Is it possible to have a schedule full of deadlines, meet the deadlines, and actually improve your health and well-being in the process?
Yes! Deadlines are not the problem--it's how we handle them that determines our stress level. You can actually increase your energy and confidence under a deadline, but only if you know how to work with time, rather than struggle or race against it.
A Guide to Exercises and Writings on Dealing with Deadline Pressure
If you are experiencing time pressures and you have not fairly clearly identified your major personal and professional objectives, identified some steps to achieve those objectives, assigned priorities to those steps, and organized and scheduled such steps recently, the lack of clarity on these values and long-term and short-term goals will almost certainly add confusion and pressure to any task you are now involved in. You should consider doing these conventional time management practices soon, if not right away, particularly if you have felt chronic time pressure (which could result partly from not doing these practices). On the other hand, if you are currently on a crash project and cannot do such planning now, go to the deadline pressure exercises and readings below.
If you simply want to do something to change the pressure, choose one of these exercises:
- Balance Your Breathing immediately transforms time pressure and anxiety
- Identify Pressuring Emotions helps identify situational feelings contributing to pressure
- Relieve Your Tension is a physical isometric exercise useful to relieve stress and pressure
- Concentrate Your Energies discusses the natural antidote to pressure resulting from resisting what we're doing
- Turn Time Around relieves pressure by turning our 'normal' temporal perspective around
- Evoke a Timeless Experience helps identify favorite activities to evoke peak, timeless experiences
- Clock Watching can show the difference between clock time and our sense of time passing
- Exaggerate the Pressure Perspective brings awareness to the 'pressure perspective'
If you'd like to read something as a first step, try "The Qualities of Deadline Pressure Scenarios," and then "Where Does Time Pressure Come From?" Then choose one of the exercises above.
Click here for purchase information on audiocassettes on "Taking the Pressure Out of Deadlines."
Additional reading: "Gambling with Deadline Pressure." For a mock work practice dealing with deadline pressures, try the Card Sorting Exercise, which is discussed in "Gambling with Deadline Pressure." For an exploration of the typical way we plan and its limitations--including how it intensifies pressure--read "Different Perspectives of Planning."
Note: If you have questions or comments about these exercises
or readings, please send
email to or call Steve Randall at 510-303-1035.
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