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“I’m so stressed!”
We hear this a lot today - faster deadlines, impatient customers, and bosses who are never satisfied.
But are we stressed? Wikipedia describes occupational stress as a “chronic condition related to one's job. It can be managed by understanding the stressful conditions at work and taking steps to remediate those conditions.”
If you let stress perpetuate and take over your life, it begins to impact your emotional well-being, physical health, and job performance. Granted, there are times at work when things can become crazy — emergencies, mistakes, miscommunication — when we might encounter temporary stress, but that’s normal.
In business, there are three areas we can investigate to alleviate stress: Organization, Communication, and Delegation.
ORGANIZATION
Are you organized? Are you more of a reactive or proactive manager? Do you plan your day, your week/month/quarter? Is your desk, files, note-taking, email inbox, and projects neat and organized or messy and haphazard?
Many of my clients who encounter stress usually have bad organizational habits. They forget things and miss deadlines and meetings, and everyone sees it, which compounds the pressure they are feeling.
You might have many built-in bad organizational habits that contribute to your overall stress. Step back, reviewing, and changing your organizational behavior is one way to minimize stress.
This is a great resource to start doing just that.
COMMUNICATION
Have you built suitable communication structures around you? With upper management, your peers, and your team? Vendors and clients also play a part in the overall health of our communication.
A lot of workplace stress starts with your boss. Do you have regular status meetings with them? Do you give them a good overview of all your projects and responsibilities? Most people think their boss follows everything they do — they’re wrong. It’s critical to regularly keep them in the loop on all of your most important activities, or you will fall off their radar. Then what happens? They dump even more stuff on you. Read this.
You have to learn the art of saying ‘NO’ with peers. Too often, we get corralled into different projects, activities, committees, and meetings that take up our precious time and add to our stress levels. If this is a problem, read this.
Stop being a doormat and start communicating more effectively.
DELEGATION
Most people suck at delegation — they always fall back on these phrases (these are actual comments from clients):
“It’s easier if I just do it myself,” or “It won’t get done the way I want it,” or “It doesn’t look good if I delegate all of my work away.”
Insufficient delegation is a significant contributor to your stress level. You try to hoard and keep all the work on your desk while you have many open avenues to delegate. Read this.
If you regularly encounter high-stress levels in your life, seek help. But I would suggest trying one or more of these work-release-valves first.