If you are efficient, planned ahead, or lucky enough that no unpleasant surprises pop up – then life is good. Yet what if you are lagging behind and the tasks pile up? Why not throw in one or two sudden incidents into your original schedule to ruin things further? Eventually, you finish all the tasks, but the damage is done.

When things don’t work out, the toughest part to swallow may not be the tasks that were not completed in time, but rather from a more subtle, emotional side – not holding up to the expectation that you can get things done, regardless of your situation. Often, those who assigned you the job can be:

1) may not know/do not care of your workload;

2) trust you to handle the task over others;

3) just do not want to do the work; or

4) purposely add to your tasks to hinder your progress.

Regardless of the reason, it is this derived sense of ambivalence that weighs you down with an added sense of isolationism, resulting in feeling helpless. This kind of emotion is exactly what anyone would want to avoid. For work, you can seek assistance from teammates or vendors but in the household, you are on your own, especially if you cannot get help.

Only recently, I personally went through a situation where my limits were, and still being, tested. The event itself is a happy one – we are soon to have a new member to our family – a baby boy. As the due date nears, my wife faces increasing difficulty with many everyday matters so naturally I will step in to handle it all – no debate there. Until recently, all the different preparations had been falling into place mostly without hiccups – baby clothing and supplies bought, baby furnitures arrived, helpers arranged, the list goes on. Now that we are on the final stretch, however, the anxiety builds and the human factors come into play a lot stronger.

There was the issue of training the helper, liaising with our confinement (post-pregnancy temp helper mainly focusing on nursing the wife after birth), confirming operational details with her doctor and the hospital, getting a car for family, getting his passport and ID documents after birth, school planning and finances, and many more – all these issues are coming…rather…crashing together at the same time. Among these, tasks involving family were the source of stress – wife’s discontent with the helper, relatives with their opinons, the confinement and her insistence on certain protocols – all these negativity had been straining my patience, especially because they expect me to resolve it all without assistance. Moreover, some of these have actually hindered my progress, especially with the car issue – because of their opinions, I lost on a prime opportunity on getting a nice family car at a “steal” price…

How did I handle the negativity that had been dumped on me? The importance is to maintain a balance in my schedule so that one can keep up the effort without feeling too burnt out in the process. Owing to the need to clear tasks on a daily basis now, rarely do I get time to do prolonged relaxation methods like hiking or meeting up with friends. Rather, in between tasks, I put in short “burst” periods such as quick gaming or a quick “tea break” as a method to quickly balance out my mentality. I treasure those times I can meet with close friends even more, as those are the main times I can really let out the steam.

All in all, never underestimate the subtle bits of stress that seeps in, because prolonged periods leave you burnt out and lose interest in other things and if left unchecked still, can gradually become the first signs of depression. If you too face similar situations, hope my experience can be of some help to you.