Dealing with time and pressure

I haven't wrote anything for over a month.

What happened is that I had to take over a couple of projects, on top of those who were already on my list. Given the new tasks, and some bump on the road, left very little time to anything else.

I'm not a person who gets pressured very easily, but yet I've found this last period to be a bit stressed.

This post is not about complaining of tough time, but to describe some insights I had during this past month.

I participated in a "time management course" conducted in my company by Skiliks (details about the course can be found here, to who ever is interested).

In the course, I realized that I do mange time, in a reasonable manner, but yet I have many things to improve.

As an example, dealing with e-mails:
We all use Outlook or some other organizer. When I work, I'm using my laptop for documents' writing, development, etc. When e-mails gets in, Outlook pops out this announcement, saying I have a new e-mail, the title and some other details. Like this one here:

 
The thing is, that when you see that, your eyes are going to that corner automatically. Furthermore, you tend to read the title. Every now and then, the title is intriguing enough, so you stop what you were doing, and read the entire mail. Once you there, you might also answer, or read other mails, and your original task is forgotten.

To solve that, I just switched this feature off ("Tools" -> "Options" -> "E-Mail Options" -> "Advanced E-Mail Options" and un-check "Display a new mail desktop alert").

Another thing about e-mails is to set a time for answering them, or just dealing with them. It is much easier to have an hour (more or less) to just deal with everything. I alos informed my cotacts that e-mails will be answered in the morning or afternoon, but not immidiatly. So far it works...

I found this article on "Microsoft @ Work" site, 4 ways to take control of your e-mail Inbox, it is worth reading.

Anther tip I figured is about coffee breaks.

First of all, those are very important. It gives you some time to breath, to relax, and so on.

However, if you'd bring yourself a bottle of water, you will find out that you save a lot of time, otherwise wasted, bringing 10 cups of water...

The course gave me many other tips, so I recommend you take it, if you can.
I can't cover everything here, there isn't enough space here