Juggling too many responsibilities can cause intense stress. You cannot operate everyday in a state of constant pressure and preserve your mental or physical health.
No matter how well you multitask and organize your time, the balancing act of handling a heavy workload while facing personal stressors (caring for a sick child or parent, overseeing costly home repairs, etc.) can push you to your limit. You need to devise a way to reduce anxiety without sacrificing productivity.
Track your goals.Following a goal-setting system can produce quick results. There are dozens of well-honed programs you can use-from software that helps you budget your time to day planners that break your day into 15-minute increments. One of the easiest systems is this three-step approach:
1. Establish about five broad categories to represent the most important areas of your work and home life. Examples: job performance, family, friends, leisure and health.- 2. Within each of your five headings, create subheadings. Examples: Subdivide family into spouse, children and parents; subdivide job performance into sales, service and quality control.
- 3. Set quantifiable goals for each subgroup over a specific time frame. Then note your deadlines for achieving those goals on your calendar.
It's True! One of three American employees is chronically overworked and 54 percent report feeling overwhelmed at some point in the last month. [DAN: This is reported in a March 2005 study released by the Families and Work Institute. I read about it on p. 105 of Crazybusy, a new book by Edward Hallowell.]
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Tip Follow the 80/20 rule to achieve more balance and productivity in your work and home life. Identify the top three responsibilities or outcomes that matter most to you. Then track how much time you devote to these three areas in a typical week. You should be spending about 80 percent of your time on those three duties. Many supervisors suffer needless stress because they divert too much of their time on trivial or extraneous matters.
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