Some pointers that indicate you need to be less productive with more time, not the other way around…burnout blog post.

Photo by Gabriel Matula on Unsplash

Some pointers that indicate you need to be less productive with more time, not the other way around…burnout blog post.

Lately I have noticed a rise in Apps to help with productivity. I counted 240 apps listed under productivity on iTunes. Come on guys, how many formats do we need to see a To Do list in?

We are celebrated in our culture if we are hardworking, cease the day, do 10,000 steps blah blah blah. Those things are good if you are great at moderation and you can recognise the signs of overwhelm. Never have a known such a good word to describe a feeling…overwhelm is just the perfect word.

How do you know when overwhelm is happening as a parent or a teenager?

              Feel quite fragile

·       You can’t seem to find what you want to watch on TV, but you know you can’t watch anything heavy or upsetting. The news seems like too much.

Burst into tears very easily

·       You try to get something out the fridge and the lid falls off the butter pack and you start to cry.

A teenage client once described it when she tried to get her bike out the garage that was behind loads of stuff, the peddles got caught and she burst into tears and couldn’t stop for a long time.

Easily irritable

·       You have a down view on members of the family that you usually feel huge love for, but they are irritating you and your tolerance window is so small.

Avoidance

·       You do anything you can to avoid the thing you should be doing. You just don’t have the motivation or the interest. The thought of doing the task makes you want to cry with anger.

Sleep

·       Your sleep is rubbish…the slightest noise wakes you up and then you have a sense of dread about everything.

Physical symptoms

·       This one is obvious, you start to notice physical symptoms such as headaches, sore shoulders, stomach problems.

Isolation

·       You avoid getting together with friends as you feel you don’t have enough space in your life, you want to be on your own.

These things start to be felt when life doesn’t have balance, it doesn’t have structure and there is no time to recharge. Parents of teenagers can easily start to feel this way, as do parents of children with additional needs.

The most important thing to do is to make a list of priorities in terms of things that you really have to do i.e. go to work. Then the next list is things that you have committed to but you could opt out of such as helping out at the school fair. This is a temporary thing to do until you feel a bit more rested and then the next stage is to write out a timetable of your whole week (as it is now) from 7am – 9pm Monday to Sunday.

When you do this, you will start to understand why overwhelm is being felt. It will become apparent that you don’t have much reflection time or emotional room. Feelings can only be processed if they are given space to to do so.

Go through the timetable and be ruthless, cut the number of visits to the mother in laws, make half an hour space on the way back from work 2 days a week. Give your teenager bus money to get to guitar practice instead of you being the taxi (although I do think the car is where important conversations happen).

The teenager version of this is less clubs, less social media, more creative pursuits, less time with miserable friends that don’t want to do anything to change their situation.

Just try and find pockets of time for you. Don’t sit downstairs thinking you need to be the coordinator all the time. You can go up to the bedroom and read some fiction.

The timetable will be the gamechanger in looking after yourself.

The key is not in getting things done in less time. Examples below

·       Stay on schedule

·       Keep your focus

·       Better more productive planning

It is about

·       Healing and processing

·       Relationships

·       Recreation

·       Stillness

Now go and borrow someone’s ruler and make a start on that timetable.