Stress Management

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve covered two steps in self-mastery: thought management and habit formation. The third step to self-mastery is time management. You can’t manage yourself or your stress if you can’t manage your time. Over the past twenty years, time management has evolved into a complex system of list making, prioritizing, and goal setting. You may be using a “time management system” that is based on these principles such as a Day Runner, or Day Timer. These systems are great for managing time, but there’s a bit of a hidden flaw in them when it comes to managing stress. They can lead you right down the road to burnout.

If you already use one of these systems, have you ever noticed how your daily list keeps getting longer and longer and you never seem to cross off all the things on your to-do list. These systems may make you more efficient, but in the long run they don’t necessarily make you more effective. Doing everything quickly isn’t nearly as important as doing the right thing at a reasonable pace.

In order to manage time and stress, you need a system that puts planning ahead of productivity. Productivity is often over-rated, and planning is usually under-rated. For example, if you were a widget manufacturer, finding new ways to make your workers more productive might seem more important than planning to attend a seminar on the future of widgets. But if you’re still making widgets, when everyone is demanding whatchamacallits, your over-emphasis on productivity and under-emphasis on planning is going to put you right out of business.

Brian Tracy, a time management expert says: Important things are seldom urgent and urgent things are seldom important. This is one of the great truths of time management. Most people spend their days running around taking care of the urgent. Answering the phone, sending packages out overnight, faxing overdue invoices, and putting out fires. While these activities may seem important, they’re usually just urgent. Important activities like, pursuing a big idea, developing a new line of business, building personal and professional skills, get put on the back burner by the urgent activities that only seem more important because they’re more pressing.

If your dream is to write a book, the most important thing you can do initially is to just write! In 1988 a young lawyer living in Mississippi with his wife and two small children had this very same dream. He had an idea for a novel about his profession, which he relentlessly pursued. He built time into his busy schedule for writing, despite the initial inconvenience. He put the important before the urgent. In seven years time that lawyer has become one of the most commercially successful authors in history, with over 50 million books in print like THE FIRM. His name is John Grisham.

Steven Covey’s book, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, has a new approach to managing time. It’s designed to put the important ahead of the urgent. He divides life’s activities into four quarters.

“Important things are seldom urgent and urgent things are seldom important.”

In Quadrant I you have activities that are both urgent and important. Crises that need to be dealt with, fires that need to be put out and deadlines that need to be met. Some overnight shipments and faxes fall into this Quadrant.

In Quadrant II you have activities that are important but not urgent. Here you have time for planning, recreation, or learning some new skill. This is where you lay the ground-work for pursuing a dream or landing a long shot account. Self improvement, stress management, exercise, time spent with your family, and building business relationships, all fall into this category.

In Quadrant III you have activities that are not important, but for whatever reason are urgent. Interruptions of every kind fall into this category. When the phone rings, or somebody needs you to fax them something right away, or a co-worker needs to ask you a question, while it may be important to them, it often times has no long-term pay-off for you.

And in Quadrant IV you have activities that are neither urgent or important. This Quadrant is full of time wasters like reading junk mail, most TV watching, some telephone calls, and computer games you play at work.

When your furnace dies on the coldest day of the year, that’s quadrant I. Replacing it is both urgent and important. When your furnace is getting old, it’s important to replace eventually, but not urgent. So you plan on replacing it at a time when you can live without it. That’s Quadrant II. After the installation, a furnace company representative comes knocking at your time to ask you how it went. Even if the service went fine, you still have to answer the door - that’s urgent. But it’s not necessarily important to talk to him. That’s Quadrant III. If you get another company’s sales brochure in the mail about furnaces a few days later, and you spend twenty minutes looking at it, that activity is neither urgent or important. That’s quadrant IV.

While the activities in quadrant I may seem like the most important, if you spend too much time in this quadrant, eventually you’ll burnout. Too many deadlines and emergencies will wear you down. People who spend the majority of their time in quadrant I eventually bail out and escape to Quadrant IV.

Quadrant II activities revolve around planning. Planning in Quadrant II can dramatically reduce the time you’ll spend putting out fires in Quadrant I. You anticipate problems before they occur.

