In this article, I’d like to share with you 3 strategies on how to stop feeling overwhelmed and actually take control of your day.
Feeling overwhelmed comes mainly when we are confused, a lot of distraction hitting us, or simply a lot of demand that we can’t bear.
So, to help you bring some clarity into your days, and actually be productive, here are 3 practical strategies to consider applying:
How To Stop Feeling Overwhelmed For Good…
Strategy #1: Brain Dumping
Often we don’t think about writing our thoughts, and offloading our brain of what is concerning us. The benefits are so amazing..
Not only it will help you to structure and organize your thoughts, but also it will help you to free some space in your brain, that will positively impact your emotional state.
And as a result, you’ll be able to take action a lot smoother.
Personally I use it for 2 things:
- The first thing is I write the tasks that I’m going to do when I’m going to work in a coffee shop for example, so I don’t feel overwhelmed in my way to it, and actually take action right after the coffee is served and don’t lose my time in trifling stuff.
- The second thing is I write all the expenses and the upcoming bills to know how much I’m going to save for the month, and how much I’m going to put aside for the ad.
Also, I started using it as mean to develop my English even further, and expand my knowledge of everything that I’m reading.
There are a lot of great ideas that you can extract from the books, but you need to invest them, and one way to do so, is writing them down.
Also you can use it as a personal diary where you expressing your insecurities, your flaws, all the things that probably you can’t share with others.
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Strategy 2: Take advantage of the Parkinson’s Law
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
In other words, if you give yourself a week to finish a task or a project, it will take one week to finish it.
If you give yourself one month to finish the same task it will take the whole month. The same thing if you give yourself one year.
You get the point. The more you give yourself time, and you extend your deadlines, the more it will take you longer to get the job done to finish the task.
Plus , the more you will give yourself excuses to fill the extra time with other things that may not be good for your focus, and your attention span like playing videos games, or social media…
So, what happens at the end! Panic. When we get closer to the deadline, we simply hurry up things, causing us to stress, and the quality of the work might not be good as we’d like to.
So, how to use the Parkinson’s Law practically? If you know that a task will take one hour to finish, don’t give it one day.
If you know that you can finish your to-dos in half a day, don’t take two or three days to complete it, and busy yourself with other things.
So two elements that need to go hand in hand to make the law work for you: effort, and time estimation.
Simply the more effort that you need to put in, the more time it will take you to get the task done. Procrastination happens when we give more time to the tasks with less effort for example.
Strategy #3: Take advantage of the “Do Something Principle”
It’s not a revolutionary idea, it might sound a bit philosophical, but actually it’s very simple.
When we are overwhelmed, usually doubts, and negative thoughts start creeping us to the point we found ourselves not able to do a single thing.
So, small, and tiny tasks becomes gigantic and mammoth tasks. What most of us do in this situation: NOTHING, and we fall victim to our internal demons.
So, what do we do in this situation? Take any form of action. It could be many things like:
- Brushing your teethes.
- Going outside for a walk
- Calling a friend
The goal is to get yourself out of the mental trap, and get the momentum going just slightly a bit, to be able to take the next decision for the goal that you’re after.
But also you can use this strategy to get started with an important task. For me it works perfectly when I want to write a blog post.
Instead of fantasizing about the perfect sentence or the perfect paragraph, I just start writing simply what comes up in my head without any judgement (of course by knowing the topic in the first place) and really I’m so amazed with the results!
And also another amazing benefit with this principle, is that after a bit of time you’ll build the muscle of “taking action no matter what”, and actually nothing will bother you in the future despite of the difficulty’s level of the task.
This post was about how to stop feeling overwhelmed and get stuff done.
Thank you for reading this post, I hope it helped in some way. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section, I’ll be so happy to answer them;
