If You Can Keep Your Head...
A Note to Minions:
You’re waiting for a personal phone call that bears bad or worse news. It’s 10 AM and you showed up twenty minutes late after leaving late and sitting in accident-ridden traffic and that was after getting into a fight with your partner that left you feeling overwhelmed and ready to throw in the towel and the coffee isn’t doing its job and you know your lunch break is going to be spent taking care of fixing your credit card problems that have been put on the back burner for too long…
(1) Focus on one thing at a time.
Whether it’s an email or drafting a document or prepping for a meeting, your usual stance of having 15 windows on your computer open is not going to cut it on a day like today. The habit of opening a one document at a time and even braving closing your email for the 15 minutes you are working on something allows for more focus and less time to stress about your personal life.
(2) Take a break every hour on the hour.
Take bathroom breaks when you don’t need them. Get up and get a glass of water. Just get up and get some blood flowing for a minute or two every hour.
(3) Keep track of what you’ve done and what still needs accomplished.
If you get instructional emails from your bosses, print those out and sort them by priority. When you finish a task, get rid of the email, both in your inbox and the paper copy. Repeat!
Make a list of what you’ve finished – if you have more than 5-10 tasks in a day (most of us), it gets easy to forget what you’ve been working on, especially when you’re distracted. Keep a tally (ex. - called Dr. So-and-So, am waiting for a callback) so that when your supervisors walk up to you asking you what the status of a task is, you skip that deer in the headlights look.
A Note to Supervisors:
Different than micromanaging, checking in on the health and wellbeing of your staff will inevitably lend itself to less friction in the workplace.
Knowing your staff is imperative. We all have our bad days, but when it seems your staff who used to be reliable and productive appears to be having a bad week or more, it’s time to check in.
Noticing patterns can curb frustrations you have with that staff member and help both of you out. For example, single instances of forgetting to prepare for a meeting does not mean your staff is unreliable. Breathe deeply and let it go.
Remember: Evaluate your staff, and then Re-Evaluate. If they are constantly texting, scatterbrained, etc., and they have been from day one, then what are they doing working for you? If they started out diligent and now appear distracted or their work is less polished than before, don’t be afraid to chat with them to see what’s going on.