As promised already long ago, my experience on how the stress reduction works out.
The time management part works our really well. After my summer holiday, I spend 2 days to put all the counters to 0: mail counters (we have 4 different types of mails) and todo’s. It’s a big change to be able to say, at some point in the day, that the complete backlog is gone !
Setting the counters to 0 doesn’t work every day. But that doesn’t matter that much anymore. I know I can get them down and that’s what matters. Also, having a backlog is not that important. While I was in India, I hardly read any mails. Most of the people didn’t even notice that. So that gave me the insight that I don’t need to react right away !
Working with breaks during the day is more difficult. I need to be more strict at taking the power naps since these help me a lot to maintain energy levels in the afternoon. One of the main problems there is balancing work/life. Between helping out in taking the kids to school and ensuring some time during the evenings, I tend to skip this 20-30 minutes.
The micro-breaks are even more difficult. It’s no problem when I’m working on my own at my desk. But it’s difficult to keep it up when being in a phone call or, even worst, a meeting. The main issue here is that other people don’t follow it which makes it awkward to do.
Another thing that’s helping me out a lot is delegating tasks to other people. Because the designation of people have been better written out, it makes it easier for me to pass work to them because it’s clear now what’s expected from them. Before that, there was no real clarity.
This obviously helps me out because I have to take up less work. It also helps out my direct colleagues because this enables them to grow in their job. Thirdly it helps out other colleagues since they get quicker responses and get direct input from the experts. Win-win all over 😉
By gaining this time from processing mails and working on things that others should actually have taken up, I end up having more time to work on things that give me energy. And that’s the best part of it all.
There are still days where I come home a bit more tired or dispirited. But they are much less frequent that, say, a year ago.
Now I just have guard all of this and say NO when they ask me to do things that would endanger this evolution. No Peter Principle for me.
This is the final (?) part of my “40 days without stress” series. You can start from the beginning.
