How to Handle Workplace Expectations, and Other Listener Q&A

This month’s listener Q&A gives us three juicy areas to cover: struggling with frequent task switching, dealing with burnout and unachievable workloads (and the expectations associated with this), and how our practices integrate with personal reflections.

Erin and Jessica respond to your questions with insight, experience and resources, to give you some great, actionable steps in your daily life.

Episodes referenced in this episode:

• Everyday Practices for Organizational Resilience:
  https://oneop.org/learn/everyday-practices-for-organzational-resilience/
• Turning Conflict Into Collaboration:
  https://oneop.org/learn/turning-conflict-into-collaboration/

Links and resources from this episode:

• Sign up for our monthly newsletter: https://oneop.aweb.page/practicing-connection-newsletter
• Join our LinkedIn group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12879756/ 
• Send us a message: practicingconnection@oneop.org 

Transcript

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ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: [00:00:00] Hi. Thank you for listening to the Practicing Connection Podcast. I'm Erin, my co-host Jessica is here as well. Today we're answering listener questions. 

Hi Jessica. How are you feeling about today's questions?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: I mean, this is the second time we're doing this kind of episode, and I was super stoked last time, and I might be even more excited this time. I mean, it's really nice to, I guess, have more of an exchange, right? Because podcasts are much more of a one-sided kind of thing.

So it's nice to have at least a few moments like this where we can kind of have an exchange with people who listen.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah. I love that. I think for me, I also really love how it feels. Some of them almost feel like getting a case study, where we've taught you a concept, and then here's a case study. “Here's a real life example of using it,” which is maybe a little bit easier to wrap your head around than our interviews, which are combining a bunch of things altogether, and this is a little more narrow [00:01:00] focused.

So all of that to say, I am also very excited. Are you ready for our first question?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: I am. Go for it. Do it. Floor is yours.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Okay, question one. “I balance so many different responsibilities in my role, and have found myself struggling more and more with transitioning between tasks. Do you have any practices to help? Please? I'm drowning!”

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Oh, no. Oh, that one sounds very - well, we better say this really quick and like, let's publish this episode before the one we just recorded so that this person has help right away!

No, so I mean, really if only this were a simple answer and simple to implement, it's just like you and I always say, you do need to find what works for you, right? And try different things. 

But I'm happy to share some of the things that have worked for me. And, you know, one of the reasons why it's also not a super simple answer is that we don't always have as much control over our schedules as we’d like. [00:02:00] 

I've been doing a lot of reading, or I've done a lot of reading in the past, but of course, I do a lot of reading just in general about productivity, and a lot of the things that I've read, give you this advice or that advice, or they give you a whole system to follow. 

I have not once found an entire system out there that I could follow, the way the person set it up for themselves, that worked for me. And so I always tend to find like a little piece of this system here, a little piece of that system there, and I pick what works for me. I try things out if it works for me.

Sometimes I only keep it for a few months, because that's when I really desperately needed that particular tool. Sometimes I drop it for a while and I come back to it later. 

So here's some of the things that I do. I like to hold aside about an hour in the morning to plan and do things like read articles, kind of easing into the day a little bit. And by reading articles, I'm not talking about like In Style Magazine or whatever. I'm talking about, you know, articles that are related to my [00:03:00] job. 

So, I'll spend that time planning, reading articles, blocking time on my calendar, and then during this time, I choose no more than three things that I need to get done that day.

The reality is, and this is what I used to do, I would list out every single thing that needed to be done. I would copy over things I didn't get done the day before from a list, and I'd write them out again the next day. And a lot of times there would be like 10, 15, 20, 25 things on that list. It was overwhelming.

And if I could get 25 things done in a day, that would be great. But guess what? Tomorrow there's gonna be 25 more, because it just seems like it never. Really. Ends.

But sometimes I only have time to get one thing done. That reality, when I really realized that, that was a huge wake up call. It just depends on what that one thing is, and how many meetings I have, right? Because we know sometimes the one thing on your list could be a 3, 4, 5 hour [00:04:00] project, or your one thing could be a 30 minute email you have to write. 

And then if you have a lot of meetings, well maybe you only have an hour here to get things done between meetings an hour there, half an hour there. Sometimes I could only get one thing done in a day. So I choose the three priorities during that kind of one hour block where I do a little bit of reading, a little bit of time blocking, et cetera. 

And I think I've talked about how I like to put them on a small post-it note that doesn't have much real estate, so that I can't keep adding to the list. But once I choose those three priorities, I block off time that day to do each. And that's where I start to realize, “Oh, I don't have time to do these three things today. One of them's gonna have to give and go on to tomorrow.” 

