How to Cope With Overwhelm in the Lab: Taming Your Inbox

Look around you in your lab, your institution, and even in the world in general and you’ll see how much we all gravitate towards stress and overwhelm. Stress is just the workplace norm. Overwhelm means you are working “hard enough”. Being so occupied that you are frantically buzzing around from one task to another means that your work matters, you are a doer and you are a vital cog in the machine. I say that’s rubbish. Especially if you are a scientist. Science is about creativity, logic and clear thinking. And it is very difficult to be creative, logical, or think clearly when you are stacked up to the eyeballs with “todos”, emails and meetings. To be creative, logical and to think clearly you need organization, space and peace. In this Bioscience Mastery Bite, Nick Oswald and Karen O’Hanlon Cohrt discuss how to ensure that your “inboxes” – that is email, phone calls, SMS’s, meetings, bosses, your own ideas… anything that is competing for your awareness – take up less of your focus so that you have more time and space to do fantastic, calm science. Hit play below to listen in. This post was originally posted in the Bioscience Mastery Academy blog.