When helping isn’t helping.

I have a confession. I was a crisis junkie. I needed to be needed. My job for the past few years has had a large component of advising my team, helping them move large, high priority projects along. These projects often required long hours and late nights. Adding a team two timezones away extended my workday until bedtime. This combined with my natural preference for early morning productivity resulted in a sent file with timestamps from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m.

And I felt like a hero. Look how hard I’m working.

And I felt drained and unhappy and stressed. Which made me crabby. Which made me a less effective manager.

I realized that I was letting this reactive mode of helping rule not just my day, but my life. I would constantly drop what I was doing to respond to a request because my team needed me right now.

No. They. Didn’t.

I was doing two very bad things. I was enabling bad habits - letting them rely on me for immediate answers, rather than giving them space to solve problems on their own, and I was not getting enough focused work time to do my whole job well.

I started looking at messages every hour or so, and slowing down my responses. My team stopped expecting me to answer every question as soon as it was asked, and they often found solutions on their own. If they needed an answer from me right away, they found me, and we talked, and I worked with them to help them find the answer.

I was able to focus on my own projects, the ones that required periods of quiet thought, such as building training programs to teach my team craft and problem solving skills that would cut down the number of times they needed my help.

This focus did not come easy, as I’m a notorious multitasker, and felt guilty at first about not being painfully responsive. Then I started to see results. I was better at my job, and my team became better at theirs.

I continue to work on focus and have learned a few techniques to help resist the pull of being everywhere at once. I don't know that I'm cured, but I'm certainly a recovering crisis junkie.