6 Finding Balance in a Chaotic World: Strategies for Managing Overwhelming Workloads

The topic of this episode is discussing the of feeling being overwhelmed at work. Drew suggests having a conversation as a way to address the issue. Landon talks about the challenges of being a salesperson for a First Choice Builders and how the workload can fluctuate between being busy and slow. Landon's main concern is ensuring that clients are taken care of and satisfied. The conversation explores the importance of prioritization, time management, and delegation in managing overwhelming situations. Landon reflects on his past experiences and how he has learned to prioritize tasks and rely on his team at First Choice Builders for support. Landon and Drew discuss the need for effective communication and the potential modifications or assistance that could improve their systems. Overall, the conversation aims to provide insights and strategies for dealing with feelings of being overwhelmed in a professional setting.

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Transcript

Okay, so back to my thing, all seriousness.

Okay. So you're talking about being overloaded with work, which is a good thing, but not a good thing, but kind of a good thing. And even if you had a whole bunch of sales, okay, so one thing is that probably most people don't know is you're a salesperson for First Choice Builders, and times get busy and times get slow, and your job gets busier no matter what.

I mean, you're busy when it's slow because you're trying to get work and then things pick up and you get a whole bunch of jobs and things are even more busy because you are trying to keep track of all these things and get back to customers and perform at a top notch level. Which is what I always do, obviously. Well, that was not a question.

You're performing at top notch at a top notch level. Maximum bandwidth. And so when things are slow, you're like, oh, this is pretty cool.

We need to get some jobs and get these things going, and then we get jobs and you're like, oh, now I just doubled my workload. Because not only I have to keep jobs coming in, but now I have to keep track of all these things that customers are. And so tell me about that.

Well, I think sort of the pivotal point is this. At the end of the day, the clients need taken care of. That's all I care about.

That's legitimately all I care about. If the clients are happy, I'm happy. Even if I'm doing a crap job at whatever I'm doing, seriously, if the clients are happy, then I'm happy.

So my ultimate goal is to make sure that A, it's not just a lip service. I'm actually following through on the things that I promise. I'm actually doing the things that they need help with or whatever.

Right. And B, I'm doing it in a timely manner, while at the same time I'm bringing in more work. And how do I bring in more work? It's by relationships, talking with people, getting with people, bringing up different ideas.

So the sense of being overwhelmed, first of all, it's a personal problem. That's really what it comes down to. Like, I am busy maybe, but maybe not.

And yeah, perhaps, maybe not. But the way I look at it is this I feel overwhelmed when I worry, when I start to worry that the people I'm taking care of are not quite fully being taken care of. Even if I like, oh, it's not that big of a deal, or I generally want to pour in all the attention that I possibly can to even to one client, even if that client's a small client, I still care about them.

I generally give a rip about their situation. Yeah. So that that's where the worry well, that's why we have you doing this job.

Yeah, but there you have it. The challenge is, and this is something I've been learning, knowing what to delegate, knowing how to time manage, knowing what's truly priority and what feels like priority. Those are the things I have to juggle.

Those are the things that I've been working on. And if I can get that stuff figured out, it seems to me like I'm much better off for it mentally. Right.

I'm less stressed out, we'll say. And also my team is getting the proper stuff that they need to do their part of it as well. If I have some information on client and I have to hand it off to a project coordinator and I'm all scatterbrained in, helter skelter.

And suddenly a week goes by and he doesn't have the info he needs. So I'm not doing my job. So here's a question for you then.

When you are overloaded, how do you deal with it? First of all, what gets you overloaded specifically, you said it's when you worry that the customer is not getting what they want. Right. So is it because you're worried that they're not getting what they want because you're spread so thin that you don't have the time to do the things? Or is it because the systems aren't set up well enough? There are certain systems that we use, but maybe there's modifications we need to make in order to keep things going as smoothly as possible, no matter how many clients or prospective clients that we have, or maybe a person needs an assistant.

There's so many different ways to go, and and let's kind of dive into a couple of these and see if any of it makes sense. Like, you know what? Now that you mention it, our CRM program is whatever. I'm just kind of throwing that out there.

No, that's actually a really valid point. Why do I feel overwhelmed? Right. I would say particularly in the beginning when I was very new to this job and I really didn't have a good grasp on even what I was supposed to be doing, let alone how to do it.

