Are you experiencing stress at work? Want to learn more about what causes stress and the impact of stress on people at work? First, you should start by exploring where and how your workplace stress is coming from.

Once you understand the origin of your workplace stress, use these five suggestions to help you manage it. Effective stress management is not easy and requires time and practice. But developing stress management skills is important for your overall health and well-being.

Set realistic goals and time frames for yourself. Remember the Alice in Wonderland Syndrome from the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Alice is walking in a woods. She comes to a fork in the road. Not knowing which way to go, she asks the Cheshire Cat:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to, said the cat.
“I don’t much care where, said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter, said the cat.
“—so long as I get somewhere, Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that, said the Cat, if you only walk long enough.”

Do you feel this way some days? Setting realistic goals for your day and year helps you feel directed and in control. Goals give you a yardstick against which you can measure every time commitment. And, walking long enough is a stress producer, not a stress management tool.

Scheduling more than you can handle is a great stressor. Not only are you stressed trying to handle your commitments, you are stressed just thinking about them. If you are experiencing overload with some activities, learn to say, “no.” Eliminate any activities which you don’t have to do. Carefully consider any time-based commitment you make.

Use an electronic planner to schedule each goal and activity you commit to accomplishing, not just your appointments. If that report will take two hours to write, schedule the two hours just as you would a meeting. If reading and responding to email take an hour per day, schedule the hour.

2. Reconsider All Meetings

Why hold meetings in the first place? An effective meeting serves an essential purpose — it is an opportunity to share information and/or to solve a critical problem. Meetings should only happen when interaction is required. Meetings can work to your advantage, or they can weaken your effectiveness at work. If much of your time is spent attending ineffective, time-wasting meetings, you are limiting your ability to accomplish important objectives at work.

The Wall Street Journal quoted a study that estimated American managers could save 80 percent of the time they currently waste in meetings if they did two things: start and end meetings on time and follow an agenda.

3. You Can’t Be All Things to All People – Control Your Time

Something has to give. Make time for the most important commitments and take some time to figure out what these are. Time management is a systematic approach to the time of your life applied consistently.

The basis of time management is the ability to control events. A study was done some years ago that revealed symphony conductors live the longest of any professionals. Looking into this longevity, researchers concluded that in no other occupation do people have such complete control over existing events.

In his book, Time Power, Dr. Charles Hobbes suggests that there are five categories of events:

• Events you think you cannot control, and you can’t.
• Events you think you cannot control, but you can.
• Events you think you can control, but you can’t.
• Events you think you can control, but you don’t.
• Events you think you can control, and you can.

There are two major issues about control:

• Each of us is really in control and in charge of more events than we generally like to acknowledge.
• Some things are uncontrollable. Trying to control uncontrollables is a key cause of stress and unhappiness.