Keeping Balance Despite a FullSchedule

It took 2 weeks of being back as a CEO (as an interim) to return to bad habits of skipping lunch, working at night, saying yes to more meetings than I have capacity for, and missing more workouts per week than I managed to sneak in. The momentum towards a perpetual sprint is real, even if I know better and have already traveled the path of overworked CEO and burn out.

Part of what I value in serving as an interim, is it thrusts me right back into the hot seat of the nonprofit staff experience, helping inform my client work, and ensuring the strategies I promote are ones that I have directly tested within the current nonprofit landscape.

So what works in countering a feeling of perpetual urgency? While acknowledging that balance will always take mindfulness for me, here is what I find allows me to create space in my workweek:

• No to-do lists: A list of things that I am supposed to take care of at some point I find just creates a feeling of overwhelm and the added inefficiency of needing to take time to prioritize whenever the list gets pulled out. If I need to do something, I calendar when I will get it done – not the deadline, but rather when I will actually do the work.

• Schedule what I need: Without intervention, my calendar easily is consumed by meeting upon meeting. I schedule in my working time (i.e., time for completion of tasks), and I schedule in break times. When I absolutely can’t avoid an overpacked day or have upcoming travel, I make sure to block some time the day before and after to catch up and refocus.

• Automate breathing room: I love the efficiency of scheduling tools like Calendly, but with links to my calendar floating seemingly everywhere, the two features I find invaluable are the Notice feature (under Availability, under Date-Range) that prevents last-minute meetings from popping up unexpectedly without time for preparation and the Buffer (under More Options, under Limits & Buffers) that sets a break between meetings.

• Shorter meetings: I used to be a firm believer in the 60-minute meeting. I now schedule most individual meetings for 30 minutes and find it works just as well.

And the beautiful part of all this is as soon as I take the reins on how I spend my time, not only do I feel loads better, but I am also more effective – more present to those I am working with and better able to see solutions that otherwise are obscured by being so very busy.