The Blessing of Busy Days

“To do two things at once is to do neither.”

-Publilius Syrus

My working days in HR have always swelled between slower weeks — where I’m surprised to find time to work on projects and get the department in order — and weeks where everything happens at once. After coming back from vacation and the holidays, this week is firmly the latter. There is simply a lot to do. A lot of urgent things. A lot of important things. And a good many that are both urgent and important.

For the first time in a while, I closed my door to work for an hour yesterday afternoon. I put a post-it note by the handle: Focus time. Please knock if about X. I knew an interruption would be worth my time only if it had to do with the project I was focusing on.

Yet the amount of urgent things still piled and I could feel an exasperation welling up in my body. That doesn’t matter though. Deep breath. What needs to get done still need to get done. Out loud, I asked myself: “What do you need to prioritize? What is most urgent?” I answered myself out loud too. Talking to yourself is cheesy, but I’ve always been comfortable with it. Sometimes you need to get words outside of your body to see them clearly.  I wrote down the three steps to finishing the task. I closed my door. I didn’t let myself do anything else as I checked them off.

It wasn’t exactly the deep work I’d been imagining on my vacation, but it was focused and productive.

The day was ending and everything I wanted to was not done. It would be easy to get caught at work all night but my focus was yielding after the day. I set a cut off time for myself, where I would shut down work no matter what. Most things, I know, don’t explode after business hours.

The racing thoughts of work kept me up last night, but I feel a blessing in it too. I’m glad to be back. I’m glad to be missed and have things waiting for me. The rest of this week will likely carry the same urgency, but I’ll prioritize when I can, shut my door when I need to, and keep the perspective that while my work matters, it is not life and death. It’s all going to be okay.

With Love,
Natalie