Sometimes I have to drop an item because there's not enough time between the meetings to get to it. So to me the biggest takeaway though, from how I do this, is that I don't write out [00:05:00] everything that needs to be done in a big, long list. This helps me focus and limit how many transitions I make. 

And that's to me the key with the question that's being asked about transitioning. And sometimes to be honest, I'll start out by only writing down one thing. Because I see my meeting load for the day, I might add a second thing to it. If I actually get the one thing done, I might add a second or third thing to it. 

But I really have just gotten very realistic about what I can actually get done in a day. And it really does help me limit the number of transitions that I make.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Okay.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: I still have too many transitions, I'll be honest.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah, it sounds like this is a thing you think about a lot, because you immediately had a lot to say about this. I love that. 

I think that's really useful to figure out ways to limit your transitions. One of the ways that I do that is I try to bundle things. So, you know, I think of my workload in different themed buckets, and then I try to have like days or half of [00:06:00] days where I work on one particular bucket. 

Again, this is not always possible, because sometimes I'm going from a meeting about one bucket to a meeting about another bucket, and I just, you know, there's no magic fix for that, but some of the things that have helped me are scheduling buffer time in my calendar.

So I actually have a setting in Outlook where my default meeting length time is 50 minutes. Which I think is really helpful. It's not always possible depending on the culture of where you're at. But I think that's really helpful. Or sometimes if I know I have a meeting right after, I'll say at the beginning of the meeting, especially if it's a one-on-one meeting, this is a lot easier, just say, “I'm so sorry. I have a hard stop of this time. Does that work for you?” Kind of negotiate a little bit of like a five minute break. 

Some other things that have really helped me with transitions are physically moving my body when I'm moving between tasks.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: I've sometimes gotten up and like [00:07:00] timed myself and gone on like a five minute walk around my office. It seems silly because I'm just doing a loop, but -

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah, literally. Sometimes it's just, ‘I'm gonna stand up and walk across the room to touch the other wall and then step back.’ It takes me 30 seconds, but even just physically moving my body helps my brain unfocus and refocus, which is great. 

Sometimes when you're in a work environment, you don't want to get up and have walks all the time, because then there's this appearance of you're not working or something.

You know, it can just be, it can be messy. So other things that I'll do is I'll have water or a little snack that I can eat, to transition between tasks and do some kind of care for my body, help me be in my body, and that helps my brain switch. 

I think the other thing that has been so helpful is to not start my day by reading emails or messages. So I [00:08:00] try to schedule like an hour buffer at the beginning of my day where I can sit and think about what are my priorities for the day? What's important to me? What things do I need to think about? And really kind of figure out what's going on in my work, and bring myself back to focusing on work mode and not the rest of my life mode.

And the thing that's really helpful about that is if I start by reading my email, I get decision fatigue immediately. So I like to try to make my decisions about my day before I get inundated with a billion messages. And that has been so helpful.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: This is also reminding me, some of the things you're saying, remind me of this great activity you can do just sitting at your desk. 

If you didn't want to get up or, or whatever, and it's the - have you heard of the 5, 4, 3, 2 1 activity? 

Okay. So, if you need sort of this little bit of a transition time, because that's another thing you can do is even if you can't change how many transitions you have in a [00:09:00] day, maybe you'll be able to find like 30 seconds to a minute to do something like this, just to kind of allow you a little bit of buffer time. 

And so, it starts with five. You name five things that you can see around you. Chair. A plant. Your hands. Your laptop, whatever. Just name five things that you can see. 

And then name four things that you can feel. So maybe it's your feet on the floor, maybe you've got a blanket in your lap. Like I often have maybe your smooth desktop, your mouse, whatever it is. Four things you can feel. 

And then name three things you can hear. So in my case, it's right now my laptop, my voice because I'm talking, you know, and I have a space heater running right now, and I can hear that.

And then two things you can smell. So that one sometimes gets a little harder, which is why it's only two. 

And then one thing you can [00:10:00] taste. And so this might be, you know, lingering toothpaste or food from your maybe coffee breath, whatever. It doesn't matter. One thing you can taste, and if you can't taste anything, then maybe just name your favorite smell or the favorite thing that you can see.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Okay.

That's a great transitional activity. Because I feel like it really pulls you out of wherever you are, and it's very like, regulating activity.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. Yeah. I really like it. It's very calming too. Okay, let's go into the next question. I'm going to read this one. 

“It feels like I'm the only person on my team who cares about not giving ourselves burnout with unachievable workloads. We never say no to anything. Or even ask for an extension. How do I bring this up without sounding like I'm unwilling to take one for the team or without sounding like I'm uncooperative?”

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Oh, oh wow. Okay. This is a good question. [00:11:00] I am this person a lot. 

