Trying to do it all

photo by Rob, rjs1322

My week was tough. The projects seemed doable, but then Mon­day hit me like a ton a bricks. Seven dif­fer­ent projects, each one seemed sim­ple enough, but when you start to see stress-enduced fore­head acne all over your face, you know you are in trou­ble. I know a lot of peo­ple who try to “do it all.” But let me tell you this– I am the queen of try­ing to “do it all” and failing…every..time.

I didn’t see a lot of options.  I was blinded by the desire to do EVERYTHING, say yes to EVERYONE, and prove to myself that I CAN DO IT ALL.

I tried break­ing down my days like I break down my work­outs: one inter­val at a time. I counted down my tasks by half hour incre­ments. Sched­ule a bunch of cus­tomer calls. Sched­ule another bunch of cus­tomer calls. Launch a sur­vey, and self recorded stud­ies. I cranked through each task like clock­ing the miles in a work­out — one at a time. After one day, I felt very busy, very pro­duc­tive. I tried it again the next day — I was slammed, but things were mov­ing along.

Then the end of the week came, and I was totally exhausted. I was dri­ving the projects for­ward, but not really get­ting any­where. I was doing too much, and not really being of value. I wasn’t improv­ing, I wasn’t see­ing the research make any dif­fer­ence whatsoever.

I real­ized research tasks really aren’t like clock­ing the miles. It’s not about the quan­tity of tasks you com­plete — it’s truly about the qual­ity. How much did your work make a dif­fer­ence? How much value are you giv­ing your company?

Some­times we get so caught up in try­ing to do EVERYTHING, that we end up doing nothing.