Marriage Counseling-Make Time for Your Relationship by Avoiding Urgency
Addiction
by
Barbara Bartlein
Lori Zimmermann of Santa Barbara,
California, worked for a large international retail organization for eight
years. She entered corporate America with the intent to stay and make a career.
But after eight years, she called it quits and started freelancing to have more
control over her work hours and her life.
"I never felt finished at work," she explains. "While I could maintain the
status quo, I really couldn't make it better. We worked up to 60 hours a week
just to get the job done. It wasn't directly said you had to do it, but everyone
else was working that hard, so you just felt it was expected."
She walked away from a guaranteed salary, a benefit structure, and stock options
to have flexibility and control over her time. "Although it has certainly made
things tougher financially, I've never regretted my decision," she states.
She is not alone. More and more workers are questioning their role in corporate
American and it's "ASAPs" climate. Today's corporate culture is "hooked" on
urgency where everything is a priority, needing to be done yesterday. This
"urgency addiction" has become a way of life, a workaholic culture. Company
routine revolves around a series of emergency "fires" that need extinguishing
immediately. Employees run from project to project with caffeine energy and
buckets of sand. Sprinkling a little sand here, a little there, they feel
exhausted at the end of the day, yet cannot point to any specific accomplishment
or finished project.
Urgency addiction permeates today's organizations and affects all who work
there. It produces an adrenaline rush of feeling important, but soon leads to
exhaustion and burn out. Those who attempt to fight it by asking, "But, which
one is the priority?" are told, "Everything is a priority." Employees dance as
fast as they can but fall increasingly behind.
Workers try to compensate by taking work home, coming in early, or sacrificing
time on weekends to improve productivity with no interruptions. This additional
effort is usually rewarded with yet another project, another area of
responsibility, and more simmering fires to extinguish.
By accepting bonuses, promotions, stock options, and buy-outs, boomers are
trapped with "golden handcuffs" that make it difficult to leave, hard to stay,
and impossible to say "no." Money becomes the goal rather than a means to an
end. Workers find that each rung of the success ladder only takes them to a
higher level of urgency addiction. As one executive explained, "I'm at the top,
but I don't like the view."
Some techniques to fight urgency addiction in your life:
*Review your calendar at the beginning of the week. Highlight the priorities and
goals for each day. This will help you to narrow your focus. While unexpected
emergencies may occur, you will be much less likely to be in a reactive mode if
you take time to plan.
*Avoid hop-scotching. Resist hopping from one project to another without
finishing what you start. You know what I mean; you start cleaning up a pile on
your desk and then decide to create a file system. When you go to look in the
files, you realize they have to be thinned, and so on. Finish one thing before
you move on to something else.
*Do big projects first. You may have a tendency to gravitate to the projects or
work that is easy to do. These often tend to be small projects that are
"no-brainers." Possibly you kid yourself that if you just clean up these small
projects, you can give your full attention to the big things. The problem is
never getting around to the large projects. So start with the ones you really
don't want to do and the small ones will get done along the way.
*Have a sign over your desk that reads: Lack of planning on your part... is not
necessarily an emergency for me.
FOR MORE TIPS TO IMPROVE YOUR RELATIONSHIP, VISIT:
http://www.101marriagecounseling.com
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Barbara Bartlein, RN, MSW, is the People Pro and a relationship expert. A
clinical psychotherapist, she has worked with couples for over twenty five
years. She is the author of "Why Did I Marry You Anyway? 12.5 Strategies for a
Happy Marriage," which received a five star rating on Amazon. She can be reached
at barb@thepeoplepro.com or visit her website at http://www.ThePeoplePro.com
About the Author:
Barbara Bartlein, RN, MSW, is
the People Pro and a relationship expert. A clinical psychotherapist, she has
worked with couples for over twenty five years. She is the author of "Why Did I
Marry You Anyway? 12.5 Strategies for a Happy Marriage," which received a five
star rating on Amazon. She can be reached at barb@thepeoplepro.com or visi
Source of article:
www.goarticles.com
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