Have you ever had one of those days when you just wished you could push the reboot button and start it all over again? Do you see yourself working harder and harder toward something with rapidly diminishing benefits and are at this point in it just to see it done and gone? More and more of us in IT are facing spending cuts, job cuts – this is all about what you can do not to let yourself down.
The RMT Concept
The Reverse Midas Touch is a popular concept at OWN.
“Everything you touch turns to shit.”
It happens to the best of us. Sometimes things just don’t go right. Maybe two servers you touched both went up in flames. Maybe your last two client followup calls resulted in them making you feel like a fool. You are afraid to touch another thing today.
There are multiple ways to deal with this:
a) Cloaking – Just stop working. Open up a web site and veg out. Keep the portal open in the other window so it looks like you’re working.
b) Teleportation – Leave the office “to visit a client” and spend the lunch at a bar.
c) Shields up – Reject all human contact, appear to be super busy while avoiding others.
I know people who have turned to alcohol, even drugs. I know folks that just go home, bar, IT conference, favorite client retreat and generally everything but the one thing they should be doing – work.
Multitasking Meets Score Padding
The reason most IT folks get depressed at work is rooted in the fact that we all multitask. When you are spinning 10 plates and two of them fall on the ground and break you feel bad. Then another. And another. It starts to feel like you are walking around crushed porcelain that is your workday because a few things didn’t go your way. You feel like a loser.
Successful people don’t think like this. Successful people are goal oriented and even though they multitask, they do so for the purpose of accomplishing more – faster. They also partition out their day, manage their calendar and time, track their commitments and deliverables. What happens when they start to feel the case of RMT coming on? They work on something else.
This concept of score padding is designed to make you feel better. If you are dealing with a remarkably difficult task that isn’t due today and you are starting to get down about it – work on something else that needs to be done. Knock out the easy stuff. You know that there are 50 things you need to do, you aren’t going to quit, go drinking, leave office or browse the web aimlessly for hours just because you can’t complete tasks 3/50 and 4/50, are you?
Surprisingly enough, most people do not practice making themselves happy by getting more stuff done, they let little things along the way depress them and keep them from accomplishing all their goals.
Work on different projects. Skip around. Get stuff done. Just don’t take your eyes off the ball or quit.
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