A reader writes:
I am a manager deemed an “essential personnel” and have a lot of responsibility for other people. With crushingly short notice, I put together office sanitization routines, created and mandated a teleworking system for my entire group, created workflows that accommodate flexible schedules due to school closings and the like, solved logistic problems created by the sudden switch to teleworking, etc. When I say short notice, I mean having to swap from a decades-old entrenched physical paper system to a software and workflow-driven paperless system in a matter of **days**.
I think I’ve done a bang-up job at work. I have gotten supportive feedback from my boss and my staff. The problem is that I can’t get crisis response mode turned off when I am done with work each day, so it is almost impossible to do anything with my time that isn’t planning, preparation, or panic.
For example, my sister said she couldn’t find bleach so I searched online until I found some to ship to her at retail price. I spent hours figuring out and finding substitutes for items in short supply – specific concentrates of dish soap in water as a bleach alternative, what to use instead of butter in recipes, for example. I’ve catalogued various surfaces in my house that are touched frequently and added them to a daily cleaning routine. I washed and dried my shoes. I came up with a routine for how to/in what order to remove clothing and wash when returning home from a public space to minimize likelihood of virus transfer.
I have undergone a mind-bogglingly intense week setting up these procedures, keeping work moving under the new system, putting out fires as they pop up, and doing my best to ensure the physical and emotional health of my team during the COVID-19 crisis… but now I am stuck in crisis management mode every waking moment. I can’t stop. I can’t relax. Have I done enough for myself, my family, and my staff?
Do you have any suggestions on how I can wind down and turn off my crisis management mindset after finishing work each day?
There will always be more you can do, but if you use that as your measure of how much you should be doing, at some point you will burn out and be able to do nothing at all.
Any chance you’ve seen this treat in yourself before — do you deal with stress by Doing All The Things and does it distract you from from anxiety or other emotions you’d be feeling right now? There’s nothing wrong with using intense preparation and activity to soothe the nerves everyone’s having right now, but you also have to recognize when it’s no longer serving you — and it sounds like you’re at that point.
It’s the weekend. Take the day off. Read a book. Binge watch Netflix. Take a walk. Nap. You’re allowed to take a day off from thinking about what’s going on.
Do the same things tomorrow after work. Being “on this” doesn’t mean you have to be on it 24 hours a day.
The whole point of the preparations you’re making are to carve out some space that we can relax and live in. Let yourself do that.
Life is still here. It’s weird and it’s different and it’s stressful. But you still get to have space for normalcy.
how do you turn off a crisis management mindset after finishing work each day? was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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