Manage Your Time to Reduce Your Stress

Book excerpt: How often do you think to yourself "So much to do and so little time"? Rita Emmett can not give you more minutes in an hour or more hours in a day, but she does offer help with the "so much to do" part. The key is not time management but "stuff" management--all those things to do, people to see, commitments and obligations to fulfill. And mismanaging all that to-do stuff is what leads to stress. We often have little control over the demands made upon us, yet we can control our reaction or response. That's where the management of stress must start. Stress is neither good nor bad: your response to it is what can be harmful. In Rita Emmett's signature style that combines quick, easy-to-digest tips and infectious good humor, Manage Your Time to Reduce Your Stress gives readers positive ways to handle stress; examines how stress impacts our physical, mental, and emotional health; how to clarify your values and prioritize activities based on what is important. Spending time doing things that are incongruent with your values makes you feel frustrated and stressed out. Striving for perfection, being overly competitive, and job insecurity are some of the other reasons you feel overburdened and overwhelmed. Rita Emmett draws on the stories of many people who have e-mailed or written her or spoken to her after her seminars; readers will identify not only with their problems but can find common ground in Rita's strategies that have worked for them.