Okay, some things that are really helpful are appealing to underlying shared values. So do you have a shared value for quality of work? Do you have a shared value for relationships? Do you have a shared value for sustainability?

We have episodes where we talk about collaborating with people you disagree with. And I think that practice may also work here, because there is a disagreement happening here, which is you have a different tolerance for chaos and unreasonable achievements. So, think that's a thing that you can do.

You know, often in a situation, the only thing we can control is ourselves. That doesn't mean that there's not a systemic issue happening, it just means the thing you can control is you. So if you need an immediate thing to do, that's one. Figure out where you have a shared value and then [00:12:00] connect the unachievable workload, unachievable expectations, conversation with a value. 

And I find if you talk about it too, in terms of long-term stability or you know, if you can really frame it from a place of, “We want our deliverables to come quickly, but we also want them to be accurate, or quality.”

Sometimes that conversation can really help especially if you're working with community members or clients, or if you're producing this work for somebody else, quality does matter. You know, like you don't want to break trust by doing so much that you're dropping balls. I think that can be really helpful.

When it's a situation of I am not in charge of a team, or there isn't shared leadership on a team and I'm just being asked to do many, many things, I will ask the question, “What would you like me to stop doing to work on this new priority?

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Mm-hmm.[00:13:00]

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Or, “What task would you like me to do later so that I can do this one right now?”

And sometimes just asking that blunt question helps pull people out of the, like, ‘we have to rush, we have to do all the things,’ conversation into, ‘Oh, what's the priority order for these tasks? Is there anything that we can do later? Does everything have to happen right now? Or are there some things that are more flexible?’

And that's kind of a sneaky way to start helping people rethink about, oh, not everything's immediate. Often I see this for people who have been in crisis mode for a long time and they don't know how to shift out of crisis mode into a slower pace.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Any other thoughts? I said a lot there.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: I do. And I love that we're taking slightly different approaches here because what came to my mind when I saw this question was something I've learned [00:14:00] with systems thinking, and that's maybe one way to do this without seeming like you're unwilling, to whatever, be a team player, which is totally not the case here, right? You're just trying to raise the yellow flags and say, “Hey guys, we gotta think about this a little bit, right?” 

But I would suggest really fleshing out with your team a definition. Like, “Let's really define what success looks like here. Let's define what we're talking about with this project.”

So what are all the things that would define success for this project? And what do we not mean? Right? What are we leaving on the table? That's still important, but it doesn't need to be part of this right now. Like, “What do we mean by success and what don't we mean?”

I want to be clear here that I'm not talking about what does success mean and what does unsuccess mean? What does not being successful mean? I'm talking about at a minimum, how are we defining this project, [00:15:00] and how are we defining what's not included in this project, so that you can get really clear about all of the pieces and parts that make it up. 

And people can make choices when they see, “Oh, we mean all of these things by success.” That means now, when we take a look at what our capacity is, which is, you know, one of the other things you would think about with systems thinking, that means we have a lot more thinking to do. It just sort of slows everyone down a little bit without you seeming like you're being uncooperative, right?

You're just saying, “Hey, we gotta define this.” That's all you're saying.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Okay. This made me think of another episode that we recently released called Everyday Practices for Organizational Resilience. And this talks about how to do a bit of a debrief, which means you're going to have to be strategic. 

You might not be able to launch this one whenever you want to, but after you've completed something, if it was high cost and you're all tired, you can do some of the [00:16:00] questions. There's like an inventory that we walk you through, or you walk us through to help you figure out, “Oh, what were the warning signs?” 

This feels indirect, but it's directly getting people to pause and reflect, and kind of see a bigger picture of, why was this so hard? How can we make it easier for ourselves? 

And I think one of the things that will come up if you can kind of encourage these conversations is, “Oh, we haven't ever defined what done means.” Or, “We have different definitions of what done means,” or, “Some of us don't know the amount of work it takes somebody else to pull this off.”

“We gotta communicate more. We need more lead time.”

JESSICA BECKENDORF: “We need more cross training.” Yeah.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Those kinds of conversations are really hard to have in the moment when you're in the weeds. But if you have any sort of built in evaluation or reflection time, you can bring some of these really strategic, targeted questions, and really help get at [00:17:00] the, ‘how do we not burn ourselves out’ conversation.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yeah. And no one will know that you're actually panicking about the amount of work that they're talking about trying to do.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Exactly. Okay. We should do our last question so this episode doesn't get too long. 

Question three, “Why are so many of your practices just different kinds of reflection? LOL.”

I think the LOL means like, they're not mad about it. I'm not sure, but that's the question.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Okay, so no, this is great, and I was very excited about this question, and Erin, you probably noticed that when this question first was added - because you choose the questions - that when the question was first added to this document, I immediately started typing. 

