Focusing When Overwhelmed
I love how calm the lake is here. My mind definitely wasn’t calm last weekend. Rather, it was rough and full of ripples. The stillness seen above was what I strove for though, and while I didn’t get to this level of calm, I definitely beat down the waves.
Last weekend I was feeling extremely overwhelmed. I had a to do list which seemed insurmountable, and no motivation to climb that mountain. I was coming off a busy week and had some looming deadlines which were creeping up faster than I would have liked. I was emotionally exhausted as we neared the one year mark of the pandemic. I was missing the parts of my life that filled me up and helped me find the motivation to do all the things. To be truly blunt, I was just tired of everything, and quite honestly, had no desire to do any of it. Unfortunately, avoidance wasn’t a feasible strategy. As I worked through it, though, I thought it might be of value to others to understand my process. I’m not saying that this is the process you ought to take, but there may be pieces which are relevant and useful to you. I suggest you pick and choose what works from many systems. After all, that’s how I’ve created mine.
Firstly, I’m a list maker, and a planner. I have a productivity system that I use through my bullet journal. I wrote about it in depth here but I’ve even revised it since then. I had the list made. It was long and detailed.
An example of my weekly layout with my tasks. I took it after I finished the week, so you can see that many are crossed off, but this was the list (of mostly not crossed off) items that was staring back at me.
The first thing I did Saturday morning, was actually to journal. I’ve been working on a morning routine (I have a whole blog post coming up about that) and I take the time every morning to journal. Sometimes, it’s superficial, but other times, I dig into the thoughts that are floating around in my head. I got them out and worked on addressing them so I could try to focus more on completing tasks and not running interference with the thoughts duking it out in my head.
Another element of my morning routine is to plan my day. I started with the commitments I had that day (I was going to the farmer’s market in the morning, but the rest of the day seemed free). It was important for me to understand that I was removing an hour and a half from my day for the outing, but also for me to recognize that while it looked like I had tons of time on paper, if I didn’t block some of it and do some planning, then the end of the day would come and I would not be much further ahead (a lesson gleaned from past experience).
I looked at my list in my bullet journal which was sort of grouped, but mostly linear, other than some of the priority stuff. I normally work off this list and it’s fine, but the list was really long with not many things crossed off, so it required a bit more than my normal routine (which obviously hadn’t worked for me that week since there I was on Saturday morning looking at a huge list of stuff I hadn’t done). On a separate piece of paper, I started grouping tasks: Leadership and Life, Work, ASCA, Other and I wrote tasks down under these headings. Grouping tasks helps me work on like stuff together so I don’t waste as much time switching focus. If I am working on different pages on my website, it’s easier to just work on that than to do one page, then maybe pay some bills, work on a board evaluation and then go back to my website.
You can notice that the same items in the previous list are in this one, but they’re grouped by headings. It’s not neat or pretty, but that wasn’t the goal.
You can see that it’s not clean or neat and that’s fine. I kept adding tasks, and in some areas I ran out of room. The purpose was definitely function over looks.
Then I started with choosing a group and I would say, I am going to work on this group of tasks for an hour or an hour and a half. My attention span is less than 90 minutes, so I try to never set myself up for failure by saying I’m going to work on something for 2 hours as after about 90 minutes, I either need a break and take it, or I am not nearly as productive. I started with work and wrote down 10-11 so that I knew that I was going to focus on these tasks for 1 hour. As it turns out, I was on a roll and kept going for another hour (occasionally, I do end up working for longer than a 90 minute block, but I try to not plan or force myself to do so). When I was done and felt good about what I had accomplished, I took a short break and then chose another group to focus on and wrote set a timeline for how long I was going to work.
On Sunday morning, I journaled some more and planned out my day again in terms of commitments and how much time I was unavailable. I reflected on the tasks I had accomplished and those still yet to do. I checked off tasks as I completed them and while at the end of Sunday evening, I had not accomplished everything, I know that I made huge progress and checked off the most essential.
When I look at my daily and weekly tasks, I divide them out into priority and time sensitive and the rest just go in a list. It’s important to evaluate your tasks and do them in order of priority and importance. If something is time sensitive, then add an appointment in your calendar to do it. If it’s important, then block time to work on it. For the smaller stuff, I will often block an hour and just call it “small stuff” or I’ll put a daily goal to do 3 small things. These things are tasks which need to get done, but aren’t really important, so I often ignore or avoid them. I generally can accomplish quite a few of these in an hour; they are also the ones I most often procrastinate. At the end of the week, I look at tasks which I haven’t completed and ask myself if they are really important and worth carrying forward. If I still don’t complete it the next week, I either delete the task or schedule time for it.
It’s easy to let our task list get out of hand and let it control us, but that leads to all kinds of negative feelings. I also find when I am feeling out of control or overwhelmed, is when I am least productive. There’s a great quote I love:
“Anticipation is greater than any pleasure or pain”
I know that the anticipation of starting a project or tackling my huge task list often makes me avoid it, which compounds the problem. For me, making a plan truly helps. As does acknowledging the feelings and addressing them (whether by calling a friend or by journaling).
There are tons of great systems for tackling your task list. I’ve adapted some of mine from a friend who created her own system. She references the Eisenhower Box in hers (a grid of importance vs urgency) so I also encourage you to check it out and to look at a variety of systems. Try different ones and then pull what works to create your own. Then use it! Feeling overwhelmed is, well, overwhelming, but thankfully, unnecessary.