PRDV005: Time and Stress Management

Imprisoned in the ancient Greek underworld as punishment for his earthly crimes, Sisyphus was famously tortured by a never-ending task. He was condemned to roll a massive rock up a hill – only to watch it roll back down and have to start all over again.

Sound familiar?

Let's have another look at the scenario from the first chapter:

So you start the day full of enthusiasm. You are excited about a new piece of creative work and itching to put your ideas into action. Firing up your computer, the familiar stream of emails pours into your inbox, burying the ones you did not reply to yesterday. Scanning through the list, your heart sinks – two of them look as though they require urgent action. You hit reply and start typing a response to one of them… 20 minutes later, you come around and realize you have got sucked into the email zone, have been sidetracked by interesting links sent by friends, and getting involved in issues that are not a priority for you. You minimize the email window and get back to your project…

After 15 minutes, you enjoy yourself, getting into your creative flow – when the phone rings. Somebody wants something from you – something to do with a meeting last week. You rummage through the papers on your desk, searching for your notes. You cannot find them. Suddenly your heart leaps as you lift up a folder and find an important letter you had forgotten about – it needed an urgent response several days ago. "Hang on, I will get back to you," you tell the person on the phone, "I will ring you back when I have found it."

You put the phone down and pick up the letter – this needs sorting immediately, but you remember why you put it off – it involves several phone calls and hunting through your files for documents you are not sure you even kept. By now, you have only got half an hour before your first meeting and promised to ring that person back. Your design stares at you reproachfully. The email inbox is pinging away as it fills up – already, there are more messages than before you started answering them. Your enthusiasm has nosedived, and the day has hardly begun. Creative work seems like a distant dream.

There are two big problems with this way of working:

1. You Are at the Mercy of Interruptions

Whenever you sit down to focus on your own work, you never know when your concentration will be broken – by an email, a phone call, a request from a colleague, or even by yourself, when you suddenly remember something important that you have forgotten to do. Almost as bad as the interruptions is anticipating them – you can never really relax and focus because you know you could be derailed at any moment.

When I trained in hypnosis, one of the things I learned was that if you want to create amnesia, you should keep interrupting people and/or change the subject. The hypnotic explanation is that memory depends on your state of mind, so when you change your focus, you are changing your mind – making it hard to remember what you were thinking about before. Think of a time when you were chatting to a friend in a restaurant or at a party, and someone came over and interrupted you with a question – when they left, you both turned to each other and asked, "What were we talking about?"

The bottom line is that interruptions destroy your concentration. And loss of concentration = loss of creative work. If you are not careful, you can end up in permanent reactive mode – spending your time responding to others' demands and all the things you have to do instead of the one thing you really wanted to do today.

Let's face it, the interruptions are not going away anytime soon. If they did, it would be a bad thing – it would mean you had no clients, colleagues, customers or collaborators. Obvious short-term fixes are to close your email application, switch your phone onto answerphone mode and put a do not disturb notice on your office door – as recommended in my previous chapter on how to Ring-fence your most creative time. But you cannot do this all the time – and it does not solve your second big problem…

2. The Sisyphus Effect – A Never-Ending To-do List

The Sisyphus effect results from endless to-do lists, which are created by a constant stream of incoming demands. We start the day full of enthusiasm, but by the end of it, we have taken on so many new commitments that the to-do list is longer than when we started.

Productivity expert Mark Forster makes an excellent and (to me) surprising point about motivation:

I had not thought about it like that before. Still, on examining my own experience, I think he is right. When faced with a few things to do in a day, even if they are not all inspiring, I feel motivated enough to get through them. But if I face a vaguely-defined, open-ended list of tasks, I can feel hopeless, and my energy drops. I can even be paralyzed by inaction when faced with three or four fascinating pieces of work if I do not think there is time to do them all.

You Need to Give Yourself Room to Breathe!

Faced with the twin problems of unpredictable interruptions and the Sisyphus effect of neverending tasks, you need to give yourself room to breathe, keep a clear head and stay focused on what you want to achieve. In short, you need to install a buffer between others' demands and your response. Otherwise, you will end up in permanently anxious and unproductive reaction mode.

On the other hand, you need to find a way of fulfilling your commitments and giving others what they need from you within a reasonable timescale. Otherwise you will quickly gain a reputation for unreliability and pay the penalty.

How can you manage this? I will present one solution in the next chapter – a surprising and counter-intuitive idea that has transformed my own working life…

Questions