Hit That Snooze Button
“Work has been crazy.”
I found myself saying that a lot these days. To my family, friends, and colleagues that have been waiting for my email reply.
“So sorry, things have been really hectic.”
Mistakes were made. Unavoidable.
But then, once again, I try to be better with my schedule and focus. Regularly check my email. Scroll down my WhatsApp, looking for unanswered requests.
Oh, and delegate tasks. Tell you more about it.
New challenge is in the house
I used to hate a short-notice task. Something’s urgent in the middle of my movie night. A distress call during my weekend. A new goal in the midst of the second quarter resulted in an abandoned KPI.
Not a big fan.
I like to make plans and I like to stick with them. For me, plans are made to protect work-life boundaries.
But lately, I’ve been trying to be more flexible because some things aren’t made to be planned.
That, and a new urgent work situation emerged a month ago.
It resulted in more jobs for me. I had to do overtime to make sure everything is fine. I take on a new challenge, the one that I have been asking for so long yet the opportunity finally came with other things in tow.
These upcoming 4 months will be crazy, I told myself back in July. But then, I kinda just go with it.
Ice creams and anger management, here we go.
Should be time management, you say?
Oh, I’m pretty great with time.
The morning and afternoon are usually full of meetings and coordination chats. Left me with the night time for me to make creative concepts and recheck the contents made by my team.
The bright side is, I kinda like it. I like doing creative things at night.
The not-so-bright side is that I found myself accidentally bothering my team in the middle of the night.
A 1 am Notification
I did mention the ‘delegate task’ for me to prevent mistakes from happening.
My team started asking: “Hey are you still working at 1 am? I got an email notification that you are constantly adding things in the document that we shared.”
Constant email notifications at 1 am. What a prickling situation.
And I’m like, “Wow sorry, didn’t mean to do that.”
So I started more on snoozing things so I could notify my team at the right time.
- Scheduled email (hail Gmail, I love you).
- A personal reminder for me to put a soft (or hard) reminder for my team to do their job, but during proper work hours.
- Adding my ideas to separate documents first before adding them to the main document at the proper time.
- Say sorry and thank you if I need to contact my team outside work hours, even at lunchtime.
It’s extra. But I’m comfortable with that. I’m not planning to integrate the crazy work mode with the culture of my team, so I guess it’s important to keep it separate.
Hit that Snooze Button
More than once, I have this urge of sending follow-up notifications to my team after work hours, but then I remember, there is more to life than just working.
There will always be more jobs to do tomorrow, but kind respect and mental health are what keep everyone sane and strong in the midst of a crazy work week.
So I use that scheduled send button, make that buffering document, say that little sorry, and I hit that snooze button.
Because everybody deserves a personal downtime, including me.
Have a nice snooze, everyone.
