Procurement & Career Guidance
For business professionals, the end of the year can be a stressful time. It is easy to fall into a funk and lose your passion.
One way to fight the funk is to embrace your curiosity. Seek out new information, read new books, take short classes, watch movies…
But another critical step is to share what you learned with your peers, coworkers, and friends. It will help you get engaged and stay motivated.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
The key to time management is self-awareness. But don’t just take my word for it: As Erich C. Dierdorff notes at HBR, awareness, along with arrangement and adaptation, are the skills that “separate time management success from failure.” Research shows that “people struggled the most with awareness and adaptation skills where assessment scores were, on average, 24 percent lower than for arrangement skills.”
I particularly appreciated the action words used by Dierdorff: “assessment: and “adaption.”
“This evidence suggests that awareness and adaptation are not only rarer skills, but are more difficult to develop naturally without direct interventions,” writes Dierdorff. “Additionally, awareness skills were the primary driver of how well people avoided procrastination, and adaptation skills were the primary driver of how well they prioritized activities.”
Saying “no” by either not accepting commitments in the first place or by eliminating commitments that are currently on your plate is your most powerful organizational tool. It’s the equivalent of decluttering your closet before you attempt to hang everything up. By reducing the overall number of items, you make it easier to organize.
When you “declutter” from a time management perspective, you’re not only giving yourself less to fit into each day but also more time to keep the whole system maintained.
Stress comes in four primary flavors. It’s important to identify and understand which one you are feeling. First, there’s time stress. Time stress occurs when you worry about time or a lack of time. Impending deadlines often cause time stress. As a time-strapped leader, you’re no stranger to this type of stress, also called anticipatory stress. When you are concerned about an upcoming presentation or board meeting, you’re suffering from anticipatory stress. Remember Murphy’s Law? If anything can go wrong, it will.
The third type of stress, called situational stress, occurs when you feel you aren’t in control. As a leader, you may experience situational stress when your status drops or you suffer reputational damage. The final type of stress is called encounter stress. It occurs when your interactions with others cause you to feel uneasy. When you interact with a toxic co-worker, you may experience encounter stress.
It’s also important to understand whether you’re suffering from burnout or stress. Burnout occurs when stress continues for a long time. When you’re suffering from burnout, you feel tired and drained. Your immune system is affected, and you are more likely to get sick. You also feel helpless and lose motivation. Stress is less extensive. When you experience stress, you feel that too much is being demanded of you and you may experience physical effects like muscle tension and headaches, but you don’t feel empty and detached like you do when you’re experiencing burnout.
As I get older and more experienced, the adage of life being about the journey resonates with me. I am in motion and flight, but I am not pursuing a figurative or literal destination.
The question, particularly for those of us who spend a lot of time online, is how do you resist the perpetual treadmill that society and your inner saboteur (Thanks, Cody!) try to push on you to be perfect?
You say no.
As a person, as an entrepreneur, an employee, a visionary, you put your foot down.
https://www.the-future-of-commerce.com/2020/02/21/stop-chasing-perfection/