Table of Contents

1. Slow Down to Speed Up
2. Ask Your Supervisor for Help Prioritizing
3. Break Large Tasks Down
4. Look for Efficiencies and Automations
5. Minimize Distractions
6. Try to Cut Back on Meetings

Feeling overwhelmed at work is more than a nuisance—it’s a performance killer. Overwhelm can create a perpetual cycle of stress that robs us of our highest potential.

According to the Harvard Business Review, the side effects of constant overwhelm “can range from mental slowness, forgetfulness, confusion, difficulty concentrating or thinking logically, to a racing mind or an impaired ability to problem solve…Any of these effects, alone, can make us less effective and leave us feeling even more overwhelmed.” 

The solution to overwhelm isn’t to put in more hours. It’s to create a work environment that allows us to do our best work in the time allotted to us. Here’s how.

Slow Down to Speed Up

It sounds counterintuitive, but the first thing to do when facing overwhelm is to press pause. Racing to accomplish your task list won’t help much if you’re focusing on the wrong things, like responding to non-urgent emails.

Instead, take a few minutes to look at the big picture. If you don’t have an updated to-do list, this is the time to make one. Include every task currently rattling around in your brain, plus any upcoming meetings you have on the calendar. We often don’t consider meetings “tasks,” but they take up our time just the same.

With your complete list, you can start to assess what you can realistically accomplish in the amount of time you have. 

But what if you have 40 hours of work and only 30 hours of available time after accounting for meetings and normal administrative duties? 

Ask Your Supervisor for Help Prioritizing

When faced with too many tasks and not enough hours to do them, it’s time to escalate the situation. Ask your supervisor to help you go through your task list to identify your top priorities. With their sign-off, you’ll be able to focus your time and energy on the most important tasks, without stressing about the lower-urgency work. 

If there’s still too much on your list, they may be able to pull some work from your schedule and delegate it to another team member.

Break Large Tasks Down

Faced with a large project, you may be bewildered as to where to start and how you’re going to get it all done. 

First thing’s first: break that project down into pieces. Perhaps you’re about to launch some new event services at your hotel, and you need to create a promotional plan. Start by identifying the high-level pieces of the project, like so:

• Add the new services to the hotel website
• Add the new services to the hotel’s event brochure
• Promote the new services on social media

From there, you can decide which piece of the promotion is most urgent, and break that down even further into its component parts. If the most important piece is to update the website, your steps might look like this: 

• Take new event photography
• Write sales copy
• Finalize new service pricing

And now, you can start with the first task: booking a photographer. 

Look For Efficiencies and Automations

When facing overwhelm and overwork, we often think, “If I can just get through this week, everything will be fine.” But a better long-term strategy is to reduce the amount of time required to complete recurring tasks through automation.

There are many ways to do this, but one helpful tool is Zapier. This app integrates with over a thousand other programs, letting you create “if this, then that” conditions. For example, let’s say the cleaning staff needs to be alerted when the late check-out guests leave the hotel. What if upon check-out, a message was automatically sent to the housekeeping manager through Slack, letting them know that the room is vacant and ready to clean? 

Any tasks that can be completed automatically without your involvement free up that much of your time to spend on more important work.

Minimize Distractions

Create better focus conditions for yourself by minimizing distractions. Put your phone away somewhere you won’t see notifications, and close Slack and your email inbox. Set an alarm for yourself to check your messages once every hour, instead of getting instant notifications. You’ll be able to better focus on the task at hand and make much more progress without constant interruptions. 

But what if you work in a role that requires you to be accessible at all times, like a concierge? Perhaps you could request a short overlap with the person who works before or after you. Then you ccould have a short stint of uninterrupted time to catch up on tasks while they respond to the urgent requests.

Try To Cut Back on Meetings

Meetings are important, but they can be a productivity killer. How are you supposed to get anything done if you spend half your time on meetings?

Perhaps it’s time to gently push back on the meetings you’re invited to. Do you have to attend that weekly sales meeting, or can you simply glance at the report instead? You could also request that meetings be shorter. Is there actually an hour of business to discuss in that meeting, or is it 30 minutes of work and 30 minutes of chit-chat?
Meetings are rarely the highest and best use of our time. Any hour you’re not in a meeting is an hour you can use to do your actual job and keep yourself on track!