Monday, 16 July 2007

Reflections on stress

Today was a long hard slog. But very productive.

Anne and Vanessa have worked very hard on Basis. I do tell them how appreciative and grateful I am. But I suspect they might be a bit tired of hearing me say it. So on the way in this morning, I stopped off to buy them some flowers and chocolates. Rather a superficial gesture. And a dangerous precedent. But at least it is an unequivocal public statement of appreciation; and I think that itself will be appreciated.

After delivering up my gifts (both thankfully took the gesture as it was intended) I caught up on four days of incoming e-mails. Or at least I answered a few e-mails and put little red flags on lots of others, which at least gave me a sense of having achieved something.

One remarkable e-mail was from a CEO in a local charity who had resigned because of work pressures. It is always a terrible shame when the charity sector leeches talent in this way. Perhaps I will consult with people over creating a Chief Officers group in Watford.

I also spent some time thinking through last week’s HIC meetings and decided to complete my allotted task sooner rather than later. My task was to create a representation of a possible future structure for HIC. Over the weekend I showed a draft to my wife and sons who were horrified at its complexity. Some rather disparaging remarks were made. So this morning I simplified and reworked the diagram. It’s so much easier to get these things out of the way while they are still fresh in your mind.

In the afternoon, I sorted out July’s salaries and met with Maria. Then it was back to our second stage Basis application / business plan. Currently the bane of my life. By the time I surfaced from this work, it was gone 7:00 pm.

Rather reluctantly (as I was making good progress on the business plan) I set Basis aside to prepare papers etc for Thursday’s trustees’ meeting. Personally, I like to receive papers a week in advance of a meeting, and this is perfectly reasonable. But I had at least written to trustees last week advising that I would e-mail the papers on Monday. Given current circumstances here that’s not too bad.

Preparing the papers took a few hours. Twice our network crashed making things take longer than they should. Then I had to use my web-mail account to mail to one trustee as AOL has started rejecting e-mails from watfordcvs.net. Then I printed off a set of papers to hand deliver to our one trustee with no e-mail. Then I mailed a few requests to Maria for the morning (I will be at a meeting in Stevenage).

I arrived home just after midnight. Jackie was sound asleep. She is so wonderful and I do love her so.

Work pressures are a difficult thing. A larger workload doesn’t necessarily equate to more stress. I like to relax, but nothing stresses me so much as enforced idleness. For me, the two other major sources of stress are feeling out of control (not being able to find things, filing to be done, computers crashing) and fear of failure (missed deadlines, not delivering on promises).

A final source of stress can be people: personal conflicts, power games, poor communication, etc. It is inevitable that sometimes we buffet up against one another. But this is not stressful if there is fundamental respect and goodwill. And these, I think, are what abound at Watford CVS. All staff and all trustees respect each other, support each other, and appreciate each other’s contributions. And this is worth any number of stratagems and policies on time management and stress management. Even after a sixteen hour working day.

But of course there may be rather less respect and goodwill if we don't get our Basis bid and our audit completed on time!