While remote working offers several conveniences, it also blurs the boundary between people’s professional and personal lives. Consequently, many people today have an increased tendency to overcommit ourselves. This overwork can increase stress, sap energy, stifle creativity, and blunt overall productivity.
This article will help you maintain a healthy work-life balance and establish better habits for yourself and your company. Let’s start by understanding the triggers that lead to overwork in a remote working environment.
Understanding the Triggers of Overwork
Being overworked can manifest in various ways, like dwindling passion, physical strain, or unwarranted frustration toward loved ones. Before you can overcome it, you need to identify the triggers causing these effects.
Clarity and Expectations
Uncertain expectations are often at the heart of overwork. When employees are unsure of their responsibilities or objectives, they end up spinning their wheels, accelerating burnout.
Many people also have trouble setting or accepting realistic deadlines. If you don’t know how to say no to busy work, it can easily overwhelm you.
Lastly and significantly, the sheer volume of tasks, or workload, plays a major role. An unmanageable flurry of tasks creates a feeling of constant pressure, tipping the scales towards overwork. You feel like there’s constantly another mountain to climb.
Individual Mindset and Behavior
One of the challenges of remote working, and equally applicable to physical setups, lies in the individual. You likely know colleagues who overwork to display a commitment to the company’s cause.
Various triggers underpin this behavior. One is a state of constant availability, driven by the fear of missing opportunities, a byproduct of the digital age.
Equally compelling is the overwork that results from pursuing impossibly high standards. Understanding these individual traits is key to reshaping and kick-starting healthier work habits.
Work Environment and Management
Now, let's turn our attention toward the work environment and its management. Particular management styles (such as micromanagement) can inadvertently spur overwork.
When employees are deprived of decision-making autonomy and feel over-scrutinized, the resultant stress could make them constantly chase approval by overworking. Examples of micromanagement include:
- Frequent updates required on tasks
- Involvement and interest in the minutiae of work
- Distrust in employee decision-making without managerial input
Furthermore, being constantly connected—a fallout of our digital work environment—can also contribute. The inability to disconnect from the internet (and from work) prevents employees from truly unwinding and relaxing, eventually resulting in burnout or resentment.
Identifying these practices can help address overwork from the root and tackle it before it becomes a problem.
Task Management and Resources
An often-touted qualification for job postings is “must be good at multitasking.” Ironically, though, this expectation can lead employees to attempt to juggle multiple responsibilities, resulting in stress and exacerbating the risk of becoming overworked.
Similarly, under-resourced environments, be it due to understaffing, insufficient tools, or lack of support, strain employees to overextend themselves. Like pouring gasoline on the fire, expanding or changing project requirements will drive stress levels higher without corresponding adjustments to resources.
The pressure to to maintain output and results despite limited resources is a major trigger of overwork.
Recognizing and addressing these factors in task management are crucial steps toward establishing healthier work practices while overcoming the challenges of remote working.
Organizational Culture
A prevailing organizational culture that glorifies long hours, rewards overtime, or fails to stress the importance of a healthy work-life balance can inadvertently promote overwork. Here are a few telltale signs that a company may be fostering that type of culture:
- Celebrating late-night workers
- Holiday and weekend emails from leaders
- Shorter breaks or a lack of regular breaks
- Encouraging skipping over lunch
- Minimal vacation or PTO usage
- No initiatives for stress management
- Frequent after-hours meetings
These challenges must be identified and redirected towards cultivating a culture that values balance, reducing the risk of employees becoming overworked.
Tips on Preventing Overwork
Being overworked may seem inevitable, but it isn't. Understanding the triggers and adopting proactive measures can help counter overwork, ensuring that the challenges of remote working aren't insurmountable.
Let's dive into some practical tips to help prevent overwork and maintain productivity and well-being.
Effective Delegation
Enhancing productivity while maintaining sanity is only possible through the art of effective delegation. Learning to delegate tasks is pivotal: it spreads the workload more evenly, reduces personal stress, and fosters a team environment.
Start by assessing which tasks to delegate. These shouldn’t include your core functions but tasks that others on the team can handle.
Don't shy away from outsourcing, either. Hiring virtual assistants (VAs) can help manage a multitude of tasks, freeing up your valuable time. Depending on your needs, several types of VAs can be considered:
- General and administrative VAs
- Industry-focused VAs
- Marketing-focused VAs
- Sales and outreach-focused VAs
- Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) and reception-focused VAs
Not only do VAs provide a relief valve for your overflowing task list, but they also offer considerable cost benefits. A key statistic revealed that hiring virtual assistants could reduce operating costs by as much as 78%.
In a climate where we all seem to be doing more with less, employing effective delegation strategies can be a game-changer in combating overwork.
Batching Similar Tasks
Batching, the practice of grouping similar tasks during designated time slots, is a strategy to minimize overwork. It reduces the cognitive load, preventing the mental fatigue that comes from constant context-switching.
Here's how to apply batching:
- Identify similar tasks: Categorize the tasks that are alike or require a similar mindset.
- Allocate specific time slots: Dedicate specific periods in your day or week to work on each category. Remember to be realistic about what can be achieved in a given period.
- Stick to the schedule: Avoid interruptions and resist the temptation to deal with other tasks. By allocating your undivided attention to the tasks at hand, you maximize your productivity.
- Evaluate and revise: Monitor your productivity during these slots. If necessary, reassess and adjust the length and frequency of these slots.
Harnessing the power of batching can be instrumental in avoiding overwork while enhancing productivity.
Monitoring Energy Levels
A proactive approach to energy and stress conservation involves aligning tasks with your energy levels. Simply put, pay attention to your natural energy cycles throughout the day.
