Stress v Busy
If you have ever been in a truly stressful situation in work then you have my sympathy. True stress is a total lack of control over a situation caused by a variety of circumstances. What causes it varies. Imagine fearing your role because of bad training. Imagine avoiding a line manager because sarcasm and humiliation are her management tools. How would it feel to know you are under threat of redundancy…how will I pay the mortgage?
Doing your daily job for which you are trained, busy and capable of is not stressful. It is simply a full day. I do wish people wouldn’t mix up stress and busy!
To help those who are feeling stressed, I offer below some tips for time management:
- Get up 15 mins before you really need to and start your first activity bang on time
- Use multi-part files to organise your work and thoughts
- Only have on your desk that which you are actually working on
- Use the last 20 minutes of your working day to plan the next day: know when you are doing what
- Learn how to handle interruptions to your day. For example, distinguish the unplanned and necessary from the simply unplanned and imposed interruption from a colleague
- Learn the art of EIR: Empathetic Interruption Replanning. For instance, a colleague pops into your work space with a genuine issue to discusss. But for you not now! Learn how to say things like,”great idea John, is 2pm a good time to discuss that more fully”. Agree time and get back to work. You showed interest, support and managed your time all in one go: EIR
- Say no. Too many times people say yes to another project, another meeting, another conversation and add to a workload they cannot currently control. So, think can I really do another thing? If faced with an emergency or unexpected work, do the following: renegotiate the deadline for existing work; ask for further resources; delegate; refer up the way and seek input into your solution for doing everything in the new timescale
- Plan….Prioritise….Persist: plan your day, plan your week, plan your month.
- Take the last half hour of your working day to make sure you have the resources and the structure of the next day planned and available. Know the first thing you need to do the next day and be ready to do it
- Prioritise: too many times we leave the more important things until it is too late or very close to deadlines. Why? Simply causes unavoidable stress
- Persist: if you start doing the planning and prioritising you cannot stop. Make it an intergral part of your life
Joe Costello is the Managing Director at Lucid
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