英文阅读：你被过量的工作困扰吗
In the information age, when almost everyone in every office is a knowledgeworker, we're paid to process information. And since there's an infinite amount
of information, there's an infinite amount of work. For everyone.
So your boss is probably giving you enough work every week to fill three
weeks -- if you let it. If you work a certain way, it could also fill only three
days.
My point is that people who feel overworked in some respects choose to be
overworked. Here are five choices to make instead:
1. Force your boss to prioritize.
要老板优先化
Because processing information is not an objective task, you can do a good
job or a bad job or any kind of job in between. Which is to say that you don't
have to do a great job with everything. You can't, right? Because your boss is
giving you too much work.
So you have some choices. First, you can try to force your boss to
prioritize. Say to him or her, "If you want me to do project z perfectly, then
you need to get projects w, x, and y off my plate."
Maybe your boss will think project z is so important that he or she will
clear your plate. But most likely, your boss will say, "Forget it. You need to
do everything." This is an open invitation to start experimenting with cutting
corners.
2. If your boss won't prioritize, do it yourself.
如果老板不肯优先化，你自己来优先化
Please don't tell me you don't believe in cutting corners. It's the
layman's term for prioritizing, and you probably perfected it as a way of life
in college. In fact, cutting corners is what college teaches best.
Over the course of a semester, you were assigned sixteen 400-page books to
read, plus you had to write papers about them. You also had to show up for
classes to find out what was going to be on the tests. Of course, there was no
way you could read all 6,400 pages you were assigned -- that would be impossible
in the allotted time.
So you figured out what you could skip. You determined that the best way to
get out of the reading was to go to the lectures, because professors lecture
about what interests them, and their tests reflect their interests.
Now back to your workplace, where you have too much work to do. Here's how
the losers handle it: They complain about being overworked. They keep accepting
more work, and trying to do it perfectly, and complain. And their bosses keep
dumping it on them and saying there's nothing they can do about the workload.
Meanwhile, neither of them is prioritizing, neither of them is taking
responsibility for the situation, and each is blaming the other.
If you boss insists on giving you more work than you can do, you should
start cutting corners. Do everything very quickly, and ignore the idea that it
needs to be done perfectly -- it can't all be done perfectly. Your boss refuses
to prioritize for you, so you'll have to do everything as best as you can.
3. Get comfortable with ignoring some tasks.
心里踏实地去忽视某些任务
For some of you, even doing things less than perfectly will take too much
time. In this case, you'll have to blow some stuff off. So experiment and see
which things can fall through cracks without anyone noticing.
You already do this. Someone at work sends you an email demanding a
response. But before you have time to reply, another recipient does so, so you
just delete the original message. Try this approach with work you're not a
central force on and see what happens.
4. Stop complaining before it ruins your life.
在过度的工作破坏你的生活之前，停止抱怨
I can already imagine the comments flying about this column. Some of you
will say that you'd be fired for following the above advice. But what's your
choice? You've already told your boss you have more work than you can get done
in a day, and he or she didn't scale back. Do you want to continue to just
complain about it every day? Probably not, because complaining is toxic.
Besides, do you really want to work 15 hour days to get extra work done for
a company that doesn't respect its employees' time? Why should you give up your
personal life because your boss can't prioritize?
Instead, take control of your life and create a situation where you stop
complaining about having too much work. If you're fired for not doing all the
work, you probably didn't want to work at the company anyway. And if you're not
able to scale back, consider that you might over-identify with your job to the
point that you're working harder than you need to because you can't imagine not
being perfect.
5. Take responsibility for being overworked, then change it.
对工作过度负责，并改变它
OK, suppose you love your work and you're happy working 15-hour days.
That's fine. Just don't complain about it.
What I'm saying is that if you complain about having too much work you
should look in the mirror -- it's your own fault, and you can change the
situation by drawing boundaries at work. Be an adult by taking responsibility
for your time, and complain only when you have a solution.
Star performers don't talk about being overworked, they talk about time
management. The best time managers excel at it because they're good at figuring
out what they don't have to do. The best time managers have the confidence to
say, "I'll still be a star even if I don't do that task."
This reminds me of Gina Trapani, who edits the Lifehacker blog. Gina and
three other editors put out a publication that has more readers than just about
every local newspaper in this country, and many national magazines. Surely she's
a very busy person. But her productivity tips belie a Zen-like balance in which
she isolates the most important things and lets other things languish if need
be.
Want an example? In order for Gina to blog every day, she has to keep up
with hundreds of other bloggers so she knows who to link to. These blogs come to
her via direct feed. What does she do when she's falling behind and blog posts
are piling up? She clears out her in-box and starts over. "If something's really
important," she said at a panel I attended, "someone will email me about
it."
This is great advice from someone who's succeeding in an area where most
people would succumb to information overload. Clearly, the way to do good work
is to know when it's time to not do it.
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