My Time and Workload Management e-learning course emphasizes that too much work is too much work – that is, everyone has a limit to how much they can get done in a given timeframe. However, some people get themselves into difficulties by taking on everything that comes their way. They feel obliged to say yes to everything even if this means they may become overloaded to the point that they risk becoming stressed and possibly practising dangerously because of that. A key skill, then, is being able to successfully negotiate our workload. If we take on more than we can reasonably cope with then we are likely to achieve far less than if we had kept our workload within manageable limits, and we also risk things going tragically wrong. Some people find it very difficult to be assertive about their workload limits, but allowing ourselves to get into that dangerous overload zone is very unwise.

‘More haste less speed’ is a well-known saying and it has more than a grain of truth to it. So many people tend to respond to pressure by rushing, and this is a dangerously counterproductive strategy. When we rush our error rate goes up significantly and our sense of control goes down significantly – and, of course, losing our sense of control is a major step in the direction of stress. What is also significant is that, when we start rushing, we start giving people the message that they are not important, that we have more pressing things to do than to listen to them and take in an interest in them. Working slightly faster than usual is one thing, rushing is quite another. If we find ourselves in a position where we feel the need to rush, that is the time to start reordering our priorities – taking our thinking up a gear, rather than letting it go down a gear by rushing.

Some people are morning people and some people are definitely not morning people. We all have our rhythms and routines that mean that we are at our best at certain times of day and far from our best at others. So, do you know when your best time of day is? If so, are you making sure that you are doing your most important work at that time of day in order to produce the best results? If not, why not try and work out when that is so that you can capitalize on it? Similarly, are you clear about when your least effective time is? If so, are you making sure that you are not making important decisions or carrying out vitally important tasks at those times? Understanding your best and worst times is an important part of self-awareness.

The idea of the value of learning from our mistakes is well established, but unfortunately many people don’t manage to get the benefit of this. That is because they adopt a defensive approach to mistakes; they see them as things to cover up or deflect attention from. Nobody is perfect and so mistakes are inevitable, so there is little point in trying to give the impression that we never make mistakes. Some mistakes can be embarrassing, but most are not unless we are trying to come across as ‘mistake proof’. Some mistakes are quite serious, but the more serious they are, the greater the scope for learning. However, that’s not to say that even small mistakes cannot produce significant learning. But, of course, no mistake will produce learning unless we are prepared to be open to learning by admitting that we are not perfect.

In any project or task we undertake, it can be very easy to get engrossed and lose focus on why we are doing it. If, however, we can make sure we don’t lose sight of the why (the purpose), we will be in a stronger position to decide on the how (the method) and put it into practice. Sadly, though, it is not uncommon for people to become so busy doing something that they forget why they are doing it. They then lose sight of how best to move forward. Clarity about why we are doing something will make us more motivated to achieve our goals and give us a more helpful picture of the possible ways of achieving them. If other people involved in the situation are clear about why we are doing something, then they will be in a stronger position to play their part in making the project a success.

How to manage a range of pressures is a challenge that we all face. A very worrying (but sadly not uncommon) scenario is when we allow home and work pressures to combine to overwhelm our coping resources. An alternative strategy is that of ‘compartmentalization’. This means training ourselves to focus on our home pressures when we are at home and our work pressures when we are at work and having a clear boundary between the two. Many people achieve this by having some sort of ritual that symbolizes the end of the working day and the return to home life – for example, by getting changed. Different rituals work for different people, but they can all play an important role in keeping our two domains separate so that we do not find ourselves in the situation where home and work pressures combine to leave us feeling stressed and ill-equipped to cope with the challenges we face.

It is now increasingly being appreciated that self-directed learning is the most effective form of learning. That is, if we are able to identify for ourselves what we want or need to learn and how we are going to learn it, we are likely to be more motivated and the learning gained will be more suited to our own specific needs. Unfortunately, though, many people adopt a passive approach to learning – they assume that it is someone else’s job to take the lead, an ‘expert’ in learning like a teacher, tutor, trainer or mentor. Of course, such people can be very helpful as guides, advisers, sources of encouragement, support and ideas, but the more control we have over our own learning, the more effective it is likely to be – and the more committed we will be to continuing to learn throughout our careers. Teachers, tutors, trainers and mentors can often provide helpful maps of the learning territory, but we need to determine our own itinerary if we are to get the best results