Hi there,
Welcome to another Productivity Wednesday and I trust your day has been great. If you live in Lagos, it’s been a rainy day and days like this can summon the spirit of no-work; you literally just want to relax and bask in the euphoria of the soothing weather. Yielding to this feeling can lead to carrying over of tasks that will in turn leave you overworked.
Overworking is taking up more tasks than you can deliver on or deliver efficiently and we can often times confuse that with hard work. Working hard is excellent delivery with effective time management on assigned tasks or tasks that you have taken up.
A lot of individuals mistake overwork with hard work. When a staff is given more work than is attributable to their role in the organization and such staff is meeting such deliverables, we tend to term it as hard work. Is it really hard work? An individual doing the work of two people simply means that individual gets to have little to no time to have a work-life balance. How do you function without a work-life balance? This singular act tends to have a ripple effect on both the individual and the organization as the result of overworking is burnout. Burnout as we know results in a significant drop in the deliverables from such an individual.
To put things in a clearer perspective, hard work put simply is the meeting of the set deliverables assigned to the individual occupying a given role in the organization. Hard work is great work. However, in most organizations, hard work often leads to overwork as such individual is perceived to be meeting deliverables and as such, more work should be thrown at them irrespective of whether such work is meant for the role they occupy. Upon delivering on such extra work, it leads to that being the norm and the extra work becomes consistent. Such overload of work for the hardworking individual over time has a negative effect.
Well, having read this, I hope you get to make necessary adjustments to working hard and not overloading yourself with work either as a means to earn a promotion or by your own choices of carrying tasks over. Please remember to register and attend our Data Protection training happening this Friday and Saturday, 17th and 18th of June respectively.
Until I come your way again, stay safe, work smart and not just hard.
Love,
Lizzy.