And we were developing new systems, and this whole thing just came from scratch. When I was at that point, a lot of it was you made yourself busy. You filled your time with busy work.

You were reorganizing the thing you reorganized yesterday. I mean, really, you did you're what? You paid for that? I thought you were being productive. No, absolutely not.

No, I was just, like, reorganizing my pens in my drawer, man. No, but you're really trying hard to stay busy, number one. And number two, you're trying to in tandem with that, you're trying to build these new systems or come up with these creative ideas, or you start delving into something, not knowing what you're doing.

And then you find a pitfall and you realize there's a problem, so then you come up with another idea, and that's how systems are started. In innovation, there's a lot of waste. Yeah.

So I feel now I'm past that point. In fact, I know I'm past that point. I definitely have a lot better grasp on what I'm supposed to be doing.

Obviously, looking at it from a macro view, it's, oh, you need to close sales, and you need to help people. It's like, well, yeah, but what does that entail? What makes me get stressed out now is I know we'll say I'm making up a time frame here. I don't know the exact time, but we'll say three to four months ago, it was me learning how to prioritize and realizing what's important and what's not.

And then, say, one to two months ago, it was learning where I needed to lean more on my team because we can't be the expert in everything. So if I have an issue with X, Y, or Z, I need to know where I can get that answer. I don't need to be the professional on everything.

So if I run into problem with X, oh, the old self would, okay, well, I need to research the beans out of X. And I go down this big rabbit hole and you come on the other side and you don't even remember where the heck you started. And then you rinse and repeat that with Y-M-Z and so on.

Now, I try to be more resourceful and what I found is A, it takes a lot of stress off me and therefore B, allows me to have a bigger workload on the more important things and then C, I am also communicating with my team more by being resourceful. And by that I mean leaning on my teammates. So I have a question on something, and I'm not the expert on it or it's not necessarily under my umbrella per se.

Then I go get the answer from the person who does handle that I have a question on a bid on some particular window trim thing or whatever, and I don't know the ins and outs behind it all. Then I need to go sit down with Brian, our project coordinator, and get the answer. Yeah.

So you mentioned prioritizing. How do you go about prioritizing? This one's hard because it's simple but yet difficult for me. For me.

And the reason is when something comes into my mind or if something comes along, let's say a person calls me and asks, hey, thinking about building a house, wondering if you could meet up with me at some point and go over this concept that I have. You bet you. Boom.

I am now going to do everything for that person in that moment. So I'm going to continue on down that path. That's like all said, and a top priority.

Yes, okay. Yes. But the problem is that happens all throughout my day, every day because we do time blocking, right? We have time periods set for each part of our day, company wide.

And let's say 09:00 in the morning, your time block pretend says meeting with Drew about X, Y and Z. Now, a customer calls and says, hey, I just happen to be in town and I'm in town for the next 3 hours and I'm looking to build a custom home. Suddenly priorities are different.

Drew, you're going to have to wait because now we have this potential customer and you as a person who wants to please the customer, me. And your meeting suddenly is less important. Right? But now what if what if it was something like, hey, I just wanted to follow up on my bid, where's it at? And you and I were scheduled to have a meeting.

Is that a high priority? You have to be able to justify throughout the day what level of priority something this is where I'll say in the beginning it was a lot more difficult to ascertain because when you're learning this trade by trade. I mean, like, consulting and working with people. Every lead is like a gold gem.

You're going to put in the most effort possible for every little thing. You give me an inch, I'm going to dive for the mile. Right.

So that's where the whole, like, everything's a high priority needs to happen now thing, I think kind of stems from now. You actually do have high priority items, and you need to, like you said, manage those throughout the day. And so a huge part of this is simply learning what those are, simply understanding and all this.

I would say I lean a lot more on my intuition now because I have the experience behind me to state that, hey, Drew, we're meeting at this time, but we need to push it off because so and so just came into town, and this is not priority. I now have the experience and the confidence behind me to make that call. Whereas when you start out, you don't have that you don't know.

Right? Yeah, no, that's good. Originally, just so everybody knows, the reason we're even talking about this is because Landon walked in and said, man, I am just overwhelmed. I have so much stuff going on.

And so we're like, let's just jump in and start talking about that instead of doing our regular scheduled podcast. We have an agenda for today, but we've totally just gone off it. We're just going to talk about Landon's overwhelm and how we can address it.

