Staying connected when your workload hits capacity

One of the things that’s easy to do when the workload starts piling up and you’ve got multiple deadlines, multiple projects and multiple priorities, is that unless you’re careful you can sometimes end up isolating yourself in an effort to get all of it done. I know this because I’ve done it firsthand a lot of times and the results are never as good as if you stay engaged with the rest of your team. There’s a lot of temptation to just try to bowl through work in order to get it done. While that may solve the crisis of the minute it probably doesn’t help you succeed in achieving your big picture goals. If you do it often enough and long enough, you can begin to lose touch with the rest of your team and you’re going to see team wide performance degrade and eventually you’re going to add to the workload that you have. All the sudden it becomes a vicious cycle that’s hard to overcome.

I think one of the things that you have to do is engage with your team and make that effort to spend time with them. I think this is important even if it’s not helping you share the workload because you can’t share the workload. It’s about staying engaged so that you maintain the awareness of what the team is doing. No matter how hard you’re working or how little time you have, take ten or fifteen minutes to walk around the office, pick up the phone or send that email that keeps you connected to the people that help you achieve on a daily basis. Even if they’re not working on the same project that is keeping you up late right now, it’s important to stay connected and not lose touch. I’m curious what other people think.