I was fit at 50. At 54 I had high cholesterol, high blood pressure and a quadruple heart bypass.
I didn't consider myself to be particularly stressed at work. Sure there were efficiency initiatives, demanding performance targets, a management restructuring to deliver and the usual disciplinary hearings, complaints and MPs' letters. But - and this is the point - that was the usual stuff that you have to deal with as a manager in the public sector and I had been dealing with it for years. I had accepted this as normal.
When my GP asked if I had a stressful job I said "not particularly". I thought stressful meant struggling to cope, not being able to sleep the night before an important meeting, replaying decisions over in my head, worrying about dismissing someone or having deadlines I might not be able to meet.
I didn't doubt my abilities and I genuinely thought there was nothing that my working day could throw up that I hadn't dealt with before, so nothing would justify being stressed.
I didn't realise the pressure and stress I was under until it stopped.
Three months after retiring early, I now accept that work dominated my life. Things that seemed so important at the time now seem fairly insignificant. Much of the pressure was self-imposed. It was me who squeezed in an extra meeting at the end of the day, who didn't leave enough travelling time between meetings or failed to put in adequate preparation time to work on that important presentation.
It was my desire to impress that led me never to decline invitations to join any working group. It was my naked ambition that led me to distant parts of England and, once, Wales, to put myself through gruelling assessment centres, trial by sherry and beauty parades masquerading as a rigorous selection process.
Some pressures are self-imposed and it is important to have the insight to recognise this because you can do something about them. Other pressures are external and a new era of budget cuts, efficiency drives, compulsory redundancies, wage freezes and service reductions will increase the pressure on managers. These pressures may not give you a heart attack or stroke but they will increase the risk that you become preoccupied with work, lose contact with your friends and neglect your family.
So what can you do to manage the pressure and reduce the stress? Well if I knew then what I know now this would be my survival plan.
1. Take your full allocation of annual leave. Do not carry over annual leave to be taken at some point in the future. You need the break now.
2. Have a three week holiday as opposed to two weeks. This is all about getting people to do things in your absence rather than waiting till you get back. It will also reduce your emails. You get fewer if you are away for three weeks rather than two; this may be hard to believe, but it is true.
3. There should be no meetings booked in your diary first day back at work. This is catch-up time and if you do don't do it now you will spend the next two weeks doing it, at the end of which you will feel like you have never been away.
4. Take a lunch hour. You probably got in early and are staying late. You will be more productive and less tired if you have a break away from the office. Yes it is hard to do but modern management is about what you deliver not the hours you put in.
5. Stay an extra hour in the office if it means you won't have to take work home. With any luck the traffic will have died down and you will have a quicker less stressful journey home.
6. Try leaving the briefcase at work. If you take it home you will be tempted to open it later in the evening and do some work.
7. It is very convenient being able to access emails and reports at home on your laptop but don't fall into the trap of extending your working day into the evenings or weekends. Instead negotiate a regular working from home day. If senior managers can't negotiate this for themselves because of the "culture" in the organisation, this is a weakness. If senior managers are doing it then that gives permission for other managers to do it.
8. Delegate. With increased spans of responsibility the modern manager cannot micro manage. Your job is to explain what needs doing and ensuring they have the skills, knowledge and resources to do it.
9. Don't do urgent; only do important. It is surprising how few things are important. Embrace this approach in your expectations of your staff; in other words something is not important simply because it came from you.
10. Reduce your email. I altered my machine to bounce back any emails into which I was copied. These were mostly people covering themselves by telling me what they had already done. Overnight I reduced my emails and my blood pressure.
Blair McPherson was until recently a director in a large local authority
From Bubb's Blog
From Whitehall Watch
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