Landon's going to Whine, but I want to quiet somebody. The reason this is valuable is because we want to tell people in real life how we deal with issues. We want to be as open as possible.

And you know what? Maybe there'll be another salesperson listening and be like, hey, you know what? That's a good idea. Or maybe another contractor who knows who's listening, right? And they can say, you know what I learned about time blocking, I realized about priorities. Or I just hope to give somebody some value off of our real life scenarios.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm happy to share it's. Conversations like this, particularly when I remember starting out, you suck this stuff up like a sponge.

You're looking for every at least I was. I'm looking for every angle and every avenue, and I'm trying to soak up as much advice as I possibly can. Perhaps it can be a little bit of analysis, paralysis, but it's different when it's a real world scenario.

Like, I'm living through this right now. This is my day to day life, so I know what I'm talking about. I don't have to come up with a general theory or whatever.

It's raw. Without names or anything. What has made you overwhelmed today? Definitely Drew.

Oh, without names. Sorry. Well so cut.

No, I haven't even seen you today, dude. No, I would just say, like, a scenario that you've been going through. Okay, here's a common scenario.

Remember how I told you about how the priorities thing and how it's like a priority always shifts? Right? You have one thing going on and suddenly another person calls you and that changes priorities and this and that. So I am definitely human. I don't always make the right judgment call when it comes to priorities.

Sometimes I become so frustrated with certain things. I've been trying so hard to finish this thing I was going to write and I keep putting it off because I keep getting interrupted with these different calls and yes, the priority, but sometimes it's like, you know what? If I don't prioritize this, it's just never going to get done. Sometimes you have to kind of play it like stonewall like that a little bit.

A prime example of my day is it's a difficult job in the sense that you never stop taking in info and passing it along. Communication, communication, communication. Communicate.

That is literally the pivotal point in my job is communicating. 99% of my job is communicating. Yeah.

If I get some info on a client or if they have questions for me and I'm walking them through different products, if I have someone I'm going to meet up with and I meet with them and I take down a bunch of information and then I go meet with my project coordinator and pass that all off to him, It's that all day? So the overwhelming part per se is when those items overlap, there's only so many hours in the day. So sometimes when you start to overlap things, what stresses me out the most is the fact that I might miss a detail and even if it's in the big picture, not so important. It is important to me because it's important to the client, and I certainly know it's important to our team.

I would hate to have this happen where we begin a project and partway through, suddenly this window doesn't fit or whatever, I'm making something up and the team goes, what the heck? We didn't know about this. And I would say, oh, that's right, I forgot to mention that. I don't ever want that to happen.

I want there to be like zero room for error. And so in order to do that, thus far, what I've been doing is I lean heavily on my team. I make sure that I verbally communicate with them always, and I make sure that they extract stuff out of me.

So just curious, when you're working on, let's call it selling to a customer. Selling a customer, right. And they have a lot of questions, very specific questions.

And you're trying to keep track of these details and you want to keep things moving forward, and you also need to keep the customer informed on everything. There's so many moving parts. Is there a method to organizing so and so called, they ask this question, very specific question about a bid? Why is this priced this way? Or what material exactly is this on this bid? I want to hire you.

A salesperson has the most broad knowledge of anybody in the company as far as maybe not as deep as the specialists, but the most broad knowledge of the other guys in the company because you have to know quite a bit about almost everything, right? Yeah. You kind of are a utility knife. You have your fingers in multiple pies.

So how does this go for you when you have all these things coming in? I mean, I'm just curious if this is part of the reason for overload. There's so many details to take care of. There's so many people to take care of.

There's multiple jobs, sometimes multiple customers per job. We're dealing with somebody right now that's actually a partnership. Right? Yes.

And sometimes we don't even know who to go to because it has not been made clear to us who the boss is. Right. And we're trying to figure that out.

One partner is real easy to deal with. Another partner is maybe not so much. Their communication styles vary.

We've communicated that we'd like to talk to one person, but then we get a response from a different person. We have details about something. And so you formulate an email, articulating all these details, you send it to the one person, but the other person doesn't get that memo and suddenly we have a miscommunication issue.

Yeah, absolutely. And then the thing is, now these customers are coming to you and saying, oh, how come you didn't tell us that? Well, actually I did. It was sent to the person who we thought we were communicating to and maybe they didn't communicate to the other person.

