EmbedEdit
After those curveball weeks – whether it’s an illness in the family or a work fire that puts off all other work – it can be overwhelming to look at the backlog on top of upcoming meetings and deadlines. Let’s talk practical strategies to help dig out and get you back to feeling more stable and on track.
Resources mentioned:
- Article: What do you do when you have to work with a sick kid at home?
- Podcast episode no. 26 & 27
—
To take my free 5-day program, the Reset and Refresh, click here: https://kellynolan.com/reset-refresh.
Full Transcript
Ep 69. How to Dig Out After a Curveball Week
[Upbeat Intro Music]
Kelly Nolan: Welcome to The Bright Method Podcast where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up The Bright Method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all, personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep proud of what you got done today and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in!
_________
Kelly Nolan: Hey, hey! All right, so today we are going to talk about a topic that someone asked me to cover. I actually posted on Instagram I was explaining that, as you’ll find out in this episode, my brain is pretty mushy. I’m kind of coming up blank a lot, and I needed some help coming up with a podcast topic, and this was one of the topics was how do you recover after going through a crazy week or a week like I’ve had. So we’re gonna talk about that today!
Context: The Week I Had – 0:57
For context, the week I have had was last week was back-to-school week for my family. I’d had the kids home most of August without childcare. Part of it I had camps for but a lot of it I didn’t. And we planned things in light of that, like we went on a trip together. It was a lot of fun. But basically, I didn’t have a lot of childcare for all of August. So I’m really looking forward to back to school.
And my six-year-old went to school on Thursday. Thursday was the day I was excited for to get both kids back in school and have time to myself. The Tuesday before that Thursday, my three-year-old broke her collarbone, so we kept her home the rest of the week, and then my six-year-old had a dental thing that ended up being totally fine, but I had to call and the only time they could get her in basically required me to pick her up early on her very first day of school, so that Thursday was a kid at home now, and I didn’t even get a full day of school for the oldest.
Then on Thursday itself, I started feeling crummy. Friday I tested positive for COVID, then the three-year-old also went down with COVID, and what really made it stressful on that front was that we are living with my parents while we renovate, for at least part of the renovation, and they are already doing us a massive favor, and now we’re COVID-positive a couple days before they go to Europe. And so, they want to protect this trip to Europe. So it was a lot. It was a lot of logistics, a lot of stressors, a lot of not working. [Laughs] It was a lot of not working when I thought I was finally gonna get the ability to work.
So that was the week I just had. We made it through. We’re all good now. The collarbone is still slowly healing, but so far that’s the only residual thing going on, and we’re on the other side. But how do you come out of that? I mean, and obviously people go through way worse things. I’m not saying that it’s incredibly hard, but it is a life disruptor, and whether you have something similar in your life or something else, we all have those weeks (I think that was more like ten days) of things that just really derail our plans. And so, when you come out of it, you have a lot of things that have piled up. Your emotions are a little bit kind of all over just like, “Oh, my gosh. I’m so stressed by all this piled-up work.” And so, how do you handle it?
How to Handle The Stress of The Piled-Up Work – 3:11
So the first thing I want to do is just talk about, briefly, what to do during it. I have a whole article about what to do when you have to work with sick kids at home, so check that out. I’ll link it in the show notes. I did two podcast episodes that also kind of cover that article if you’d prefer to listen to it. So I’ll also link those in the show notes or at least list the numbers of the episodes.
A couple other little things that came up that I just wanted to emphasize are — I weirdly found this helpful this time. Over the past ten days I would make myself explicitly state in my head what I was prioritizing when I felt the overwhelm start to creep in. So I needed to go to bed. I was sick. I was exhausted, and yet I could feel the work piling up. I would monitor the emails coming in. I knew who was waiting for my responses, and I could just feel that pressure to do it. But I also was like, “I’ve got to go to bed! It’s eight o’clock at night. I’m really sick.” I mean, I wasn’t — I was fine. But “I’m sick. I’m fine partly because I’m doing a good job keeping up on my sleep. I need to go to sleep.” You know the conflict. And I would make myself say — instead of focusing on what I wasn’t doing I would say in my head, “I am prioritizing sleep because I am sick.” Or if I was with my daughter and I felt like I should be on email in the corner but she wanted to be held and I was getting stressed out and she was barnacling on me and I couldn’t do the work that I wanted to do, and she was just watching TV but she wanted to be on me, and I would be kind of stressed out like, “I need to put her down and go do this work,” and I would make myself say, “She is sick and in pain, and it is a higher priority to take care of her than responding to XYZ email.”
