How to prevent everything from feeling like an emergency at work

There are days at work when there is an all-hands-on-deck, this-is-not-a-drill, drop-whatever-you’re-doing-and-help emergency. And on those days, you find a way to be useful to address the crisis at hand before you return to your regularly scheduled to-do list.

As long as emergencies are not a regular occurrence, these occasional adrenaline shots are reasonable. Some people find that these emergencies are a regular part of the work week. Something is always burning. And that is a problem for several reasons.

For one, living life in emergency mode is exhausting. For another, it is hard to make progress on any long-term plans at work when you are forced to grapple with some critical issue that has gone wrong now.

If everything at work feels like an emergency (and you are not, say, working in an ER), then there are a few things you can do to try to create a less-hectic work environment.

Recheck your priorities

Work is busy, and organizations try to staff up to have the right number of people to take care of current business while also preparing for the future. If everything you’re doing feels like an emergency, it’s possible that the problem is with your priorities.

One thing you may be doing is prioritizing the wrong things. Sometimes, you work on tasks that are easy to do and leave the ones that are tedious or difficult until later. If you delay too long in some of those jobs, then you are forced to do them in a hurry at the last minute. You need to prioritize making progress on tasks before the deadline looms too large.

A second strategy that may cause you trouble is spending too much time on everything. You know that the more work you put into anything, the better the job you’re going to do. So, there is almost always more polishing you could do on something before sending it off.

The trick to navigating this effort-accuracy trade-off is to put in just enough effort to make it accurate enough to be acceptable. If you find that you’re dealing with too many emergencies, it is possible that you’re putting in so much effort on tasks that don’t deserve it that you’re neglecting other things that need attention.

Rethink your task list

If you’re working on the right things and putting in about the right level of effort, then you have too much to do. There are three ways to address a packed portfolio of activities.

It’s possible that you are being asked to do too many things. If the list of responsibilities you have been given exceeds the time you have to address them, then you need to sit down with your supervisors to talk about which things can be taken off your plate and given to others.

Relatedly, you may have some discretion about the projects you take on, but you say “yes” to too many things. Often, you agree to take something on because it seems like fun or you believe that you will impress the higher-ups if you volunteer for a role. At the time, it seems reasonable, but when it comes time to do the work, you are slammed. This common experience reflects the observation that you think about the future more abstractly than the present.

In the moment, you are just thinking that you will enjoy doing a task or benefit from having done it. But, you don’t think deeply about what your actual specific schedule is going to be on the days you need to do the work. As a result, you may add things to your future agenda that you don’t really have time to accomplish. Instead, you need to start keeping a to-do list that includes the number of hours a task is reasonably expected to take, so that you can budget your future time more effectively.

Rethink staffing

Of course, it may be that there really is too much to do. If that happens, talk with the team about whether you can hire someone new to address the extra work. You’ll still want to look at whether there is going to be a permanent workload or whether there is a temporary set of tasks that need to be done.

Often, there are a set of fixed demands to your job, and then some seasonal requirements. Perhaps there is extra reporting to be done at the end of a quarter or fiscal year, or a surge when particular clients need help. Analyzing where the overload is coming from is crucial to deciding whether the additional staffing you need is permanent or temporary. Understanding that demand will help you to best make the case to others in the organization that additional staff are required.

Know your motivation

Finally, you also need to understand your own motivation and how it relates to your productivity. When the deadline for a project is far away, it’s easy to put off working too hard on it. You might even find yourself goofing off a bit rather than digging into a project that will ultimately need to be completed.

If that project is going to need a lot of effort, though, you may have to work on it well in advance of that deadline. If you’re the kind of person who needs deadline pressure to work on those big projects, then break it up into chunks and give yourself a deadline for each of those pieces of the project. That will keep you on track and avoid an emergency situation as the final deadline looms.