The Road Not Taken: Triage

What happens when you've got a personal emergency during work? You learn how to triage and give up control.

It was a trying week for me. I am slowly recovering from a pretty tough illness and I lost a loved one. Between these two things, I have not been able to focus on work 100 percent. Work, however, still trundles on and things must be done. But I knew I would soon need to be out of the office for a funeral, so instead of taking sick days to convalesce under my bedcovers, I chose to work through it.

This may not have been the smartest decision, but I still learned something from it. My brain and heart weren’t fully present in the work. Not only that, but I physically could not keep up with the deluge of daily requests that come to me. I had to triage my work.

I have read many of those articles about time management, efficiency, and managing email. I try those techniques for about 15 minutes, then real life butts in, emergencies and hysterics force their way into my office and inbox, and once again, all problems are huge problems simply because I’m there to solve them.  A large portion of this is my fault. I am too eager to solve other people’s problems in an effort to be helpful to the team. I am a helicopter-mom to my business units and, quite frankly, sometimes it is just easier to do it right the first time than to let them try to figure things out themselves. Things like making business decisions, reading comprehension, figuring out how to engage a customer; none of these are within my job-description, but I do them many times a day.

Last week, that couldn’t happen. I had to limit my work to the absolute necessary things. Issues with real deadlines for real deals that were actually going to happen or fail within the next 10 days. I triaged. And, despite my office-helicopter-mom fear that all would fall apart, it turns out my kids were okay. They struggled. They fought against it and I had to divulge the reasons why I wouldn’t be handling their non-emergency emergencies. But once they had that information, their emergencies could (usually) wait a few days. Some hammered for immediate attention anyway, but it was attention I simply could not give. And they lived. Their deals survived. What they thought was a “need-to-have” revealed itself to be only a “would-be-nice-to-have” once my colleagues were presented with the unwanted gifts of time and relative independence.

From my very-bad-no-good-week, I learned that my previous failures at time management and efficiency were not because I am so important and necessary to the everyday functions of my job that the standard recommendations for handling workload are too juvenile for my needs. I learned that I am part of the problem. I work with human beings who are capable of cognitive thought and bipedal locomotion. I can set them free to solve their own problems and the world will not fall apart.

The hard part will be implementing this practice when I do not have a consuming illness and overwhelming personal loss as a justification. When my only explanation for refusing, however true, is, “You don’t need me to do this for you,” will I have the backbone to stand by and let my colleagues struggle and fuss over having to think for themselves? I have a few more weeks of difficulty ahead of me, so I will need to keep my boundaries strong.
And yes, I do understand that last week I said to secure your own oxygen mask first and stop doing things outside of your job duties. I never said it would be easy. Even for me.


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Celeste Harrison Forst has practiced in small and mid-sized firms and is now in-house at a large manufacturing and technology company where she receives daily hugs from her colleagues. You can reach Celeste directly at C.harrisonforst@gmail.com.

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