A colleague recently shared a great piece from HBR regarding Collaboration Overload. In short, it discusses how knowledge workers are becoming increasingly distracted and pulled in multiple directions by both a flood of incoming information and collaboration requests, especially leaders and high-performers.
As you become better at what you do and move up in an organization, your input is largely sought after more often, which means more choices, time constraints, and trade-offs. You therefore tend to stretch yourself even thinner - ironically, because hard work is what got you there in the first place - and sometimes even become a bottleneck for others actually getting things done. The article offers some practical advice on how to keep information flowing, as well as a framework for handling collaboration-intensive requests.
I've been thinking a lot about priorities lately; both professional projects and personal passions. Thought this topic also dove-tailed nicely into a book I just wrapped entitled Essentialism. (If you don't read it, at least check out Greg McKeown's inspiring talk at the Authors at Google series.)
Overall, I think an Essentialist mindset is a nice antidote to some of the above issues. As the author eloquently puts it:
"Creating an essential intent is hard. It takes courage, insight, and foresight to see which activities and efforts will add up to your single highest point of contribution. It takes asking tough questions, making real trade-offs, and exercising serious discipline to cut out the competing priorities that distract us from our true intention. Yet it is worth the effort because only with real clarity of purpose can people, teams, and organizations fully mobilize and achieve something truly excellent."
Word.
Marc