Work can be stressful enough with added workloads; they can increase pressure and make you feel overwhelmed. However, there are ways to effectively manage your workload and make sure it doesn’t impact you or your personal life.
- Prioritizing
One of the most important things to do when you have a heavy workload is prioritizing your work and working out which deadlines are the most important.
Organization and prioritization are great ways to reduce stress as you can set clear deadlines and order how you work. It is important to create a list of everything which needs doing and sectioning this off into days; this allows for a daily goal that you can consistently monitor the progress of. Creating a daily list for yourself can break up the workload, so it seems much more achievable. It is important to create priorities within this list if you don’t manage to achieve everything on your list. You must always be realistic when creating lists; you need to make sure you don’t try to do too much and then feel overwhelmed by the lack of progress, as this often leads to you getting nothing done. You need to ensure that the goals you set are both measurable and achievable to stop you from feeling disheartened or lose motivation.
- Boundaries
It is important to set yourself clear boundaries which you can follow, nothing too unrealistic, just something which will help to improve and keep the focus on other aspects of your life. Your personal life should never suffer because of your workload; you should never feel like work impacts your personal life. You need to ensure that you set a clear boundary that you won’t cross regarding what time you will work. Whether you are self-employed or work from home, an increasing workload can slowly creep into your evenings as that “one more email” often turns into you spending all evening working. It can be effortless for boundaries to become blurred, but you mustn’t cross them once you set these boundaries; otherwise, you can start to feel the stress creeping in and your mind being consumed with work. Whether it’s a boundary regarding what time you finish working or a boundary where you stop checking your emails, you need to stick by it and make sure it is cemented to not become too stressed out by it.
- Ease
Assess whether you are actually working very efficiently; from the way you approach projects to communication skills, you must appropriately make your workload easier by developing or using your skills to the best of your potential. Any way to make your workload easier is great, so do some research and see what you can apply to your workload and utilize the tools available to you.