Let’s say you know the furnace is on it’s last legs. With a Quadrant II approach you would plan to have the furnace replaced during the summer months, when you don’t need to heat the house. With the typical Quadrant I approach, you won’t even think about the furnace until it becomes a problem. Since furnaces usually don’t break down in the summer, chances are you’ll end up replacing it in the winter when you need it most. This approach may leave you stressed, inconvenienced, and uncomfortable.

And if your pipes burst, you’re going to wish you had planned ahead and replaced the furnace in the summer when it was only important. Ultimately, time spent in Quadrant II saves you time and money in the long run.

At first, detailed planning and other Quadrant II activities seem like an added burden. So where do you find the time? Here’s an easy way to find an extra hour in every day. Turn off the TV an hour earlier than normal and go to bed. Shift this extra hour to the morning to plan, workout and improve your personal and professional skills. You borrow time for Quadrant II activities from Quadrant IV.

Quadrant II puts a much greater emphasis on planning. We plan where we want to be in a week, in a month, in a year, in five years, and so on. In Quadrant II, we envision the mountain we most want to climb. We break down the ascent into simple steps. And finally, we make the time to take at least one step every day.

The best way to start this process is to work backwards from the goal. It’s a lot easier to imagine yourself on the summit of Mt. Everest, than it is to imagine all the things you would have to do to get there. That’s why you begin with the end. Once you know where you’re going, you can figure out the easiest way to get there. Break it down into simple steps by asking yourself questions like: what is the very first thing you would do if you wanted to climb Mt. Everest. Perhaps you would go to the library and find a book. What would the very next thing be, and the next thing, and so on. You just keep going on this way until you’re standing on the top of that summit.

Breaking large tasks into small steps is a significant part of Quadrant II planning. Don’t underestimate the value of this all-important skill. You sap the stress right out of an overwhelming task when you break it down into simple steps. For example, writing a 300 page book, in less than a year, sounds like a huge undertaking. But writing one page per day sounds manageable. This is how dreams become a reality: Choosing an important objective, breaking it down into steps, and taking at least one step every day.

Give yourself 60-90 minutes of uninterrupted time for your Quadrant II activities, at least five days per week. This should be enough time to move you down the path toward your goal, at least one step. As the saying goes, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Quadrant II activities gives your life purpose, meaning and direction. With this approach to time management you’ll be more organized and feel more in control. There’s just nothing like planning and pursuing something that’s really important to you. Just knowing that you’re taking steps every day toward your goal will give you an immediate sense of satisfaction. And as the story of John Grisham confirms, the long-term payoff from setting aside this time every day can be surprising.

Now that you are in control lets look at exercise as a stress outlet. Exercise can bring your body back into a natural balance by releasing the chemicals that are built-up during stressful events. There are three primary categories of exercise: aerobic exercise, stretching exercise, and toning exercise. Aerobic exercises are repetitive, rhythmic and varied, and they utilize your large muscle groups in your body, especially your legs and arms. Stretching exercises promote flexibility and joint mobility. Toning exercises increases muscle strength.[i]

I ran across an exercise that combines all three exercises into one. It is called Synergize and here is how it goes.[ii]

1^st—Clasp hands with fingers pulling away from each other in front of you at shoulder height

—Press fingers together creating a arch, arms out in front at shoulder height. Do the same as above and add facial exercises to it by making a fish faces: as you breathe in pucker fish face, as you breathe out blow fish face

2^nd--Clasp hands with fingers pulling away from each other in front of you at below the waist level

--do the twists as above & add facial exercises: as you breathe in smile big, as you breathe out frown big

3^rd-- Clasp hands with fingers pulling away from each other in front of you lifting your arms over your head

--do the twists as above & add facial exercises: as you breathe in PiePie face to the right, as you breathe out Piepie face to the left

[i] Martha Davis, Elisabeth Robbins Eshelman, & Matthew McKay, The Relaxation & Stress Reduction Workbook, 4^th Edition. New Harbinger Oakland, 1995. Pp. 251-252.

[ii] Holmequist, Synergize for Your Spine.