Last week I had a pregnancy scare, followed by a migraine bad enough to take me out for two and a half days. I canceled a filming day. I canceled a stack of meetings. I missed every workout for most of a week and the ‘very urgent’ work that I had on my plate just did not get done.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about running at the pace we run at here at ACQ: it's not IF this happens to you, it's WHEN. The plan WILL break. The question that matters isn't how you prevent that because (surprise) you can't, it's who you decide to be in the moment it happens.

For much of my career I was able to muscle through pain, sickness, etc, and it’s only been the last two years that I have had ailments severe enough that I simply could not.

So obviously, I wanted to know the BEST way to approach these situations to make me and the work better off in the long run, instead of striking myself out.

The 3 Things I Found Useful:

1. Go fully OFFLINE. My first instinct was to answer a few emails and take one meeting so I wouldn't ‘fall behind’. That instinct is the WRONG one and the data actually backs it up (which is quite obvious when you see it lol). Research on presenteeism, which is showing up or half-showing-up while impaired, has found it costs U.S. companies an estimated $150 billion a year in lost productivity, more than sick leave itself does, precisely because people work at a fraction of capacity while telling themselves they're "keeping up."

Separately, decades of recovery research from organizational psychologist Sabine Sonnentag show that people who fully psychologically detach from work during a stressor physically, but also mentally, return with better performance and lower strain than people who stay half-engaged. Partial effort actively costs you the recovery you need without actually producing good work!

2. When you return, triage by importance, not by urgency. The instinct after two and a half days out is to attack the pile in the order it arrived, or whatever feels most time-sensitive first. This is called the “Mere Urgency Effect" where people consistently choose tasks with short deadlines over tasks with objectively bigger payoffs, simply because urgency has its own pull, independent of what actually matters.

When I got back, I sorted the backlog by what actually needed me specifically versus what just felt URGENT. Most of what felt urgent wasn't actually THAT important.

3. Don't let the story of the backlog get bigger than the backlog itself. While I was out, the anticipation was worse than the reality “How am I ever going to catch up?! I’m already behind and have a fast approaching deadline!” I was catastrophizing by overestimating how bad a negative outcome will be while underestimating my own ability to handle it.

It's associated with more stress and more avoidance, which is exactly backwards from what you need when you're trying to catch up at work. Two and a half days off won’t break A N Y T H I N G.

Checking that assumption against reality, instead of running from it, let me move fast once I was back.

The takeaway: Decide now, before you need it, that you'll disengage fully when you're down, sort by importance over noise when you're back, and check your catastrophic story against reality instead of living inside it.

Don’t let a bad few days turn into a bad week/month/etc!

-Leila

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