Right, right. It's a little bit of an uphill battle, but maybe there's a way that you have worked on trying to keep that communication streams open and even requesting talking to a specific person on a job when it's husband, wife, or partnership or business. In this case, it's a business partnership where there's a few different owners.

I would say this is kind of a broad answer. So just to reclarify your question, how do we handle or how do I specifically handle all this incoming data and dealing with issues like communication issues? How do I handle all that? And perhaps can we better ascertain what is, say, stressing me out? Yeah. And methods of communicating to specific people, just like I'd mentioned.

Do you immediately say, hey, look, I realize that you guys are in a partnership, it would be much easier if we can have one go to person that I can communicate to. Is there a program that you use? Yes. So when it comes to sort of a preliminary meeting with people and we're kind of throwing ideas out there and rough numbers and talking about the general concept of a project, it's best if everyone sits at the same table.

I'll put it that way. It's always best to just get everybody there on the same page. Now, if it's virtual, if it's going to be through email or through phone call, it's always best to clarify one point of contact.

It has to be that way. You cannot play like the example I mentioned earlier. You send info to one person or one half, and the other half doesn't get it.

It just doesn't work. You're already setting yourself up for failure. How do you respond if you get the wrong person communicating back? Well, me personally, I like a phone call.

I'll drop everything right there and just call if it's an issue. I'll drop everything right there and make a phone call. So you reach out to a customer and say, hey, I understand you guys are in a partnership.

This is a business partnership. And in order to keep everything as clean as possible, I'll communicate directly to one partner. You guys choose who that best partner is.

Now you start communicating to that one person and now this third party from the partnership jumps in and starts communicating directly to you. Now what? Yeah, well, to put it bluntly, I would put them in their place. Really.

You have to stand your ground. The important thing to remember is that if they hired us essentially as a consultant, right, or if they have hired our services in any way, they are paying us to be their boss. Essentially.

They're paying us to be their authority. Yeah, we're their expert on their side. Right.

We're going to help and guide them. And there may be times that you might have to put your foot down and say, look, this isn't going to work this way. I have to do this in order for our process to work.

Right. So a huge part of that is making sure that they understand why you're doing what you're doing. If they're in the dark and you're just, we'll say, prodding them in one direction or the other, that doesn't really work in my eyes.

You have to also help them understand. Now, you can't make them understand every single thing about every single process that you do, but you can at least conceptualize the big idea, present the big picture to them. Like, look, I know perhaps this is confusing in this area or you're wondering about this, but trust me, there's a process here and it'll make sense in the end.

Trusting the processes is part of it. And this all starts with the initial relationship, getting them to know, like, and trust you and vice versa. We don't want to work with people that are going to be hard to work with and nobody wants that, right? So we need to work as a team.

If you're going to hire a hunting guide and you're out in the woods together and suddenly you decide you have your own ideas and you're just going to start following some random track. How is that going to work? And then you get angry at the guide at the end of it when you don't actually get the animal that you were hunting. No, that doesn't work.

Right. So you have to trust the guide. You hired him for that, and it's the same with us.

Yeah. Do you ever feel like it sometimes is hard to be crystal clear? I mean, is there times that you're tempted to kind of beat around the bush when you feel like somebody might need reined in, so to speak? Yeah, I think it's tempting. It depends on the nature.

It depends on the situation. Me personally, if I have developed a relationship with anybody, and I'm a people person, so this comes a little bit more naturally for me. I don't have a problem saying things or being direct.

I'll always do it in a tactful and respectful manner. I'm never going to just blatantly be blunt and say, oh, that's a stupid idea. No, you don't want to do that.

Right. I'll never say that. Who needs to? But there are people out there, too, that do that.

But I'm always going to lean on that same concept, like, hey, you hired me for a reason, and I know you may not want to hear this, and I don't really feel like telling you this. Yeah, I kind of want to beat her on the bush when I say this, but to put it bluntly, that's not going to work. That is a tough part of my job.

And as a team, we all are unanimous in this decision. That's one thing I want to make clear. It's not like I'm the authority on X, Y, or Z.

Sometimes I am. Right. You have a whole team, but I have a whole team to lean on.

And if I need any sort of verification or can you reinstate this, please, or re explain that? Absolutely. Let me bring my project coordinator in here. He has all the details.

