I’ll be honest with you: I was scared to write this post. I didn’t want to admit defeat or failure, because essentially, that’s what it feels like when you say you can’t accomplish everything. You feel dejected, as though you let those who were counting on you down.
I don’t want to admit that I can’t do all my work, but I can’t.
I recently got married, went on a wonderful honeymoon, and returned back to Massachusetts to find that my work had piled up, and it all has a deadline. Before when I thought about work, I would just wake up even earlier (like at 5 instead of 6) and go to bed later to get it done. But with this work, I knew I couldn’t do that.
Creativity is a limited resource. With any job requiring creativity, you have to be conscious of how much creative energy is going into your priority projects. You can’t simply add more time to your day to get all your work done. Something is going to suffer if you’re drawing from your creativity for multiple tasks.
Creativity works best as a river you guide, not a reservoir you continually draw from.
When work gets the best of us, we must learn not how to use more creativity, but rather how to guide what creativity we do have into more important tasks.
Basically, when your work gets to be too much, don’t try to do it all. Instead, prioritize, consolidate, and manage. Then, you’ll ensure your best ideas and products emerge on the surface.
Prioritizing involves finding the tasks that are most important to get done and simply ranking them.
Consolidating involves simplifying and making your work easier, stripping away all the extra tasks and getting down to what you need to accomplish.
And finally, managing involves taking the responsibility to fulfill your most important tasks with all that you have.
Before I learn to do these three things, my work was suffering. My writing was crap, and my effort was exhausted.
With that being said, it’s time for me to consolidate.
I’m writing this post to inform you that I’ll be stepping back from blogging for a short while to go through the final edits of my new book coming out. It is my hope that when I come out of this brief break, I will have the experience, ideas, and treasures to share with you in abundance, much like the way a family member brings back gifts from their vacation. But all this requires me to step back and take my writing one step at a time.
I hope you will do the same if your work gets to be too much. If you do, contact me. I would love to hear about it. But if I don’t respond right away, it’s because I’m giving my ideas the attention they need to thrive.