with important milestones to hit and deadlines to meet. However, that doesn’t hold back the demands at home. Maybe they are good things on your personal calendar – graduations, birthdays, celebrations of all sorts. Maybe it’s challenges – home repairs, health concerns, and the like. Maybe it’s just life. The day-to-day schedule of classes, and rehearsals, and meals to prep, and tests to take. Maybe it’s a bit of all those things and more. The truth is it doesn’t matter which list you’re pulling from, none of it happens in a vacuum.
The pressures on your time and focus at home don’t silence when you step into your professional spaces. Yet, the work to-do list still needs to be completed. The tasks on your professional plate still need your attention and your focus. How do you turn it up at work when the world outside your workspace is swirling, pulling, and threatening to overwhelm?
You’ll find countless articles about work-life balance. Most of them will focus on carving out space for life. These discussions tend to center on how to pull back from the pressure to be “on” for work in ways that steal our peace and renewal from home. We don’t talk enough, perhaps, about giving our attention to work when the ‘life’ part of the equation is swirling with chaos. How do we get done what must be done in our professional capacities while our personal lives are pressing in and crushing us?
Psychotherapist and author Lori Gottlieb wrote, “Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.” Sure, this can fall into the easier said than done category of tips. Finding inner calm in the midst of a swirling storm takes more work than reading a simple article. It starts, however, with being aware that calm and peace aren’t a physical, tangible constant to achieve.
It’s not about controlling external factors – especially since most of those are beyond your control. Trying to quiet the outside storm is going to add more stress to an already volatile situation. Sometimes life is going to toss you around like a rowboat in the ocean. Your job isn’t to quiet the storm. It’s to learn how to ride the waves as best you can.
You’ve built a career on breaking through the limits. You’ve leapt over hurdles. You’ve set goals, met them, and then went beyond them. You’re a go-getter. Yet, at this moment, be okay with just getting through today. You really do have limits and it’s okay to accept them. Some days, getting up out of bed, dressed, and settling into your workspace is a big accomplishment. Be okay with just getting through these moments.
Hit pause on projects that can wait a little longer to get done. Delegate what you can to folks who have the bandwidth to take the tasks on – and trust them to do the things you’ve given them. Be realistic with what you can handle.
There is no switch. We don’t enter our workspaces and flip a switch that quiets the outside so we can focus on the tasks at hand any more than we tuck our work selves in a drawer and leave it all there when we step back into our personal spaces. We carry the stress and the tension from one “world” into the other. Being self-aware is key here. Knowing that we’re on edge and raw from whatever is happening outside of work is step one. Understanding that the carryover can impact us is step two.
Slow down, take a deep breath and be aware. Give that email a second read before hitting send. Take more detailed notes than you might normally take. Ask more questions to clarify information, expectations, and parameters. Double check and triple check. Go slower. Don’t rush. Build more time into your deadlines to give yourself space to get things done while you’re not as focused and efficient as you might normally be.
This goes beyond delegating tasks so you can make a little space on your plate to manage the chaos around you. This is about building a support network. Your boss, your partner, and/or your mentor should be looped in at least to a point. If the chaos outside the office is going to impact your ability to focus and perform in the office, looping some trusted folks in can be helpful, at least when the chaos is outside the ordinary.
Death of a loved one, health concerns that might pull your focus and your time away, challenges that crowd over the edges of the outside into your work day, these are things that merit conversation. You don’t need to dump the full emotional load on someone else’s lap, but sharing at least the high level overview of what you’re juggling is helpful. It will allow you to adjust expectations, find a sounding board if you need help refocusing, and make it easier to ask for time off or access to resources you may need.
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