He can unpack it for you. Okay. So when you walked in, what was your thoughts about we did an overview on things that cause overwhelm or stress.

Right. Customers who what would you say, Landon's? Need and desire to please customers as thoroughly as possible while there's multiple customers and tons of communication, time blocking, how to prioritize. Now, specifically when you walked in, what was on your mind today? Specifically, this is something I often get hung up with, and it's that I stress about details that I don't even know about to truly help.

What do you mean by that? Well, I'll make up a quick example here. Someone calls me. They want to build a house.

They want some information on this, that, and the other thing. And right away, you can tell that that person's getting into the weeds. Okay.

They don't even have a land picked out, and they're already asking about their trim, color, automatically, I'm going to try and guide them and say, hey, look, you need to think about the general concept, and before you even think about that, you need to consider your land, because that's going to dictate your house design. Right. So I leave it at that, and then oh, okay.

Sounds good. I appreciate your help, Landon. Thank you.

We'll get back in touch in a couple of days. All right. No problems there.

And Landon moves on with his day, except for that he doesn't. Now I sit here and I stress about, well, perhaps there was more in those details that they wanted to mention, and perhaps that would better dictate their decision and then all those different things. So how do I battle that, I'm assuming, is your next question.

What do I do to fix that? I lead on my team. I don't have the answers in my head necessarily. I don't have the whole picture formulated.

I try to grasp what the person is after and help them the best I can. And if I have any sort of worries, doubts, or fears on the details or numbers or whatever, I lean on my team. If I have a real estate question, I can go to Drew and talk to him about that or perk tests or whatever.

If I have a specific question about cabinetry and the line of cabinets that we use and how much they cost and what's the linear foot cost, I can go to Brian and so on. So those are the tools that I lean on. So let me see if I understand this correctly.

So what you're saying is one person of a team is really only as good as the other people that they can go to on the team. So let's say let me put it this way. If I personally was in charge of project management, project coordinating, sales, marketing, like, I was at one point, right? Everything I would even be out framing houses in the meantime, right.

Everything kind of gets done incompletely. That's a nice way to put it to be nice to myself. But now, okay, now I have a project manager, and he's experienced, and he knows how to run a project, and I can lean on him to make sure that these jobs run smoothly.

Now I can do sales and marketing and project coordinating a little bit better. Right? Right. And now pretty soon, eventually, you have a whole team.

You have a project manager, a project coordinator, a salesperson, a marketing person, a general manager, and you get all these positions. Now, each one carries a smaller workload, and they can all rely on each other in order to get things done. Would you say that's accurate and from your perspective that that team, it kind of makes your job easier or harder? I gather that it makes it easier, but 100% no.

Very easy answer there. If I didn't have my team, I couldn't. Do my job.

Really? So then the reasons for overload are I ultimately want to want to get a point blank answer of like, the overload is caused by all these things, but maybe simply just too much to do. Is there just too many things to do? I wouldn't want to say directly if it is or not. What I would like to say is perhaps I need to take a step back and really see what my workload should entail, really see what my priorities should be.

Am I including too much in my day? Am I creating busy work or whatever? That's really that I think would better determine the answer. Short answer. Yeah.

Probably a way people can sometimes get overloaded is actually by putting their fingers into places that really isn't even their job. Right. But it can be easy to say, oh, well, I really need this thing done.

Right. Right. Whatever that is.

I really need this document written up, but it's only going to take me a couple of hours. I'll just do it. In the meantime, you've gotten four phone calls and three meetings set up and you never actually completed the document that you're going to do, which you shouldn't have been writing in the first place.

And all in the name of trying to do your job better and more completely. Right, right. I'm just speaking from experience because it's amazing how relatable that statement is because that's me to a fault, and I know I've gotten better than that.

I know I've improved on that. Prior to that, it was 100% stepping over the dollar to pick up the dime. Right.

I got to get this document pushed out. Meanwhile, you missed four leads because you didn't answer your phone. So learning how to prioritize and manage time, that's ultimately what it can come down to.

However, I do think a massive proponent to that is clearly articulating what your role is and what it includes. Okay, well, I have an idea. What if we made another podcast on what roles are and what they should be entailed as how they should be described prioritizing time.

And the third one was time management. Prioritizing and scope of work. Scope of work, yeah, absolutely.

Let's do it. Okay.