Each of us has distinct times when we're most alert, creative, or productive. Use these peak periods to tackle tasks requiring intensive thought or creativity and save the less demanding tasks for when your energy naturally wanes.
For example, if you hit your stride in the mornings, use this time to brainstorm, strategize, or crack challenging tasks. In contrast, during your low-energy periods, you might schedule routine tasks, such as administrative work or meetings.
This synchronization of your workflow with your energy levels can enhance productivity while preventing overwork.
Goal Alignment
One more excellent strategy to keep overwork at bay is through strategic alignment of your daily tasks with your overarching goals.
When each task you perform contributes directly to your larger objectives, it helps you remain focused on your priorities and avoid unnecessary tasks that could pile up to create overwork. Frameworks such as objectives and key results (OKRs) can be pivotal in establishing this alignment.
OKRs provide a structured approach where objectives are defined, measurable key results are set, and initiatives to achieve these results are developed. For example, an OKR might look like this:
- Objective: Increase company market share.
- Key result #1: Achieve a 15% increase in sales by Q4.
- Key result #2: Attract 500 new customers by the end of the year.
- Initiative #1: Launch a new marketing campaign targeting new market segments.
- Initiative #2: Develop partnership programs with leading influencers.
By using this targeted approach, you keep yourself focused and efficient while minimizing the risk of burnout.
Key Leadership Practices for Preventing Overwork
While the previous section provides practical strategies individuals can implement to curb overwork, this section takes it a notch higher and focuses on the instrumental role of leadership.
It’s our leaders who inherently set the pace and signal appropriate work habits and behavior for the entire organization.
Clear Communication
This is a key leadership practice that can significantly help curtail overwork. By setting transparent expectations and reducing uncertainty, leaders can discourage their teams' sense of constant availability. If you need them after working hours, explain why and assure them that it is not expected moving forward.
Effective communication helps delineate work scope and prioritize tasks, thereby preventing needless overextension.
A survey by Expert Market identified poor communication as a reason for late project completion, with 28 percent of respondents naming it the primary cause. Consistent, clear communication is crucial in setting expectations and reducing the possibility of overwork.
Establishing Boundaries
Leaders play a critical role in establishing and respecting work boundaries. Managers modeling sensible work limits to employees send a reassuring signal. While advising workers to set their boundaries is simple, the actual implementation can be tricky for several employees.
Here are a few ways to overcome this challenge:
- Adopt a clear protocol for working hours
- Emphasize the importance of regular breaks
- Respect personal time; refrain from sending after-hours emails unless necessary
- Encourage vacation time
- Teach them ways to refuse busywork respectfully
By incorporating these strategies, leaders can ensure that individuals in their teams understand their value beyond merely being workers, fostering a culture that discourages overwork.
Ensuring Teams Have Realistic Workloads
One cornerstone of mitigating overwork lies in maintaining realistic workloads. Leaders should regularly assess workloads and timelines of ongoing projects. Not only does this enable a deeper understanding of team dynamics, but it also allows for timely calibrations.
Leaders can then allocate resources aptly, ensuring assignments are realistically achievable and that overwork is held at bay.
Empowerment Through Autonomy
Empowering individuals with decision-making autonomy is key to controlling overwork. Providing employees with the liberty to manage their tasks not only fosters a sense of ownership but also equips them effectively to balance their workload, thereby preventing overwork.
Flexible Scheduling
The adoption of flexible scheduling can significantly diminish the risks of overwork while promoting a healthier work-life balance. Flexible work hours and alternative scheduling ensure that employees can mold their work schedules to suit their lifestyles and personal commitments.
Let's take Deloitte as an example. To prevent potential burnout and promote work-life balance amidst remote working, Deloitte employed a three-pronged strategy:
- Continued remote work: Deloitte allowed its employees to continue working remotely. This gave employees control over their work environment, enhancing their comfort level and productivity.
- Core business hours: The firm established 'core business hours' where staff should be available. By defining a structured time frame, Deloitte managed to keep work within reasonable limits, reducing the tendency for perpetual availability.
- Output-based approach: Deloitte shifted from a traditional time-based evaluation to an output-based approach. With a focus on output, employees can tailor their schedules as it serves their productivity best yet still deliver expected results.
By replicating a similar flexible strategy, businesses can cultivate a positive culture where everyone can move easily according to their productivity.
Encouraging Breaks and Time Off
Imagine a motor running constantly without scheduled intervals for cooling off—it's likely to overheat and break down.
Your team is not a machine. Working non-stop makes members prone to burnout. Leaders must actively promote breaks and vacation time, which are pivotal for promoting mental well-being and acting as much-needed respites to prevent overwork.
Overworked? You Don’t Need to Be
Feeling overworked doesn't have to be the status quo. By understanding triggers of overwork, effectively delegating, aligning tasks with your energy and goals, and monitoring your energy levels, you can reclaim command over your work life.
Meanwhile, leadership is pivotal in preventing overwork, with responsibilities ranging from clear communication and establishing boundaries to ensuring realistic workloads, empowering autonomy, offering flexible schedules, and encouraging breaks. The culture of work-life balance should ideally trickle down from "the top.”
Keep in mind: strategic hiring of virtual assistants from Wing can play a significant role in easing your workload. Why not explore how VAs at Wing can turbocharge your productivity while easing off overwork? Try Wing today!
Nick Saraev is a writer & entrepreneur who pivoted from a path in medicine to forge a series of successful digital media businesses. He’s been featured in Popular Mechanics, Apple News, & Bloomberg, and is an Amazon Kindle best-seller.
