At times, I feel exhausted and irritable. I might get angry at a petty request to sign another PDF or because I have to send another reminder. I end up trapped between past times when I had the patience and time to take care of everything and my current need to minimise frustration and take care of my mental health,

A colleague recently said that I must have the patience of a saint to put up with all these requests. I do not. I get angry easily. I use small practices that allow me to keep my balance. Here are some of them.

Brain RAM: Sometimes, I feel I have no time to open a google doc and add my signature. That’s not about time – it takes almost no time to do. Just like opening that extra tab on your browser can slow down your laptop, too many little extra tasks can freeze my brain. .

When my brain RAM is fully taken, I am more prone to mistakes. That’s frustrating but I just let it go. There’s nothing I can do and adding more is the fast-track to burnout. Just like with a browser, I start slowly and carefully start closing tabs until I’m feeling like I’m functioning at full speed again.

Blame just makes things worse and will increases my frustration. If I lose money or an opportunity because I have said yes to too many things, this is the price I pay for my lesson. It is a reminder that, next time, I should take on less.

The multiplier risk: I am happy (or I consider it a necessary evil) to help a colleague with a small 10-minute task. But, when managing 300 people, those ephemeral 10 minutes might easily become 3000.

If I am preparing a funding application and get a request like, “I cannot understand (whatever) – can you help?”, or worse, “Can we have a call because I cannot be bothered reading the instructions?”, I have learned to say no, firmly and politely. If I use my time to do micro-tasks for others, who is going to take care of the macro ones?

Idiocy coefficient: The last conference I co-organised, we received (apparently) endless urgent, inappropriate, rude requests. Had the world gone mad?

In all environments, some people are rude and academics are no exception. The higher the number of people you interact with, the more likely you are to encounter a rude person. In a 10-person workshop, I usually meet one (10%) who fails to read or understand instructions. Upscaling to 400 participants, 10% means you have to deal with 40 of them in addition to the stress of organising the conference.

I call it “the idiocy coefficient” but it has nothing to do with the intellectual capacities of people. You just encounter it when managing larger crowds. One participant has poor communication skills, another lacks time, someone having a bad day or a bad moment in their life. Accept that you cannot enjoy interacting with 100% of the people and, the higher the number of participants, the higher the number of people who will frustrate you.

The easy block: Some participants, or colleagues, will have a stroke of genius: since you are so busy that you’re not responding to emails, it’s better to contact you on social media. So, at a Saturday dinner when I dare to check if my son has replied to my WhatsApp note, a message pops up: “Can I have more details about the fellowship?” or “I cannot find my name in the programme”.

If that’s a colleague, I usually reply “please send me an email about this” (unless I can give a precise answer in one line). In most other cases, I’ll just block the person. My laptop is for work, my phone is for memes and pics (and occasionally for urgent and vital tasks).

The easiest way for me to attend to a task is to see the request on my computer, when I have access to all my work files. If I am at dinner, or on the bus, either the task will bug me for hours or I’ll forget about it and then feel like the bad one because I forgot.

Timing: “Sorry if this message reaches you outside working hours.” Why apologise? Everyone has different working patterns, and some are in different timezones. I assume that if someone does not want to be bothered, they can avoid checking their email (and avoid uploading their work email onto their phone).

I consider 24 – 48 hours to be a reasonable delay before replying to someone that I work with. If I am sending an email at 11 pm on Friday, I might send a reminder on Tuesday afternoon. Exceptions might apply for pre-agreed urgent tasks.

Reciprocity: For cold-contact emails, if someone invested 30 seconds or less to send me a copy-pasted message or an unsolicited group message with a request, I will invest the same amount of time to answer or delete it.

If someone does not value my time, what are the odds that they will be a dedicated collaborator? Isn’t it better to gift my time and energy to those who respect other peoples’ life and time and invest some energy into identifying common interests?

Adrenaline rush: Thinking “WHAAAAAAT??!!” after reading an email is something that happens more often than I’d like to admit.

I accept we are made of emotions and anger or frustration are part of that spectrum so I do not repress them. I allow myself to get angry as much as my body requests it.

But I try not to answer when I’m emotionally charged. I am aware that my collaboration might be affected by my response. I need to be careful and diplomatic but also clear that I am not happy with their attitude or their request.

I remain open to the option that I might have just misread the message. Communication skills vary across people. Poor language skills, different cultural references, or being under stress myself, can completely distort a message.

I can draft an inflamed message and then edit it 10 times, toning it down at each edit until it reads move civilly. If needed, the real message might be delivered between the lines.

If can’t help sending a reply immediately (I confess, I am way below the Dalai Lama level in terms of patience), I use succinct language. There’s nothing worse than writing “I hope this message finds you well” while your main desire is to yell at that person. I make a point to embroid kindness and sarcasm. In extreme cases, I might play dumb – “so you’re asking me to do this, this and this” – emphasising the details that show how absurd or nonsense the request was.

I love writing. I find it cathartic. That includes hand-picking words and combining them in a way that, on re-reading a message, I think “Good job: it conveys the message (even if the message was “don’t try this with me again”) in a kind and diplomatic way”.

I prefer succinct language. It delivers the message “I am busy but I am trying to address the issue as quickly and precisely as possible”. Support and sympathy can be shown in many ways that can be personalised to your interlocutor rather than reduced to generally acceptable forms of politeness. I do not spare “thank you(s)” or “sorry(s)” when needed. Not everyone will like my style, but I’ve always believed that if we do not like each other we do not need to interact: we have enough alternatives to work with.

I’ve written before about introvert networking and work-life balance. This contribution outlines my approach to protecting my mental health and I hope it will be useful to some readers.

Author Bio: Abel Polese is a researcher, trainer, writer, manager and fundraiser. He is the author of “The SCOPUS Diaries and the (il)logics of Academic Survival: A Short Guide to Design Your Own Strategy and Survive Bibliometrics, Conferences, and Unreal Expectations in Academia”, a reflection on academic life, research careers and the choices and obstacles young scholars face at the beginning of their career.