ChrisPosterous

How can people reduce stress in their jobs?

The stress will mainly come from insecurity about keeping your agreements, many of which are with other people but all of which are with yourself. The key is to capture, clarify, define, manage, and constantly renegotiate those agreements. It means staying organized objectively with all the moving parts in front of you in some trusted system, always available for review and regrouping, without overly structuring the plan (everything changes!) Most professionals have between thirty and a hundred projects with almost two hundred next actions associated with them, at any point in time. And any of that kept solely in your head creates stress, because psychic RAM is a crappy office with limited space! Write everything down, and decide the next physical action on any part that can have forward motion made on it. Keep all that in a trusted system, and keep it in front of your mind as often as you need, to get this stuff off your mind and moving productively. There is usually an inverse proportion to the amount something is on your mind and the amount it’s getting done.

Food For Thought
(Reprinted from an interview with David Allen on the topic of stress)

copyright David Allen