White Water Working

Work days can be like a white water ride. You get to the end and you realise you’ve lost your rucksack, you’re totally drenched, you have no idea how you got to wherever you got to, and you didn’t take in any of the scenery. Then someone tells you that you actually spent half of your day desperately trying to paddle upstream!

A work day can all too easily be spent rushing from meeting to meeting, context switching left, right, and centre, dealing with unexpected incidents, and just generally working at top speed. It doesn’t leave room for reflection, or for taking a step back and observing what’s going on around you - both of which are beyond critical for a leader. What makes this worse is that if you’re fortunate enough like I am to have a job you enjoy, then the ride can be thrilling. White water rafting, after all, has been a popular sport since the 1840s. But regular white water working, for me at least, creates very high levels of residual stress.

I find it helps if you earmark points in your day where you can dig your oar in and get yourself over to the riverbank. This allows you to catch your breath, take in your surroundings, have a sandwich, and figure out what is the next best thing to do. You might even be able to hold out an arm for a colleague to grab onto if you see them about to fly past with no idea which way is up.

The simple advice here is to take the time (it doesn’t need much) to quickly plan out your day. Decide what you’re going to work on, when you’ll work on it, and what you’re specifically not going to work on today. It doesn’t matter if you don’t stick to the plan - you can’t avoid high priority unplanned work - but it’s helpful to know what you’re trading off by taking something else on. The other way I find it helps is that it encourages me to avoid multitasking during meetings - I know that I have time allocated to work on whatever I need to work on outside of my meeting slots.

When I do this successfully I get to the end of the day in one piece knowing exactly what I achieved, with a good idea of what I need to tackle in the upcoming days, and with a decent picture of what else has been going on around me. It’s a great way to end the day.

This all hopefully sounds incredibly obvious, but I do have to remind myself more often than you’d think. The thrill of the white water can be tempting!