Stress for Dummies

Most days at work anyone that seems me would describe me as the furthest point from stress that you could possibly be. I’m good, no… I’m great at managing my daily tasks into a workflow that doesn’t cause stress. However…, right now, ..this very moment, I feel stress.

I would describe this stress as the impending doom deriving from knowledge that someone else has directed the forces that be to focus on you as to why a project is not completed, … or not well underway. Simply put, when something isn’t done in a timely manner, generally nobody wants to be at the end of the proverbial finger. But, someone will be, and this is where this ‘Stress for Dummies’ lesson begins:

1) Make sure that as a project progresses, even if you aren’t on the action items list (yes, we have those), that you communicate along the way to everyone that is part of the project.

You communicate to everyone on the list because everyone needs to know what is going on, especially if their portion of the project is dependent upon something you’re responsible for. In my case, I wasn’t communicated to. There were two meetings, one of which I was told about to late to make. The other, I was out of the office that day. I was emailed one set of meeting notes, and I didn’t have any actions items with my name on them. Granted, you have to be careful here. Just because someone didn’t list an action item that you would end up owning doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t know that it was missing, and recommended to the project leader that you should be doing this. It’s a very tricky business managing stress.

2) If you observe that the appropriate requests to complete a project that involve your time and resources have not been communicated to you or even thought of, make sure that you either a)take on the initiative to be ‘brigher’ than the project manager and get your time scheduled for the task before they know they need it (not something I excel at), or b) prepare a defense list that covers all of the reasons why you havn’t done item a).

I’m very good at preparing the list above. However, there are others here that are even better than me at displacing responsibility in this company when:

This concludes today’s lesson. Thank you for your time.