The PITA Matrix: Your Guide to Reducing Work-Related Stress

Feeling overwhelmed by your to do list?

You're not alone.

Many of us struggle with tasks that drain our energy and increase our stress, but we keep doing them because we think we have to.

Today, I'm going to share a simple but powerful tool I developed.

It's called the PITA Matrix and that's P I T A and it will help you identify what's really causing your stress and show you practical ways to deal with it.

If you've been feeling stretched thin and want to reclaim your time and energy, this episode might be exactly what you need.

Welcome to Live well and Flourish, where I help you understand what it means to live a flourishing life.

I'm your host, Craig Van Slyke.

If you're ready to think beyond material and external success, if you're ready to take control of who you are and the kind of life you live, if you're ready to flourish, this is the podcast for you.

Are you feeling stressed?

In all likelihood, your answer is yes.

Stress seems to be a fixture of modern life.

While I've explored various aspects of stress in previous episodes, which you can find@livewellandflourish.com just search for stress and you'll find a bunch of episodes today we're focusing specifically on work related stress, particularly the kind that comes from being overworked or when unfulfilling tasks crowd out meaningful work.

Personally, I find that much of my stress comes from doing tasks that I simply don't find enjoyable or rewarding.

Let me give you an example, one that motivated this episode in the technique I'll describe later.

Reviewing is critical to academic life.

You've probably heard the term peer reviewed journal.

Well, I'm one of those peer reviewers.

Peer review is the lifeblood of academic research.

Without this work, the whole system falls apart.

I do a lot of review and editorial work and it's very time consuming.

Lately, I've been finding it more and more stressful to do this work.

Let's pause the story here and move on to the technique you may be familiar with.

The Eisenhower Matrix.

A powerful productivity tool named after President Dwight D.

Eisenhower.

This matrix helps prioritize tasks by plotting them on two importance and urgency.

Tasks fall into one of four quadrants, helping you decide what to do, what to schedule, what to delegate, how to and what to eliminate.

You can do the same sort of thing to reduce stress.

Let me introduce you to what I call the pita matrix.

That's pain in the anterior and feel free to substitute your own word there.

Picture drawing a cross on a piece of paper Creating four boxes.

The vertical line represents stress, with high stress tasks at the top and low stress tasks at the bottom.

The horizontal line represents importance, with important tasks on the right and less important tasks on the left.

This gives you four distinct high stress, high importance in the upper right, high stress, low importance in the upper left, low stress, high importance in the lower right, and low stress, low importance in the lower left.

Yeah, I know that's kind of hard to visualize, but think of this as a map of your tasks, showing you exactly where your stress points are and how much each task matters.

To build your own PETA matrix, start by taking a week to notice how you feel about each regular task you do.

When you think about doing a task or actually do it, where would you place it on the map?

Is it stressful?

Is it truly important?

Over time, you'll develop a clear picture of which tasks are causing you the most stress and whether they're worth that stress.

Let me show you how this works with some examples from my own work life.

Let's start with reviewing papers.

Reviewing is definitely high on the stress dimension, but it's also important.

Writing Live well and flourish episodes is another frequent task.

This one is relatively low on stress and high on importance.

Editing these episodes, on the other hand, does cause stress, but it's also high in importance.

Then there's email management, both responding to unsolicited messages and clearing out spam.

Alright, let's consider each one of these in turn.

Reviewing is high stress but also high in importance.

Reviewing is just critical to the academic system, but my personal reviewing activities are only moderately important to my career.

That makes reviewing a little bit interesting to deal with, but we'll get to that more in a second.

Writing Live well and Flourish episodes is low in stress, but important to me personally as it lets me serve my life's purpose.

Editing is moderately stress inducing but high in importance.

For me, responding to unsolicited emails is low in importance and high in stress.

Here's one more example.

Deleting spam email messages.

This is low in stress and low in importance.

Okay, now we have five examples.

I know that seems a little odd since the matrix has four quadrants, but I have a reason.

Let's look at how we can handle each one.

Reviewing, which is high in stress and high in importance.

Reviewing is important because it's part of my job and it's critical to the research community.

So I really shouldn't just stop doing reviews, but I can reduce the number of reviews I do.

I do much more than my fair share of reviewing, so I can afford to cut back on the number of reviews.

I've already started doing this by turning down reviews unless there's a good reason to take on the task, such as doing a favor for a colleague, supporting an important journal, or being highly interested in the paper's topic.

I'm going to take this a step further and put myself on a reviewing budget.

I'll only take on a certain number of reviews each year.

When the review budget is spent, I'm done for the year Writing Live well episodes this is low in stress and high in importance.

Writing episodes rarely causes me any negative stress.

Most of the time I actually look forward to writing them, so the only action I'll take here is to possibly do more writing, although I need to be careful to not overload myself.

Overload is a core cause of stress.

Editing Live well episodes is moderate stress, high in importance.

My plan for dealing with editing is to make it more efficient.

When you can't eliminate a stress inducing activity, think about how to spend less time on it.

In other words, think about how you can make it more efficient.

With respect to editing, I can increase my skill level, be less picky about little things that don't matter, or a combination of both.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist when I edit Live well and flourish episodes.

Quality is important, but sometimes I take things too far by editing out problems that the vast majority of listeners will never even notice.

I can reduce the time spent on editing by being a bit less of a perfectionist, which will reduce the amount of stress editing contributes to my life.

Responding to unsolicited email that's high in stress and low on importance.

It's a little embarrassing how long it took me to figure out that I was under no obligation to respond to unsolicited emails.

Before having this epiphany, I would stress over the perceived need to respond.

Then I realized I didn't have to respond, so I simply stopped responding.

In fact, I rarely read these messages beyond a quick scan of the first few sentences.

If the message is from someone I know, of course I respond.

So I'm talking about those messages that aren't obviously spam, but they aren't from a colleague or friend.

If something causes you stress but isn't important, maybe you should stop doing it.

Deleting spam messages is low in importance.

It's also low in stress.

Some people are obsessive about keeping a tidy email inbox, and there are good reasons to do it.

But I am not one of those people.

I'm fine with having thousands of messages in my inbox.

So for me, deleting spam messages or even mailing list messages, it's just not a big deal.

I delete these messages a couple of times a day when I'm between tasks or need a bit of a break.

It's an easy task that causes zero stress, so I do it if and when I have the chance.

Of course, you'll need to find your own ways to deal with your tasks, but the PITA matrix gives you a systematic way of figuring out which tasks you should address to reduce your stress.

Creating and applying your personal PITA matrix will take a little time and effort, but that time and effort is an investment in your mental health and your flourishing.

A big part of the PITA Matrix method is awareness of what's causing you stress.

For major tasks, there's a fairly easy way to do a stress check.

When you get ready to start the task or when you schedule the tasks, do a quick stress check by evaluating how this makes you feel.

For example, this morning as I got ready to write this script, I couldn't wait.

I felt a sense of excitement and positive anticipation.

So writing live well scripts is in the low stress quadrant.

Later this morning, I have to finish reviewing a paper.

Thinking about that causes me to feel stressed and a bit anxious to have the review behind me.

That puts reviewing in the high stress category for me.

As you go about your day, do these stress checks with every major task you do.

My examples are all work related, but personal tasks should be evaluated as well.

Once you have your stress inventory, follow the PETA method.

Over the course of a few weeks, you'll find that you're not only less stressed, you'll be spending more time and energy on tasks that are truly rewarding, and that is huge for your flourishing.

Until next time, lower that stress.

My friends.