High achievers often face the problem of taking on too much.

Theyve been so effective at accomplishing things in the course of their career that they start to think they are capable of accomplishing even more. Their productivity causes these otherwise worthy individuals to create longer and more involved to-do lists than the rest of us.

Many people unconsciously ensure that theyll never get to the end of their list by continuously adding more tasks after accomplishing even just a few.

Over-achievers seem to derive some kind of motivation from never completing everything on the list for a given day.

This kind of approach to managing ones to-do list is fraught with problems.

It is both rewarding and appropriate when you cross off everything on your list and feel complete about your achievements. When youre able to finish your lists two to four times a week, you actually come back to work the next morning with more energy, focus, and direction than you might presume.

Completions Yield Satisfaction

Conversely, when you perpetually leave the office with unfinished tasks for that days to-do list, you unconsciously engender a situation in which you never quite feel complete or satisfied, and you find yourself in a perpetual striving mode.

In the short run, its okay to leave unfinished tasks, especially when youre on a specific campaign or project. In the long run, however, continuously over-extending your daily to-do list can have a harmful effect on your life.

Its understandable that ambitious career professionals want to achieve as much as they can and, if employed by others, desire to greatly benefit their organization. If youre not careful, however, and you attempt to accomplish one major task after another instead of alternating large and small tasks, your productivity will actually suffer, as trying to tackle one major task after another can be mind-numbing.

Instead, choose to tackle a handful of key tasks in a given day, alternating them with some minor tasks so that you can maintain a fairly high level of energy and allow yourself to leave the workplace with a sense of completion.

Youll work more effectively the next day, as well as throughout the course of your week, month, year, and career. Youll engender a most definite sense of accomplishment while experiencing, at the least, recurring feelings of work-life balance.

Slowing Down Your Day

Most of what you experience each day, in terms of the passage of time, is based on your perception. You can slow down time if you choose. How? Whenever you feel youre racing the clock or trying to tackle too much at once, try this exercise:

Close your eyes for a minute and imagine a pleasant scene. You might be surrounded in trees or with a loved one. It could be something from childhood. Let the emotions of that place and time pervade you. Get into it! Give yourself more than a New York minute for the visualization to take hold.

Open your eyes and return to what youre doing. Whatever care or task youre working on is not quite so bad and whatever pace you were working at is never quite so feverish.

Pause and Reflect

Imagine youre flying on an airplane. You have a window seat, and its a clear day. As you gaze down to the ground below, what do you see? Life passing by. Cars the size of ants. Miniature baseball diamonds. Rivers the size of streams.

Theres something about being at great heights that enables you reflect on your life. The same phenomenon can take place from the top of a mountain or skyscraper. As often as practical things seem to be racing by too fast, seek higher ground, literally, for a clearer perspective.

If youre among the lucky, perhaps you regularly allocate time for reflection or meditation. If you dont, its no matter. There are other ways to make it all slow down. After the workday, listen to relaxing music with headphones, and close your eyes. A half hour of your favorite music with no disturbances (and your eyes closed) can seem almost endless. When you re-emerge, the rest of the day takes on a different tenor.

An effective method for slowing down time and catching up with today is periodically deleting three items from your to do list without doing them at all. Before you shriek, consider that much of what makes your list is arbitrary. In most cases, eliminating three items wont impact your career or life, except for freeing up a little time for yourself in the present.

Mediums and Mammals

I have long used water to reduce stress. For eleven years, I lived in a high-rise condominium in Falls Church, Virginia, complete with its own 25-meter pool. No matter how hard I worked during the day, even if I did a 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. stint, at 6:05 p.m. I was in the pool. After 30 minutes of laps, I had swum out many of the stresses and strains of the day. Find the swimming hole nearest you!

If you have a dog or cat and do not consider it a drain on your time, heres a little something about Rover or Mittens that you may not have known. In recent years, as reported by U.S. News & World Report, scientists have found proof for what was only once suspected: that contact with animals has specific and measurable effects on both your body and mind. The mere presence of animals can increase a sick persons chances of survival, and has been shown to lower heart rate, calm disturbed children, and induce incommunicative people to initiate conversation!

The exact mechanisms that animals exert to affect your health and well-being are still largely mysterious. Scientists suspect that animal companionship is beneficial because, unlike human interaction (!), it is uncomplicated.

Even if you only have goldfish, sometimes simply staring at them in their silent world can help deaden your hectic pace.

Jeff Davidson is principal of Breathing Space Institute in Raleigh, N.C. He offers keynote presentations and workshops on work-life balance. For more information, visit breathingspace.com or email jeff@breathingspace.com.

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Taking on too much, all the time | Expert Column - Virginian-Pilot