I know it’s not this incredible breakthrough, but it weirdly helped my stress just diminish a little bit in those moments of like, “It’s gonna be okay. I’m prioritizing the right thing, and we will get to it at some point.” It really just helped reduce that, so I wanted to share that, that whenever you are feeling that overwhelm I think that sometimes it can really help just to really clarify what you’re doing, clarify what you’re prioritizing and why, and say it almost to yourself so that you’re not kind of in that whirl space. You get more of that clarity by stating it to yourself and owning what you are prioritizing.
Another quick thing about during it is more of a general thing that I do is that I often book childcare on the weekends. Now, my childcare during the week is maybe more abbreviated than some people’s. By the time I drop everybody off and everything I have basically 8:00 to about 3:00, and I know 3:00’s maybe shorter than a lot of people. So just know that I’m talking about it from this angle but honestly, I think it applies to a lot of, at least working, parents out there is that I often get childcare support on weekends that my husband is working all weekend, and that, I would say it’s maybe a third to half of the weekends that I do that, maybe closer to half, and thankfully, I did that for this weekend and I have I think it’s 8:00 to noon on Saturday blocked, maybe even 8:00 to 2:00 because in the middle of that my daughter goes to gymnastics, and I help transport.
But it’s just such a godsend when weekends like this happen or weeks like this happen because I have some extra work hours built into the system anyway. If I need them, great. Again, I’m the primary parent, so if anything goes derailed it’s typically me who has to carry the load there. So having those extra weekend hours is really valuable to me. And then if nothing does go crazy, then it’s just bonus time that I get to do with whatever I want to do, which is really, really wonderful also.
So those were a couple little things I wanted to talk about before I go into actually how to dig yourself out of this, once you’re feeling better, once your kids are feeling better, once whoever you’re taking care of or helping with or just the craziness, the general craziness has calmed down. It might even be work craziness if one particular project imploded. For a week you were handling it, then how do you kind of dig back out after that?
So we’re gonna go through this process that I generally follow. Let’s be very flexible here but it’s generally my approach. And please know that this happens over the course of days. A lot of this is a lot of work to do all at once. I don’t think you could do it all in a day. So just understand that, that what I’m talking about is work over a period of time.
#1: Look to Free Up Time – 7:32
So the very first thing I do is actually look to free up time because even before we dig into, “What do I need to do,” I know that I need time. And so, I look for things that I can punt. So I look for big meetings on my calendar in the next few days slash week or two and see if I can move them out. So an example of this is I was gonna volunteer for something with my six-year-old at her school. It was gonna be I think about three hours on a Friday, and that’s not normal for me, but it’s like a start-of-the-school-year thing that I wanted to do, and I just decided to pull out of that.
Given what the last week has done to my work, I really needed to be able to focus on work, and I have been in mega-mom mode for weeks, so I don’t feel too guilty about picking work over my kids right now because I’ve been with my kids so much, and I really do need to do a lot of work. And so, that’s an example of something that I emailed in and was like, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m very sorry. I look forward to future opportunities. Have fun!” And so, I reclaimed probably four hours with all the driving, and probably even more than that if you think about getting ready and that kind of stuff, for myself today, which I’m using in part to do this.
Side note: one thing I have learned is not to tell my kids too early that I’m doing something with them at school because, thankfully, I had not told my six-year-old that I was volunteering, so it was totally fine to bow out. She was none the wiser, and I’m sure she didn’t care.
#2: Get Clarity on Most Important Things – 9:00
Next, I got a lot of clarity on what are the most important things going on. So, for me, it was really looking at the next kind of two/three weeks and being like, “What is going on right now?” I have one program that I’m running for alumna of the programs. It’s a little convoluted, but I obviously run my eight-week program. Any alumna who’ve gone through it have the opportunity to do a refresher with me that started this past week. So that was going on. I really needed to get on top of that. I have my upcoming program that kicks off in a couple weeks, so I needed to get on top of that and make sure that nothing had fallen through the cracks there, and then in relation to that, I also need to sell that program. So I like to touch base with the people who’ve already jumped in, but I’m also trying to sell and fill the rest of that program, and that’s an important part of my business.
