Overworked is such a common feeling between people with a growth mindset, self-employed professionals and small
business owners.
Everyone wants to
- do as many things as possible
- meet their goals
- make your business prosperous
To accomplish all this, many times you have to work beyond your strength or capacity.
It happens sometimes that you focus on accomplishing everything you set out to do and, almost without realizing
it, you are working too much, for too long, or maybe you are working too hard.
How do you get to feel overworked?
When you work on your own, you have the opportunity to set your schedule and work at your own pace. At the same
time, your motivation to do as many things as possible is very strong. For these reasons, you'll often try to do
more than is possible and at one point you’ll get to feel overworked.
Some of the things that can bring you to this situation are:
- Overloading daily agenda
- Setting unrealistic deadlines
- Trying to do too many things at once
- Not respecting what you’ve planned
- Spending too many hours at your workplace
Working like this isn’t necessarily a good thing. Most of the time the negative effects are very powerful and
they are strongly affecting you. Taking this into account, when you’ll draw the line you’ll realize that maybe
you’ve got what you wanted, but the paid price is too high and it's not worth it.
When you get very involved in what you do professionally, and the boundary between your work and private time is
lost. Most of the time your private time loses ground in favor of your working hours.
Before you realize that you feel overworked, the negative effects of it will already be influencing both your
professional and personal life. The balance between those two is no longer a good one.
Feeling overworked - which are the negative effects and how it affects you?
Being overworked can affect you in many ways. Mental, physical and emotional negative effects may appear. These
are interconnected and all together will cause chain reactions in your body and your life.
The stress and exhaustion that occurs when you are overworked can cause attention problems, sleep, depression,
diabetes, impaired memory, and even heart diseases or strokes.
The influence that all these have on the efficiency of the activities and work productivity, is the opposite of
what you are trying to obtain.
- The lack of attention increases the incidence of accidents
- A poor memory makes you forget important things
- Difficulties in concentration will make deadlines difficult to meet
- Depression drastically decreases your creativity and your livelihood
- The lack of communication makes collaboration difficult
- Increased fatigue can lead to heart disease or even strokes
This is not something you need and it will not help you to reach your goals faster or easier.
On the contrary, in the long term, feeling overworked will hinder you in this process.
How to avoid becoming overworked
It is understandable that you are passionate about your business and that you want to thrive. Also, it is
understandable that you want to perform well both in your private professional life.
But you have to keep in mind that to perform at full capacity you need to have a good balance between these two.
A good balance is one of the success factors and here are some steps that will help you in this regard
