Work stress is real, and everyone feels it at some point in their lives. When you are overwhelmed by managing too many work tasks, it can create an incredibly difficult environment to produce your best work.
It can also be hard to keep yourself calm and work your way through your tasks, which is why it can help to have a strategy for how to deal with it. In this article, we review what it means to feel overwhelmed at work, common causes of feeling overwhelmed, and tips for overcoming this.
Feeling overwhelmed at work typically means being stressed and overworked, often feeling like you need to work outside office hours to keep up with everything you need to do.
When you have a long to-do list and everything is urgent, the work you produce can be substandard. When you feel like you just need to get it done and move on to the next task, there often isn’t enough time to finesse and improve things. However, this can feed back into that overwhelming feeling if the work is sent back for further improvements, once again adding to the pile of other stuff you have on your plate.
At its worst, work stress can create health issues and make it hard to sleep at night. This reinforces the importance of managing productivity in organisations of all sizes to promote employee wellbeing and get the best from your people.
Some employees may thrive when they have multiple tasks at one time, but others may not. When priorities aren’t made clear to your people, it can make it even harder for those who feel overwhelmed and even more unsure of where to begin. Resulting in unwanted feelings of helplessness and stress.
Managers can easily pass down tasks without fully grasping the magnitude of the work involved. Deadlines may also be based on strategic priorities, rather than a realistic picture of all the work that goes into a task.
Regardless of the reason for an ambitious deadline, the effect can sometimes overwhelm employees and inhibit progress.
An under-resourced team will always struggle with managing work tasks and meeting deadlines.
Specialist pieces of work require specialist skills. That doesn’t mean staff without that experience can’t do it, but there will be training required and it will take them longer. This needs to be considered when planning deadlines.
The pursuit of perfection can be inhibiting. The feeling that your work isn’t up to scratch can lead to it taking longer and a sense of inferiority that only compounds the feeling of being overwhelmed.
When a manager or colleague asks you to take on more work, it can be hard to say no. The desire to help and not rock the boat can lead to people managing tasks beyond what they’re capable of.
So what can you actually do about feeling overwhelmed? It can be hard to focus on a way out because it seems like you don’t have any time to do anything other than work. But this just contributes to the problem, making it worse. Follow these tips to help you reduce feeling overwhelmed at work:
As we said at the very beginning, everyone gets overwhelmed at work from time to time. Feeling overwhelmed doesn’t mean you can’t do it and is in no way a reflection on you or your ability to do your job.
Rather than dwelling on feeling overwhelmed and feeding the negative connotations even more, don’t beat yourself up about being stressed.
Talking to your manager might seem daunting, but it can be a quick fix to how you feel. They may be able to negotiate a more generous timeline, or reallocate tasks to someone else.
Even if they can’t solve your issues with your current workload, your manager will understand not to place any more demands on you until you’ve worked through everything that’s on your plate.
Sometimes you can be so overwhelmed with work that you don’t know where to start. Taking a moment to understand what your priorities are can help to create a roadmap forward. If you feel you're assigned several assignments with little to no guidance on how to complete them, ask your supervisor or team members for assistance. Priorities are effectively task management tools.
Regardless of how you might feel, you DO have time for a break. It might feel like the only way to deal with the overwhelming feeling you have is to get work done, but that’s not the case.
By taking time to breathe and calm yourself down, you can centre yourself to concentrate on giving your best to what needs to be done.
Everyone works better at different times of the day. You might be a morning person who hits the ground running, or you might find you’re most productive working late in the day, or even at night.
Whenever it is, schedule your most challenging work for the times when you’re at your best. This will drastically reduce the time it takes to get through the work you have on.
When you have several tasks to do, it can be hard to view them all in isolation. You might be tempted to do a little bit of work on one project, then a bit more on something else, and so on.
The problem with this approach is you never actually complete whole tasks, and it can feel like you aren’t getting things done. You can be making good progress, but if you finish the day and your to-do list is no shorter than it was at the beginning, it might not feel like it.
One of the basic tenets of task management is to focus on one task at a time. By doing that, you’ll complete pieces of work, feel like you’re making progress and start to build momentum that helps you to feel less overwhelmed.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way teams collaborate. Many of us have transitioned from office work to a work-from-home or hybrid model in the last few years. Organising work, improving team collaboration and communication, and prioritising tasks can be more challenging without a streamline process, especially when team sizes start growing.
By introducing an employee task management system, you can dramatically improve workplace productivity as it helps streamline processes and automates tasks. They represent huge cost savings and can prevent staff from becoming overwhelmed with their workloads.
For example, Smartly has a tangible impact on the time it takes to complete a payroll cycle. Payroll administrators have gone from taking hours to process payroll to less than 30 minutes.
Find out more about the biggest benefits of payroll automation with Smartly today.
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If you want to learn more about how your day-to-day tasks can be made simpler, you can chat to us to get some insight on how payroll software could benefit your business. Smartly can make the complex tasks seem simple including payroll, timesheets, leave and more! Smartly takes care of most of the faffing, so you can focus on the important stuff.