So those were the big three things on the work front. What I did was prioritized anything I needed to do on those pretty quickly or scheduled out when I would do them down the road.
Once those things were in a good spot, and that was more like what I think of as intentional work. It’s like really what’s going on, let me intentionally pick what I need to focus on and handle that. Once I felt okay on that front, then I turned to the swirling reactive stuff, the email inboxes and all that kind of stuff that’s really been piling up. That’s kind of where that easier source of stress comes from in a sense (not easier but more common or something) because you’re seeing those requests from people coming in and you’re barely responding to them, if at all. And so, that to me is a big source of stress.
So once I was on top of the clear, really important things I needed to handle, that’s what I turned to, and that stuff takes a long time to dig out of, and so, just know that. I went through my personal inbox and my work inbox. I would kind of bop between the two. Candidly, there was no particular order. And then also, the more you email out, the more emails you get back. And so, it’s a bit of a process to really dig back out of that, but it’s doable, and in some sense it’s almost like the easier stuff. It’s not the fun stuff. But we all know for the most part how to process email, and it’s just churning through that and clearing the decks on that front.
One thing I really, really kept in mind while I was doing that though, because, you know, some of this email is setting up meetings or things like that, is I really focused on not adding anything to my calendar for a few weeks at this point. Anything that was not critical, anything that could get pushed got pushed farther out than it would normally because I just knew even though I haven’t processed all the work and really sat down and thought about the backlog of work tasks I needed to do, I knew they were there. I knew I would need the work time to do it. And this is particularly true during this period of my year is I’m running, as I said, two programs kicking off this month. I have a lot of meetings, more than I normally would because of that, and so, I know that I have less time available at baseline, and so, truly any meetings that I am open to scheduling need to get scheduled out farther than I normally would. And so, that’s something I always kept in mind as I was processing email during that time is punt out, punt out, punt out.
I want to note at this point that anytime I ran out of steam, which I think happens to us normally, like anytime, and also after you’ve been sick, even more often, is that’s when I would — if I didn’t need a nap. Like, if I need a nap, take a nap. But if that wasn’t the case, that’s when I would clean because it’s not just the work stuff that piles up, as we all know. It’s the laundry, the state of the kitchen, the state of the house, all that kind of stuff. Everything kind of falls apart a little bit in that sense. And so, when I would run out of steam, that’s what I would turn to is the more physical puttering, cleaning of the house, doing the laundry, cleaning up my room. My room got really gross because the three-year-old was sleeping in my room with me so that my husband could be with the six-year-old in another room to try and prevent them from getting COVID so that my parents could move back in faster, all this kind of stuff. So basically, there was always a sleeping three-year-old in here too if I wasn’t in here, and so, there wasn’t the normal cleaning in the mornings or the evenings that normally take place. So it was gross. [Laughs]
So that was a big one that I had to clean up, and that took a lot of time to do. And so, that was a big one but a kind of nice break from the kind of computer work is to take a break and actually clean up the house as well. Just again I’m noting if you are tired, take a nap. But that was really a good — I would kind of pendulum between those activities. They complement each other well for me and my energy.
#3: Calendar Everything – 13:38
Another thing I want to note is as I was processing email and that kind of reactive-type stuff that has piled up is I really calendared anything I needed to do, even more so than normal I would say because there’s so much stuff and my brain was tired that I really felt like I’m not gonna remember any of this. I’m not gonna remember that I’m setting all this up for down the road, so I really need to spell it out. I don’t trust my brain at baseline anyway to remember things, and I definitely didn’t when I’m feeling tired and foggy and a little bit overwhelmed, no way am I gonna trust my brain.
