Time and stress management is vital to your wellbeing and productivity of your Student Council. The clock: friend or foe?

When you have many goals and tasks to accomplish, it's easy to become stressed out. Forming partnerships helps get your goal/task accomplished more quickly with less stress. If you don't properly manage your time and spend too much time on one task, you will run out of time. This is why it is important to manage your time and set priorities.

In your council, you may have to work with people different that yourself. They may have strengths where you are weak - take advantage of this. Diversity is a good thing. Different ideas and inputs on things will make the event more successful. It is important to compromise and listen to everyone in order to manage your time and reduce stress.

In order to get a task done quickly, efficiently, timely, and less stressful, you need to delegate, or place a certain task on a person or group. Say, for example, you are having a car wash. You will need posters, towels, sponges, hoses, buckets, and a lot of help. If a group of people make signs/advertisement, another brings the towels, another brings sponges, another brings hoses, another brings buckets, and another person calls people to help, you, personally, will only worry about one task getting done. "Delegating work works, provided the one delegating works, too."-Robert Half. Committees in your Student Council are made for this reason - delegation. This will decrease the amount of time you would have taken if a few people did all of the work, and reduce the stress put on yourself.

If you are able to communicate with everyone, it will be easier to get the job done. As tasks and responsibilities are added, it is important to be able to work as a group and communicate with everyone. If everyone has the chance to voice their ideas/opinions/inputs on an event, the job will get done with more efficiency, more quickly, and successfully.

Article by:
Ryan Thomas
Menominee High School
MASC/MAHS Board of Delegates Middle Level Representative, 2007-2009