Situation: hypervigilance

On Monday, I have been away from work for some period of time. I was unwell through the week and lots of things were going on. I had to prioritise my health and so I let colleagues deal with certain issues and not me.

Upon my return I found out that there were some issues which needed my immediate attention and I knew from the news on Sunday that there was going to be a major news story.

What I felt was a sense of negativity. I felt like I was imagining the worst possible situations. As it happened, many of these worst situations happened and thinking about them enabled me to create detailed contingency plans. I did however have an overly negative assessment of situations: I did not account for the fact that colleagues were supportive and that other people around the organisation recognised that my department was being stretched beyond a capacity they would be able to deal with.

There were several interrelated issues that all were concurrent with each other. They were all individual problems yet were connected with each other. I had misread an email on sunday night which meant that one situation was not as bad as I originally interpreted.

One of the ways I dealt with the problems was to take a few high level approaches:

• Avoid strategic (top down) thinking, stop trying to model the situation and think on the ground and on your feet, dealing with each individual situation as it comes. It will take too much time to calculate the solutions of each individual problem as a single abstract problem, and will take too much time to create a bigger picture of what's going on (important for financial compliance, due dilligence etc). the issue was fundamentally : recursive function vs dynamic functioning (bottom up)
• Maximise vs satisfice
• Here and now vs. how things should be

During this situation I had a few realisations:

I need to take myself away from this situation as soon as it's resolved. I need to relax or spend some time away. I need to go to the gym for a bit and do a pump. It is important to distinguish acceptable behaviour from unacceptable and unsocial behaviour. In this high pressure situation it was difficult to identify this. It was also evident from colleagues that I was under pressure. This potentially gave the impression that the situation was not under control.