How to Deal with the Stresses and Anxieties in Today's IT Industry

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Deal with the Stresses and Anxieties in Today's IT Industry

    Stan Popovich is the author of www.managingfear.com

  • All this is good advice for managing pressure that's coming your way, but it's also well worth remembering that quite often pressure that people are trying to apply isn't yours to accept. It's good to be someone who takes ownership of a problem, but this can still be overdone, and we all have to be slopey-shouldered once in a while.

    Perhaps the fundamental point is that your employer is the business, not a particular manager within that business. The business decides how much it is prepared to spend on IT, and accepts this sets a certain level of service. In short, some things will always have to be dropped. Requests for your services may be hugely important to the person requesting, but if they're not important enough to the business to hit your priority list, that's the business's problem, not yours. Obviously, you have to communicate this back to the requester, but you needn't accept the stress of being squeezed between what someone wants and what the business is prepared to pay for.

    Semper in excretia, suus solum profundum variat

  • I was really happy to see this post. As a DBA I live in constant fear that I'm going to get the call that a mission critical application is down due to a DB being off-line. Seeing this post confirms that I'm not alone. Two important points that I feel are really important:

    1.Challenge your negative thinking

    2.Practice

    Sometimes the highest expectations we put on ourselves. There is nothing wrong with high expectations; just make sure they are possible (and realistic).

    Thanks Stanley!

  • ...overwhelms you with a lot of anxiety...

    I'm not overwhelmed with anxiety, I'm overwhelmed with too much work. 😛

  • There's a book, The Problems of Work, and a course based on it, The Personal Efficiency Course, that cover techniques for all of these things, and details on tested and proven methods for handling stress, etc. The book was published in the '50s, and it has a proven track record in this area (that is, it's not some current fad or anything like that).

    - Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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    "Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon

  • I do some of my best work under stress. It causes me to focus and complete the project. Then, I get satisfaction from the completion. I rarely find that I have too much stress. But, I tend to procrastinate without at least a little stress.

  • I think management of stress and the methods described in this editorial can be applied to more than just the computer field. A little stress is good. Too much stress is bad for your health. Management of that little stress can help prevent it from becoming too much stress.

    Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
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