Overwhelm

We’ve all been there. That sense of overwhelm when you have so much to do that you don’t know where to start. Things are piling up on your to-do list faster than you can tick them off. You might question the point of it all. Why bother with anything since you cannot keep up anymore? So instead you browse through Facebook and see the successful lives of all your friends and feel even more miserable. You go further and further down the rabbit hole until there’s no rope long enough to pull you up.

You need a system of some sort. A system that will keep the overwhelm at bay. It will not make the overwhelm disappear altogether, no system is foolproof, but at least it’ll prevent you from becoming paralyzed, incapable of doing anything.

First of all, you need to consider what you want to accomplish in life. What’s your mission? Not someone else’s purpose, what’s yours? It’s not easy, I know, but you have to come clear on this. How else are you going to know what should be on your to-do list?

Write down your mission statement and put it somewhere you can see it. You’ll need to revisit that statement now and again to make sure that the mission is still the same.

Once you have your mission stated, you’ll need to scrutinize your to do list having that purpose in mind. Are there things on your to-do list that doesn’t align with your mission in life? If so, happily delete them and move on.

If your to-do list still feels overwhelming you need to consider prioritizing your tasks. What is most important? Not easiest. Not requiring the least effort. Not making you look good to someone else. What is truly the most important task?

Women tend to clutter their to-do list with a lot of domestic chores. Delegate them to the rest of the family or someone else. You don’t need to become a martyr who is up all night cleaning the kitchen sink. Besides, not everything has to be spotless all the time. Worth thinking about.

Allocate slots of time for things that truly needs to be done. Make sure you’re doing hard work and not long work. That it ties in with your mission statement. To move forward in life, you need to do the hard work. There are no shortcuts.

Photo by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Unsplash