News

If you are like most people, doing a corporate job successfully is a lot harder than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. You’re likely working from home, but traditional office pressures remain: meetings with your direct boss and immediate teammates; serving “internal customers” at work, and fielding requests for help from colleagues — many of whom you might not even know.

You want to be one of those indispensable “go-to” people, so you probably say “yes” too often. You always owe too many things to too many people. Juggling so many commitments, you’ll soon start dropping balls. It’s just a matter of time. You feel as if you are always in danger of disappointing somebody.

Meanwhile, you’re forced to rely more and more on people you cannot hold accountable. They also probably say yes too often and sometimes end up disappointing you.

As you and your colleagues get more and more overcommitted, the chances of things going wrong, for all of you, start increasing. Delays become inevitable. Communications slip through the cracks. People misunderstand each other or lose track of specifications. As more things go wrong, everybody has more delays and mistakes to deal with, so everybody’s overcommitment just keeps getting worse.