Staff Health: Crucial Time - Management Skill for Reducing Stress by Anders N W Lindgreen

Staff Health: Crucial Time - Management Skill for Reducing Stress
by: Anders N W Lindgreen

Procrastination is wonderful. It's like having the alarm go off in the morning, but instead of getting up your press "snooze" and go back to sleep. Eventually however, you will be running late. With procrastination you won't be late as such, maybe for deadlines, but the more damaging part of this is the guilt and anxiety that may come with it. Having such emotions on a perhaps daily basis can be detrimental to your staff health, and it's silly because it's relatively easy to deal with.

Speaking for myself, I often put things off for later when I have this overwhelming to-do list and no idea where to start. Instead of just starting in one end I do nothing and feel worse for it. Much of that is related back to poor time-management and I'll explain why. Regardless of what tasks you have, there are usually a few that you are really reluctant to begin working on because they are major, they may involve calling people you don't want to speak to or deal with situations you'd wish that others could handle for you. The majority of the guilt and anxiety come from the awareness of these super-tasks. Interestingly enough, this also makes most of the negative emotions go away once the tasks are done whether you finished your entire to-do list or not. So how can we utilise this to our advantage? Simple.

We make a list. Sure, a list is not groundbreaking by any means, but instead of feeling like we have to achieve a lot, we know exactly what that "a lot" is. Also, even if you don't finish the list, there is satisfaction in seeing ticked boxes on a list in the end of the day where you otherwise may have felt like you achieved nothing at all.

All right, the second step is to arrange the tasks and to start with the worst tasks first, the ones you rather not do. I won't lie, you won't like dealing with them and you will find plenty of excuses not to, but once they are done; the rest feels like a breeze. It's amazing! Every time I wait with the heavy tasks till last I realise how much better I would have felt and how much more productive I would have been if I were to have taken care of them sooner.

It all sounds easy and you could assume that these strategies are built in to every person, because it may be common knowledge to you. But not everyone can connect the dots like you can, so take this opportunity to exercise some great leadership and lead by example, but also offer to teach your team how to reduce their stress, guilt and anxiety. They will love you for it!