Two Ways To Avoid Overwhelm And Remain Productive Throughout Your Day

frustrated woman with sticky notes

If you’re anything like me, your desk looks like what you’d imagine a newspaper editor’s desk looks like. You can even see it on the faces of people who come into your office like, “Oh my God! How do you know where anything is? How do you get stuff done!?”

I used to have this fight within myself. I’m sure a lot of you can relate. In my mind I want to start every day jumping on the phone attending to every voicemail, every email in my inbox, and start hammering away until it’s all dealt with. It was a habit for me for a long time.

Does that kind of stuff bother me? Does it make me feel overwhelmed? It used to, but not anymore Why? I focus my attention on what I need to do.

For some people, the clutter of papers and folders and memos and endless, minute tasks makes them feel claustrophobic, maybe even a bit panicky, like there’s just not enough time to go through it all and get anything done. The same goes for those dozens if not hundreds of emails to go through!

If this kind of thing stops you in your tracks, that just means you get stopped too easily. If you feel overwhelmed, it’s because you feel overwhelmed; it’s not because you are overwhelmed.

The overwhelmed feeling comes from your mind, not your work. It’s not the papers. It’s not the emails. It’s not the snail mail. It’s not the memos. It’s nothing outside of you. It’s inside of you.

What can you do to reduce the clutter, both outside and inside your own head? How do you take the weight off?

1. Focus on the present/guided meditation. Focus on what’s in front of you right now and stop thinking about all the other stuff you have to do. “I still have to get through all this and do all this. I have to clean up all of this, and I have so much to do. Oh my gosh!” I’d feel overwhelmed too if I thought like that! It’s normal for people to think like that. Handle one thing at a time and stop worrying about what’s coming next.

If it helps and if time permits, take yourself through a quick guided meditation if the overwhelm is too… well, overwhelming. There’s this amazing, free resource we all have access to called YouTube! In the search bar at the top, type in something along the lines of ‘guided meditation anxiety’ and dozens will pop up. Guided meditations are particularly effective because it takes you away from your thoughts, and the visualizations of the person guiding you through the meditation helps calm anxiety. Most of these meditations are anywhere from 5-30 minutes long, but if you stop worrying about answering every email immediately or making sure every single piece of paper is in its proper place, you’ll find that you do have time to calm yourself in stressful moments. Have a pair of headphones handy and don’t feel self-conscious about attending to your mental health.

2. Put blocks of your time in place. First, start with what I call your big rocks calendar. You simply take your monthly calendar and write down your priorities. If that means working out X amount of times per week, great. If that means taking smalls steps within larger projects, fantastic. Important meetings … certainly. This is the stuff you sweat, the stuff that’s most important to you, not those hundreds of tiny things we all have to do, like going through the mail or answering email. That stuff … that’s your small rocks schedule. Take a morning block for emails and all that other crap you have to do. Then take a late afternoon block for the stuff that really matters. If you allow for mail, email and all that other stuff to dominate your day, I guarantee you’re not effective or productive, and you certainly won’t get rich. People who are effective block their time.

Instead of watching three hours of television, take an hour or an hour and a half in the evening to answer the emails that came in during the afternoon. Make sure you’re not doing emails past 10:00 p.m.

Don’t get stopped. Not everything has to look and be perfect for you to succeed. Throw all the stuff in a basket beside your desk and move on. Keep going. Do what you need to do.

Most importantly, regardless of the time of day, put your attention on what you’re doing right this moment. Take your attention off what you still have to do that is driving you crazy and making you feel overwhelmed. You become less productive, less energetically effective, and less successful. Learn to stay present with what’s going on right in front of you, right now.

For Your Freedom,
harvsignature