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Feel like you are drowning at work? Susan M. Heathfield shares five suggestions to help you manage stress at work.
Control time allocation and goals
Setting realistic goals for your day and year helps you feel directed and in control. Goals give you a yardstick against which you can measure every time commitment.
Scheduling more than you can handle is a great stressor. Not only are you stressed trying to handle your commitments, you are stressed just thinking about them. If you are experiencing overload with some activities, learn to say, no. Eliminate any activities which you don’t have to do. Carefully consider any time-based commitment you make.
Reconsider all meetings
An effective meeting serves an essential purpose — it is an opportunity to share information and/or to solve a critical problem. Meetings should only happen when interaction is required. Meetings can work to your advantage, or they can weaken your effectiveness at work. If much of your time is spent attending ineffective, time-wasting meetings, you are limiting your ability to accomplish important objectives at work.
You can’t be all things to all people – control your time
Make time for the most important commitments and take some time to figure out what these are. Time management is a systematic approach to the time of your life applied consistently.
The basis of time management is the ability to control events. A study was done some years ago that revealed symphony conductors live the longest of any professionals. Looking into this longevity, researchers concluded that in no other occupation do people have such complete control over existing events.
Make time decisions based on analysis
Take a look at how you currently divide your time. Do you get the little, unimportant things completed first because they are easy and their completion makes you feel good? Or, do you focus your efforts on the things that will really make a difference for your organisation and your life?
Events and activities fall into one of four categories.
- Not urgent and not important
- Urgent but not important
- Not urgent but important
- Urgent and important
You need to spend the majority of your time on items that fall into the last two categories.
Manage procrastination
If you are like most people, you procrastinate for three reasons:
- You don’t know how to do the task,
- You don’t like to do the task, or
- You feel indecisive about how to approach the task.
Deal with procrastination by breaking the large project into as many small, manageable, instant tasks as possible. Make a written list of every task. List the small tasks on your daily, prioritised To Do List. Reward yourself upon completion. If you do procrastinate, you’ll find that the task gets bigger and bigger and more insurmountable in your own mind. Just start.
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