Chaos of Overreaction

"There is no chaos in the world except the chaos created by our mind."
Nisargadatta Maharaj
 
Imagine that instead of washing five T-shirts at once in one washing machine, you decide to run each T-shirt separately. You can wash T-shirts after T-shirts all day, be terribly busy, waste a lot of energy, but you have only five T-shirts washed with five washing cycles instead of one.
 
Something like this happens in teams that have zero tolerance for the "inaction" of planning. When there is no "real" work, but only talking about what needs to be done. In such teams, hustle, even an artificial one, is elevated to an internal cult.
 
In such an atmosphere, people are frequently in a hurry, and they are always late for something. They jump from meeting to meeting. They have a constant hamster heartbeat. They are startled by every deadline and even more by every new emergency that may be more urgent than the previous one.
 
Panic and sprinting between urgent tasks create the illusion that big and important things are being developed. But at the end of the day - there are only five washed T-shirts.
 
You can easily recognize the chaos of overreaction. First, if you notice that you are developing a hamster heartbeat yourself, you are parking and ignoring the new opportunities rather than exploring or discussing them.
 
Second, if people in your office run between meeting rooms, forget their laptops at other people's desks, spill their coffee more and more often, and finally, they always open their meetings with "there's not enough time for anything."
 
By these signals, you will recognize that you have a chaos of overreaction. But what triggers it? Three primary reasons start it:
 
- lack of clear priorities;
- improper resource planning;
- inappropriate people in critical places.
 
The reasons may be spin-offs of these or different. But the total responsibility for overcoming this chaos of overreaction lies with the manager. To clear this chaos from his own daily life. To support the people in his teams in this direction. Or even to find a third alternative that comes from the teams themselves.