Avoiding Stress at Work by Setting Boundaries

 
Everyone experiences stress due to work from time to time, but if you experience high levels of anxiety due to your workload on a regular basis, it can affect both your mental and physical health, leaving you feeling depressed, tired and prone to illness. However, there are a few things that you can do to help reduce your daily stress levels, making you feel happier and healthier, without too much effort. This week we’re going to look at the importance of setting boundaries.
Without boundaries, the world would be in total chaos! With that it mind, you would think that it would go without saying, that you should set boundaries when it comes to you work life. Right?
Wrong! Far too many people (business owners often being the worst culprits) do not set boundaries when it comes to their work life. This means that they can find themselves regularly working extremely long hours, including weekends, evenings, early mornings, late nights and even on their holidays. In fact, when they actually manage to pull themselves away from actively working, they continue to worry and think about work.
This kind of attitude towards work is a recipe for disaster as far as your health is concerned. Overworked people tend to make more mistakes, be quicker to anger and more prone to illness, causing stress levels to cumulate. Not only this, without boundaries, over working can prevent you from having a good social and personal life.
When setting work boundaries it is important to be realistic, so devise a plan where you have enough time to enjoy a full social/personal life but can still all of your work tasks done. If your workload is simply too big for you to get done and have a reasonable amount of time off, then it might be a good idea to start delegating some of your work where possible. If hiring a personal assistant or increasing the workload of your current assistant is out of your price range or not simply not practical, it might be worth looking into outsourcing some of your excess work, including any overflow secretarial or admin work you may have. This can often save a significant amount of time at relatively low cost, especially when you consider that many of these companies offer 24 hour services.
Taking time off should also include turning off your phone. So it may also be worth contacting a call answering service to answer your calls and email on any important messages while you are away. This means that you won’t have to worry about missing urgent messages, but at the same time don’t get caught on the phone for less pressing work issues.
Once you have got any cover sorted out, schedule in your time off and stick to it! We’re pretty sure that taking this approach to your work/life relationship will mean that you not only enjoy your time off, but also start to enjoy the time you spend at work more too.
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