Are you feeling stressed out by your busy schedule?

Do you want some tips to help you regain a sense of peace and balance in your schedule?

You take a quick glance at your calendar when it finally hits you.

You’re tired, tense, and overworked.

Your schedule is stressing you out!

What should you do?

Is it time to throw all of your calendar appointments out the window?

Or should you just continue to power through your already jam-packed schedule?

In this post, you’ll find a few middle-of-the-road tips to help you ease off the accelerator, and have a more pleasant journey when it comes to managing your schedule.

Ask for help or assistance.

As much as we like to believe we can do it all by ourselves, all the time, we can’t.

You can only physically do so much in any given day!

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with asking for help when you need it.

If your schedule is suffering, you might want to put your pride to the side, and ask for help.

Maybe you have an assistant at work who’s being underutilized; could they help you put together that massive report?

How about hiring a high school or college student to help you with yard work?

What about making use of your supermarket’s grocery delivery service?

Cut out unnecessary meetings and appointments.

You’ve been invited to yet another voluntary meeting at work.

You have your doubts about attending the meeting, and the material to be covered isn’t new

It doesn’t affect your department, and besides, you have a 5 P.M. deadline to meet.

Should you accept or decline the meeting?

While you may feel compelled to attend a meeting just because you were invited, you don’t have to attend every single one.

Refrain from automatically saying “yes” to any meeting, or appointment invitation.

Be frank and ask yourself: “Do I really need to attend this meeting?”

You should also weed out any appointments that have outgrown their use, for example, weekly status meetings for a project that has been completed weeks ago.

Take a well-deserved break.

When’s the last time you took a real break from work and personal commitments?

Sorry, meals and coffee breaks don’t count.

Rather, this is a full break from whatever it is you are working on at the moment; no phone calls, no email, no texts, and most certainly, no work.

We all need time to unwind, relax, and daydream.

If you haven’t had true break in a couple of weeks, you should strongly consider taking one.

Disconnect from digital devices over the weekend, go on a weekend trip to a nearby city or town, or just lounge around at home and binge on your favorite TV shows and movies.

How about you? Do you ever feel stressed out about your schedule? What strategies do you use to cope with a busier than usual calendar? Join the conversation and leave a comment below!