068: 5 Of The Best Things To Do When You're Overwhelmed By Work

 
Do you ever feel overwhelmed at work? You’re definitely not alone. And I know you’ve been googling, what do to when you are overwhelmed at work. Well, fear not Boss, because in this podcast episode I’ve got some great tips for how to not get overwhelmed at work. Being overwhelmed at work can be tough but I’m going to teach you how to not get overwhelmed at work. Click through to learn the tips…you won’t regret it! #overwhelmed #overwhelmedatwork #overwhelmedatworktips

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Today’s talking point:

Let's talk overwhelm.

The illness that affects all of us at one point or another in our business, especially when it comes to getting overwhelmed by work. I wanted to pull together a few of my biggest tips in this podcast episode, so that you have a nice refresher and a reminder as to what you should be doing when overwhelm starts to creep into your business. 

We go over five tips (+ 1 big bonus tip) to help you beat overwhelm for good. Then I’m going to cover how to stay motivated when your progress is taking longer than you thought. 


click here to watch the free masterclass on how to focus on the right tasks in your business without working 24/7!

WHAT IS OVERWHELM?

The first thing I want you to realise and understand is this: overwhelm is a choice. And you are in charge of how overwhelmed you allow yourself to feel. 

It's going back to being self aware, and really building that mindset and muscle to be aware of when overwhelm starts creeping in - so that you can nip it in the bud.

One thing I can promise you is that we all struggle with overwhelm. It doesn't matter how successful you are, or how long you've been in business for, it will creep up. It's that feeling that you get when you just feel off, you get a tightness in your chest that makes you feel like you can't cope with everything and you need to escape from it. You need to escape from your work.

But there is something you can do about it. Being overwhelmed by work is not actually as terrible as sometimes we make it out to be in our mind because nobody's perfect, and not every day will be perfect. It's about understanding that it's okay to not be perfect. You can allow yourself to course correct and give the day a close and start new the next day. 

It's really important that you can do that without feeling guilty or feeling like you're putting yourself down. Remember that every day might be different in your schedule. You might have a day where you have six hours to work on your business. Then the next day, you might only have two. It's okay to have a changing schedule. It's okay to not have a perfect structure in your business. Most of my days are very different. I have client calls on certain days of the week, some days, I have more calls than others. And I like to have that flexibility! 

So it's really key that you start implementing some of the habits that we've talked about in previous episodes, implementing those specific strategies to make sure that you're staying on track, even if your days are different.

So what can you do to prevent overwhelm?


#1 | Plan Your Day In Advance

Are you sick of me saying this yet? This is critical. It's really important. I'm not going to go into this in too much detail, because I did talk about it a lot in Episode 67. So definitely go and listen to that if you haven't already.

Planning your day, especially planning it the night before, can really help you so much. 


#2 | Pick Non-negotiables

Only pick 1-3 non-negotiable tasks for each day. I cannot stress this enough when I say that momentum leads to motivation. If you don't get something done in your business because you're too worried about multitasking and getting 17 things done in the day, you're probably not going to get any of them done. 

Say you've just got a load of projects that you've not started, have not yet completed. That just creates more stress and anxiety for you and your business. So instead of picking 17, pick 1-3 and every single day. Bonus brownie points if you know those three tasks lead towards your monthly and quarterly goals. 

Let me give you an example of what my current week looks like this week, as I'm recording this episode. 

Monday

  • Record this podcast episode

  • Create a new lesson for the Busy to Boss Academy

  • Other daily to-do's I need to get done including my daily to-do’s, Instagram story, those sorts of tasks

Tuesday

  • Continue writing my social content for the week

  • Continue writing an email sequence for a funnel that I'm working on

  • Client calls 

Wednesday 

  • Client calls 

  • My passive traffic flow system (more about that in another episode if you want) 

Thursday

  • Going through some market research

  • Looking at moving parts of my business over to a different platform 

  • My usual daily to do's 

Friday

  • Check in with my clients

  • My usual daily to do's 

  • Take the afternoon off

Simple, streamlined, and strategic. So, what does that look like for you?


#3 | Create Clear Steps

I don't want to see anything on your to-do list or calendar that says write a newsletter, etc - these really big broad to-do’s that are not actionable steps. You want to be very specific with the tasks that you are going to complete. 