So, for examples of this, luckily before COVID and everything, I had been able to meet my daughter’s new teacher, and as part of that you get a folder of things, and there were a lot of back-to-school things, and certain things are due on different dates and all this kind of stuff. And so, as I took that folder, I calendared the dates they were due, but I also calendared when are we gonna fill out these forms or do these projects with our six-year-old and really overdid it. So instead of just calendaring when I think I’m gonna do the thing and the deadline, I did that but then the day before I was like, “Is that done?” The day before that I was also like, “It’s due in two days. Is it done?” just so that there were a lot of back-step measures in place so that I was never startled that something was due the next day or even startled when we got to the prep time. I just knew those things were coming. It really helps my brain kind of have those back-step measures to make sure we get something done and then also it facilitates me letting go of the thing once I know all of those things are in the calendar.
Another example is I’m going on a girl’s trip at the end of the month, which silver lining, I now have gotten COVID out of the way, so that should be good! Knock on wood. There are other things that I could get too. And so, it’s really, in addition to planning out when I’m going to pack and when am I going to the airport and all that kind of stuff it was also like, “Do we need help planning?” calendaring time to do that, that kind of stuff, again, on a repeating basis. I don’t know what all the things are that I’m gonna have to help with the planning part of this, but I know that if I block half an hour every other day leading up to it that I’ll have time protected to do it. I can reach out to other people. I can make sure I don’t forget to pull my weight on this element of it. I don’t do that for every trip, by the way. This is a particular trip, and that’s why I’m doing it. That’s another example of something I have coming up that I really over-calendared what I need to do in a sense.
Another thing I wanted to note, especially as you were just going through all this reactive stuff in almost every email you read, not just contains action items but it triggers other things like your own brain to be like, “Oh, yeah, we need to do this thing and this thing and this thing.” I do find that to be a really great time, for me I take a legal pad, and I just write out to-do lists as they come to mind. The priority here is capturing everything you’re thinking of and that you’re afraid you’re gonna forget. Again, I don’t trust my brain for anything, and so, I will likely forget it and admit it. [Laughs] And so, I really need to capture everything, and then I bridge it into the calendar.
So just know that I’m trying to make this as practical as I can, and so, just really spelling it out as: as I process email I do have a legal pad next to me, and I’m capturing things as I need to if they’re not fully captured in an email. If they’re in an email I’m not duplicating them onto a to-do list. But as other ideas come to mind I’m jotting them down all the time, and then I calendar those things out.
Then once the more reactive stuff — for me it’s mainly email. For you, it might also include Slack or any other project management tool where things are coming at you, anywhere where a lot of action items are being thrown your way, once you’ve dealt with that backlog, and there are still gonna be more that come, but once, you know, you kind of get to that place of, “Okay, I’m back into normal territory now.” Once you’re there, then I would slow down and start evaluating big projects. Just to be really clear again from the practical, take a break. That’s a lot to do everything we’ve talked about. That might in and of itself have taken a day or two. And so, just take a break. You want your brain to be fresh for this next stage.
But that’s when I would slow down, really look up, think and kind of evaluate your big projects. If you’re a client, use that bird’s-eye view that we create. Really get clear on, “What are the big things on my plate right now? Let me look ahead at the next month or six weeks of deadlines. Do I feel like I’m in good shape with all of these?” Not that you’ve completed the work but there are no surprises, you feel like you can build out your gameplans for this period of time and you’ll be okay, all that kind of stuff, that’s when I start doing that. And I really look at those big projects and deadlines and use my six-step process for breaking things down and creating a game plan, so I feel good on that front.
If you’ve noticed, this is where I really shift back into more intentional mode, now that I feel like the more urgent short-term intentional stuff was handled and then the reactive stuff that takes a long time to deal with is handled, that’s when I really turn back to the intentional because now I would say my stress is reduced a lot at that stage, and I just feel like I have more brain space to do it because I’m holding less in my brain and holding less emotions about all those things in my brain. My brain is calmer, feels more empty in a good way, and bring more fresh creative energy to what are the big projects, what are the big deadlines, how are we gonna meet those and that kind of stuff.
