Once you have all your regular weekly tasks allocated to particular times you can do same with your repetitive monthly tasks. Get those down as well. They have to be done, so they need to be down in your diary.

Make sure you set aside a regular time each week for unexpected but essential. In other words build in some scheduled slack time, some recovery time. It may be that one week dealing with your mail takes longer than usual. It must be done, but you overrun your allocated time slot. That’s OK. Use your scheduled slack time. Another week it may be that your progress report takes longer than usual. Never mind. You have your scheduled slack time to make use of.

If you don’t set aside this extra time you are almost certain to be scrabbling around for time in amongst all other jobs that have come in on an irregular basis. But of course if you find that one of your scheduled tasks, dealing with your mail for example, regularly overflows into this extra time slot then you must allocate more time to that task in first place. The recovery time slot should never be constantly filled by same overflowing task each week.

Once these regular tasks are scheduled in you are free to accept all other demands on your time – discussions, meetings, seminars, requests for special reports, demands of your staff, whatever it is – without worrying whether routine but essential tasks will get done or not. You will no longer have that worry in background. Your available time will be under your control again.

Don’t underestimate stress-reducing effect of being master of your own time.