Reduce the Overload

When you’re overloaded, don’t just keep pushing through. I know too many fellow high achievers who feel so much pressure to perform that they just keep trying to knock out their to-do lists—and hamster-wheel themselves into the ground. Here’s the bad news: the list is not going anywhere. And there will always be more things to do on that list than you can possibly do.

But here's the good news: there are ways to pause the hamster wheel. Let me offer you three ideas you can try, right now.

Take a (mini) vacation

If you can’t take a full vacation, take a half day. Don’t do any work. Go to the movies. Go for a walk in the forest. Sit by a lake. Work on a jigsaw puzzle while drinking an iced tea. Paint a picture. Heck, just stare at a wall if that’s all you can think to do. The critical piece here is to STOP working, even if just for a bit. If you can afford the time and gas, go for a longer vacation! The longer break you can get from your routine, the better. On the last vacation I took, it took me almost a WEEK to feel like I was decompressed enough from work stress to feel mostly normal. That's not great. The decompression will happen much faster if you can give yourself these regular mini-vacations.

Box It In

I know some of us hate routines and resist them, but when you’re in work mode, and you’re overwhelmed, a routine is your absolute best friend. It gives you a template (or at the very least intentions) you can simply carry out, rather than having to figure out each day or hour what you're going to give your time to. Let’s say you want to get 6 solid hours of work done each day (that’s actually a fair amount, given how much of our days can go to email checks, small talk, and interruptions). Maybe you're an early bird, so you set out three blocks of time to accomplish this: 5 to 7am, 9 to 11am, and 1-3pm. You block those off on your calendar and don’t allow meetings or interruptions. Maybe you work better later, so you do you two blocks of time, 2 to 6pm and 9 to 11pm. You can adapt this principle to any schedule or style. The key here is to (1) create regular, focused work time to make progress on your most important and urgent (quadrant 1) goals throughout the week and (2) not work outside of those hours when you're overwhelmed—or you WILL burn out. And I don’t want that for you.

Focus on your top priorities

If you’re going to have focused work time, you’ve also got to be clear on how you want to use it. What are your top priorities for each day? I like to conduct an end-of-day review of what I got done and what still needs to be done, and set my priorities for the next few days. Each morning I do a quick double-check that those priorities are still what I want to pursue, and make sure I'm focusing on just one or two frogs for the day. Everything else is gravy.

Give one (or all) of these strategies a try, and let me know in the comments how it goes for you. I bet you'll be happy!

Image by Elias from Pixabay