I want to reiterate that as I’m doing all of this I am trying to prioritize a light schedule over the next coming weeks. Part of that is, I mean, it’d be great to have a light schedule but mainly it has more to do with the fact that as I process, I know there’s more coming, so I need to leave space for the stuff that I don’t know what it is yet, but I know it’s coming as I continue to process the backlog. And so, anything that can be pushed out should be pushed out to leave space in your calendar and your actual time and life for the things that you’re gonna discover maybe 20 minutes later as you do all this reactive stuff that really does have to happen next week. So that’s a big, big kind of mantra to kind of keep in your head as you process coming out of it.
The Power of Extra Childcare on Weekends – 19:54
I also want to flag that, again, childcare, having some extra childcare if you have kids and if you are tight on time can be just so nice. It’s a Friday as I record this. It was a Thursday yesterday, and that was the first day of childcare I’d had in a month. I can’t do all of this and do the other stuff that I did have on my plate. Everything we’ve talked about really takes many hours. And so, I still feel like I’m not turning to some of the stuff that I want to and some of the elements of this process that I want to, and that’s okay because I have extra hours tomorrow to do that.
Now, you might be able to trade off with a partner or a family member. My husband’s working all weekend. I’m not complaining because he was home the weekend that I was sick, and everything exploded. But he is gone this weekend, and so, I wouldn’t have that option if I didn’t do this. And so, I just throw that out again to reiterate the importance and the power of extra childcare on the weekends. And I hope you don’t always have to use it for work. I hope that you have a full five days of coverage if you have kids and then you have this extra time on the weekend to have fun. I often end up really needing those extra hours because of some sort of derailment, and this was a really big one, and so, I’ll probably need all the hours to do that work other than when I take my oldest to gymnastics.
The last little thing I’ll say on this is also really prioritizing staying on top of sleep still. Even though I’m healthy now, I just think our bodies need time to recover after illness. And so, really staying on top of sleep, not pulling a lot of late nights, especially during when you’re sick but even after for a while. It’s so tempting. I have been tempted by it. I’ve given into it a little bit. But I’ve really tried to check myself on, “Hey, you’re sick,” or “You’re coming off being sick, and you need to sleep to let your body recover.”
Recap – 21:43
All right, I hope it helps! I’m gonna give a bit of a recap because I know that I kind of wandered around a little bit because I don’t have, like, a step-by-step process I follow but as I got the question and as I thought about how my digging out this is really the process, the rough process, that I follow, it’s been really good. It’s been pretty effective for me.
Again, first, look to free up time. Cancel anything you can cancel. Punt it out or anything like that. Then get clarity on what are the most important short-term things going on right now. This week, next week what do you really have to do? Do anything you need to do for them that you need to do right now. Then, once those kind of short-term, intentional things are handled, get swept up in the reactive stuff, just that swirling backlog of email and all that kind of stuff. And really, as you process, try and punt anything that you can punt. If you run out of steam, putter around. That’s a great time to do that. More like digging out the physical stuff that we have to deal with and then, really, also over-calendar. Don’t trust your brain in these really — it feels like a whirl in a way, and really help your brain not have to carry any of it.
So over-calendar things. Give yourself extra time to do things than you might have before. Build in those back-step measures, even if all your calendaring is a 15-minute, “Hey, that thing is due tomorrow. Is it done,” type thing. Just with sufficient time, if it’s not done, with sufficient time in the rest of your day to do it if you needed to, even if it meant you had to move things around in that moment.
Once that reactive stuff is handled, then slow down and turn to the bigger projects, the bigger deadlines coming up beyond the next week or two and really make sure that you’re in good shape there. Build out a game plan. If you’re a client of mine, review that bird’s-eye view, review those upcoming deadlines and back it out, the six-step process. That’s a lot of chapter three in the program.
All right? I hope this helps! I’m so sorry if you’re in this position where you need it. I just think that it happens. It happens, and we might as well be prepared for it. And I will probably be coming back to this episode to think about how to dig out of a future whirlwind week, which I’m sure we will all be subjected to. But in the meantime, I think I’ve paid my dues for a little bit. I’m not sure that’s how that works, but I’m just gonna delusionally think that for a moment and say here’s to a couple calm weeks. I hope it’s calm in your life as well, and this is just an intellectual thing that you can use in the future. But if not, you’ve got this, and I will talk to you soon. I’ll catch you in the next episode!
[Upbeat Outro Music]
