Organising yourself and managing your time
In this section you will read more about strategies for reducing stress at work through organising yourself, managing your time and developing stress prevention mechanisms.
There is an obvious need for some degree of order in the workplace; forgetting meetings or turning up late, or failing to deliver what you have promised can be guaranteed to make your own life more difficult as well as causing problems for those around you. We all vary in our need to be ordered and to plan meticulously – you can probably think of individuals who work best under pressure and who for that reason leave things to the last minute. Nonetheless, you will make life smoother and probably less stressful if you create systems for yourself which will help you to plan what you will do in the future and to record what you have done and what you have promised to do.
Planning what you will do can take the form of a schedule (or plan) which sets out what you will do and by when, and for a complicated project this is essential. You will certainly need to keep a diary, and if you keep an electronic diary which others can access you will need to think about how to keep control of it. You may also find it helpful to keep a daily to do list. If you complete this before you leave work at the end of the day, it may help you to stop thinking about work after you have left, knowing that you have a record to refer to on your return.
In a busy working life you may also need to keep records of what has been said and agreed. Many meetings will be formally minuted, but the myriad of informal meetings and snatched conversations will not be and can be very easily forgotten. A simple way to keep your own records is to type them into a portable computer. Alternatively, make notes in a daybook – this is simply a good size notebook with dated entries so you can go back and remind yourself of what has been said or agreed.
These simple techniques can also help you to manage your time. More fundamentally though, managing your time means directing your energies towards those things which matter most, rather than those which matter less. Cameron (2008) gives this advice:
Direct your time appropriately i.e. towards the things which are most important.
Direct your energy efficiently i.e. maximise your achievements for time and energy expended.
Stop wasting time.
Long hours and intensification of work are important causes of work-related stress and this trend is far from stabilising (CIPD, 2013).
Activity 3 Prioritising your workload
This activity is intended to help you to differentiate between the key aspects of your role from the less important, and to evaluate whether the way you allocate your time is the most effective one. You should now consider and make notes on the following questions:
- What are your most important tasks in your current role?
- Are these the tasks which take up most of your time?
Discussion
Your answers to these questions should have helped you to evaluate your priorities at work and perhaps also suggested ideas about how to improve your time management. They may also have given you some new insights into how to address some of the stressors you identified in the self-audits you carried out in Activity 2.