And I would say that it's because I have a very strong belief that knowing yourself and knowing how you show up, like kind of out in the world and in your interactions with others, is the foundation for interacting with and collaborating with others. 

And so, I worked with some colleagues a while [00:18:00] back, we've talked about on the podcast over the years. I don't know that I've talked about it very much lately, but we developed programming on collaborative work.

So developing collaborative relationships that center the kind of trust and connection needed to effectively work together to solve big, hairy community issues. And a big focus of the research behind that program is that it all starts with knowing yourself. Often you're getting to know yourself partially through reflection, at least partially.

And so it starts with reflection, and it starts with knowing yourself, and bringing what you know about yourself into your interactions with others. Then again, reflecting on how those interactions helped you learn about an issue, helped you learn about a perspective and even helped you learn about yourself, right? What maybe changed about your own views or your own understanding of an issue or of a particular perspective? 

So to me, knowing yourself is [00:19:00] foundational work, and a huge part of knowing yourself can happen through reflection.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Yeah. I'm also really glad someone asked this question. My answer did not come as fast as yours, but it did help me realize kind of a bunch of connections. 

And one of them is this idea of curiosity, and how I really love both science and poetry, and I think both of them are lenses to view the world in which you're coming from a place of curiosity and wanting to know more.

And that's kind of from a personal place, and I think especially when we're talking about inner critics, I don't know if we've talked about that, but that idea of like, if your inner mental monologue is pretty critical of yourself, coming from a perspective of curiosity reflection can feel really scary if you're used to criticizing yourself.

And so a lot of our reflections are trained to teach us how to be curious about what happened, rather than judgmental about what happened. [00:20:00] And I think that leaves space for being kinder to ourselves, and being kind to ourselves really helps us stay healthy. 

Like it's such a shift in terms, and when you're healthy, it's easier to do your job. It's easier to show up in your relationships. That's why I think it's a priority, even though it's kind of personal and squishy. I do think it is a professional practice, because you're teaching yourself to be curious and kind to yourself. And when you're curious and kind, it's way easier to start solving your problems if you're immediately blaming yourself or being critical.

It's challenging to process through all of that, and then be creative about how you solve your problems. When you do reflection, it's this way to empower yourself to start seeing solutions and finding them yourself, rather than feeling like you need some expert to tell you. Because you have lived your experience, and so you probably know [00:21:00] what you need, and the reflection helps you identify, “What do I need? Who can I ask for it? What's going on? What happened?” 

Especially if you're like the last question, you're in a place where you're just doing stuff all the time. If you never have a moment to pause down reflection, practice it as a practice can be such a helpful way to help you identify, “Oh, here's where I know what too much was.”

So you can figure out your capacity limits. You can figure out all sorts of things to make your life easier by reflecting and being curious about your own experience and your own work and your own life. 

Also I have been thinking about space a lot recently. There was, you know, NASA did some stuff in space recently and one of the practices that I have always loved about NASA is when something goes wrong, they don't immediately fire people, because they don't want people to be afraid to admit what the mistake was. Because they want to know what the mistakes are so they can avoid them in the future. 

And it [00:22:00] means that when you hear people talking about working on teams at NASA, it's this very collaborative experience and it's very rigorous, and the stakes are really high. But they don't come from this place of being really judgemental and blaming each other. 

They come from a place of curiosity, and it's had really impactful results on the quality of work and the amazing things that they can do. And even, you know, scientists pause and reflect.

So just throw it out there as, reflection is actually a really cool tool that you can use to be curious and love the world, even when you're overwhelmed and tired.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: I love it. And before you do our little outro here, Erin, I just want to say that as of the recording of this episode, I got my third thing done for the day and it's the end of the day. So I feel like I won.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Hey, see, this is what I mean by setting winning conditions. We talked about this a while ago.

JESSICA BECKENDORF: Yes.

ERIN CARLSON RIVERA: Give yourself a sticker. I'm an adult who's still motivated by sticker charts. I know that's not everybody's life, [00:23:00] but I'm a little magpie. 

Okay. That's it, that's the episode. Thank you for joining us. If you have a question or if you have additional thoughts about any of the questions we've asked here, we would absolutely love to hear from you.

You can email us at practicingconnection@oneop.org. There's a link in the show notes if you don't know how to spell that. We want to hear from you. We see and respond to every message, and we promise not to share your question without asking permission and erasing identifying details. 

We'll be back next week. Until then, keep practicing. [00:24:00]

CREDITS: The Practicing Connection Podcast is a production of One-Op and is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture and the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy, US Department of Defense under award number 2 0 2 3 4 8 7 74 3 3.