
In this lecture you take one task you do every week, lay it out in five steps, add how long each step works and how long it waits, and find the single wait that costs you the most days.
This course is built from six disciplines: stress and burnout in the company, time management, delegation, personality types, impostor syndrome and career coaching.
The map of the course
A dictionary for reading a lecture from any of the six disciplines as part of your own week
Three questions to ask after every lecture
A short self-diagnostic that shows which sections to watch first
Download the Workload Wait Map and fill it in for one task from this week.
What the global research actually establishes
What stress is, physiologically and practically
What burnout is, and why it is a different condition
How either gets diagnosed rather than guessed at
Why stress arises, and the factors that raise or lower it
Why burnout happens, which is not the same question
Auditing an environment for the factors that produce it
How a culture either prevents or manufactures this
The role senior management plays
The role your direct manager plays
What the support function is supposed to do
Running the research
The one-to-one as a diagnostic tool
The link between stress, burnout, turnover and engagement
Employee experience, and the specific factors that demotivate
What managers get trained on, so you know what to expect of yours
The tools they are handed
How their performance on this is monitored
Building a report on stress and burnout
The role of pulse surveys
The automation tools that make tracking possible
What time management means and why it stopped being optional
The basic principles
Assessing your current habits honestly
The basic tools: lists, calendars, and what each is good for
Setting goals in SMART form
Prioritising with the ABC method and the Eisenhower matrix
The four-D technique: do, defer, delegate, delete
Rebuilding your task list around what actually matters
The basics of planning that works
Diaries, calendars and applications
Pomodoro for concentration
Kanban lists and the Getting Things Done method
Analysing where the cost actually is
Raising concentration with time blocking
When and how to hand a task over
Protecting one hour a day for the work that matters
The psychology of procrastination and what causes it
Techniques for managing stress, including mindfulness practice
Why breaks and recovery are not a reward for finishing
Doing the hardest thing first, and building a personal plan
The applications worth using
Timeboxing
Agile and Scrum principles applied to your own work
Mind maps and Gantt charts as visual methods
What delegation does to your own effectiveness
The psychological barriers, and the myths behind them
Formulating a task in SMART form so it can be handed over
What not delegating costs you in stress, specifically
The stages from choosing the task to confirming it is done
RACI so responsibility is unambiguous
Tracking handed-over work in Trello, Asana or Jira
Giving feedback that does not undo the handover
Using delegation to develop rather than simply offload
The GROW model applied to a handed-over task
Matching difficulty to capability so it motivates
Delegating goals rather than tasks
Freeing time for the work only you can do
Pomodoro in a delegation context
Automating routine with Zapier and IFTTT
Dashboards so you can stop checking manually
Where personality typology came from, and Jung's contribution
The four classic scales
How the testing works, and what each type describes
How to use a result, and how it relates to work
Where the methodology came from and what it measures
How the testing works
Working with people whose profile differs from yours
Using it as a basis for managing rather than labelling
What separates this from the others
How each type operates in practice
The weaknesses built into every type, including yours
Recognising a type in conversation without any test
The core of Belbin's approach and the roles it names
What a balanced team looks like
Where the Hogan assessment differs
Where to take these, and how to read the report you get
What makes this model different from the rest
Where to take it
Using it at work
How it compares with the others in this section
How it differs from what came before
Where to take the test
Working with the result you get
Applying it without over-reading it
Mike's own account of starting out as an instructor
Who an impostor actually is: usually the person who knows most precisely what they do not know
Comparing yourself with successful people instead of with experts
Roughly seven people in ten experience it, and the "this comes too easily" trap
What market value consists of, and whether you can move it
Whether it is possible to undersell yourself
Standing on three sources of income rather than one
The levers that work: a new role, a company move, coaching, consulting, speaking
What knowledge people actually pay for
Packaging it, and what it is worth
The framework from knowledge through audience and product to payment
Why people with impostor syndrome often become the credible experts
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
You have already tried sleeping more, taking the weekend properly, and putting your phone in another room. It helped for about four days.
Why the usual advice does not work
Because none of it changes the arithmetic. Your workload did not arrive all at once — it accumulated, one reasonable request at a time, and nobody ever went back and renegotiated the total. You are still doing three things you took on temporarily two years ago. You have not handed anything over because the handover would take longer than the task. And underneath all of it there may be a question you have been avoiding, which is whether this is the right job at all. Recovery techniques treat the symptom of that. They are worth having. They are not a solution.
What this course covers
Thirty-five lessons. The mechanism first: what separates stress from burnout, where each comes from, how they are diagnosed, and how organisations measure them — useful because it explains why the environment you are in keeps producing the same result. Then workload: auditing where your hours actually go, SMART goals, the Eisenhower matrix, do-defer-delegate-delete, planning that survives a real week, Pomodoro, Getting Things Done, finding the time wasters, the psychology of procrastination, and recovery as part of the system rather than a reward. Then the lever that changes the total: why handing work over is hard, RACI, doing it so it does not come back, and buying your own hours back. Then your own pattern across five frameworks — MBTI, DISC, PAEI, Belbin and Hogan, the Big Five — which is mostly useful for telling "this person is impossible" apart from "this person is built differently". Then impostor syndrome and what you are actually worth. Finally the structural questions: whether the work matches your values, the career cube, a skills audit, financial pressure, and a genuine recovery strategy.
What this course is not
It is not a relaxation course. There is one lesson containing mindfulness and breathing material and that is all — if that is what you are looking for, this is the wrong purchase. It is also not clinical treatment. Burnout can shade into depression and anxiety, and those require a qualified professional; nothing here substitutes for that, and recognising when you have crossed that line is part of taking this seriously. What this course does is the structural work: workload, delegation, direction and money, which is where a great deal of workplace stress originates.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 35 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working material: the time audit, the Eisenhower matrix, four-D, RACI, GROW, the balance wheel, the career cube, five personality frameworks, a burnout recovery plan
Straight treatment of the parts people avoid: money, and whether the job is right
Where to start
Before lesson one, write down every recurring commitment in your week and how long each actually takes. Not how long it should take. The gap between that total and the hours you have is the whole problem, stated in one number. Enrol now and start today.