Something like: 

  • Create a Facebook ad campaign number one 

  • Write the first draft of my September newsletter

  • Write the script for my upcoming YouTube video titled X 

This is really important to keep that momentum going by being very actionable with the tasks that you assign yourself. Take a look at your calendar right now or your project management system and look at the tasks that you've written down. How specific are they? If they're not that specific, then go ahead and change that.


#4 | Break It Down

Break it all down. We talked about this a lot, this view of simplifying the projects that you are working on. We want to make sure that you break down really large, complex projects into smaller, more actionable goals so that you can make progress quicker, and have the satisfaction of getting to that next step with your project.

This is honestly one of the biggest mistakes that I see business owners make. They assign themselves 40 different tasks to do in a week. We don't realise that a project takes a lot longer to complete than we usually predict. So always, always overestimate when you are allocating your tasks into chunks of time. 

Always overestimate and really think about how you can write your projects down into little bitty pieces.


#5 | Do Something You Love

Do something you love every single day. You might think this is counterintuitive, but it's actually critical. I want you to add this to your calendar, one of those three non-negotiables that you get done everyday should be something that you actually enjoy.

Once I started implementing this strategy in my business, I started seeing a really amazing increase in my productivity, in my overall happiness in the quality of content I was putting out and in the quality of products that I was putting out. 

Your business shouldn't be run in the day-to-day based on tasks you think you should be doing. It should be run based on the tasks that you enjoy, and that work for you. 

So I make it a non negotiable to every single day do something that I truly enjoy in my business. For me, that's things like: 

  • Creating content 

  • Client calls

  • Working on new projects, new offerings

I love writing blog posts and creating newsletters and recording podcasts and speaking to my clients and creating new courses and content for my Academy that makes me happy. It makes me feel satisfied. 

I really want you to do the same in your business, pick an area of your business that you love working on, and then do one small task related to that area every single day. That brings you a lot of joy.


+BONUS - Set Realistic Time Frames

Now usually whenever we think we can implement a project in a set amount of time, it takes us twice as long to complete it.

This is something that I struggled with a lot when I first started out. When I first started my business and went full-time I joined a group coaching program. I realised that people who were way more successful than me, allotted 3x more time in their project management system to complete the projects in their business. So I started realising that I'm not giving myself enough time to complete these things. No wonder I got to the end of the day and felt like I hadn't accomplished anything. It's because I had these unrealistic expectations of how much further ahead, I should be. 

That's a limiting belief that we all have. We all want to be an overnight success and have instant gratification and it's just not realistic. You have to be able to give yourself time to implement big projects in your business. So instead of creating a new big project for myself every single month, I actually now create quarterly projects that I give myself three months to complete, and I break those costly projects down into micro goals for each month. 

HOW TO STAY PRODUCTIVE

I want to talk to you about how to stay motivated when you feel like progress is taking forever. It's this whole notion of what do you do if you feel like you're chugging along, you're working hard to pursue your business goals but things are just not coming together as fast as you'd hoped expected or wanted them to. 

This is something all of us can relate to whether you're in the beginning stages of your business or you've been doing this for a while; it’s really hard as business owners to balance our expectations because we're usually very impatient people.

Sometimes it doesn't come down to not being patient. Sometimes it comes down to the other side of the spectrum where you're actually too patient and you're not moving forward as quickly as you could be because of, well, because of a million different reasons.

We want to make sure that you have the best tools available to deal with these issues. Have a patient yet impatient mindset.

When you step into the patiently impatient mindset, you're working relentlessly and intentionally towards your business goals. But at the same time, you're realising that the results are going to lag, the results are going to take time. You’re working really hard, but know that you won't see the results right away. The results will never catch up to the rate at which you work. That's just the reality. It's a fact of life. But that doesn't mean that the results aren't actually there. It just takes time.

It is a balance of both sides: If you want to be a successful business owner, you have to have the impatience, the will, the excitement, the momentum, the motivation to keep moving forward every single day and be impatient about the pursuit of progress and success in your business. But then the patient aspect has to come in. It has to teach you that hey, okay, we're working really hard here. We're moving forward. We have this energy and this determination. But you also have to realise that this is a journey and there are sequence steps to success. 

No matter how hard you work moving forward, the results will lag, the results will never be instant. If they were instant, then everyone would be doing this or no one would give up on their way to becoming a successful business owner. 

We all go through this. It’s okay to be working really hard but not seeing results. Make sure that you are balancing patience and impatience to keep a steady pace, but not beat yourself up for missing time milestones.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode:

 
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