I have found myself recently thinking in terms of cliches such as it’s a marathon, not a sprint and slow and steady wins the race when it comes to work. Not that I am in any way sports-adjacent nor even one for the sports metaphor in general (I’ll be honest; almost all such metaphors are lost on me, the boy who never really got into sports enough to even learn the rules or anything), but still: I am trying to learn not to become hyper-reactive, and to better pace myself and my stress, and such sayings prove to be useful, if unfortunately attached to activities I would otherwise reject wholeheartedly.
The problem for me, I’ve discovered, is that my latest tendency to become a workaholic overwhelms almost any more sensible response to any given situation or hiccup. Traffic is down? My first impulse is just to work more to make up the gap. Someone is out sick, or on vacation? I’ll work more so that we’re still publishing as much. We need a story on a particular topic and everyone is busy? What if I just stay an hour or two later to get it done?
This (not good, somewhat unhealthy) mindset is both a hangover from the always-hustling freelance brain that I had for more than a decade before my current position, and also the desire to magically be able to fix problems through effort and force of will, instead of… well, actually trying to address the problems.
What I’ve learned through a couple of months of trying things that way was twofold.
- It doesn’t work, but it sure is exhausting.
- It’s infinitely more productive to actually try to think through the situation and see if there really is a problem, or I’m just overreacting to something that will either sort itself out in time or be taken care of by someone else.
So, now, I’m trying something different: teaching myself to not panic react, but to try to sit back and take a beat to work out what the best thing to do will be. The frustrating thing isn’t that it’s seeming to work from my admittedly limited experience so far. (I am less stressed and things appear to generally be working! Who knew?) Nope, the frustrating thing is that all of this is still so unnatural to me that, in order for it to work, I need to constantly think things like it’s a marathon, not a sprint in order to get where I need my head to be.
Surely there’s a less cliched way to do this. Surely.