How to Go from Overwhelmed to Productive
When I first found out that I was pregnant, I started suffering from insomnia. No, not because of any physiological discomfort, but because I couldn’t get my brain to shut down. I would lie awake, tossing for hours, feeling overwhelmed with all the things that needed to get done before the baby gets here and worrying about how I was ever going to do them all. I would continue worrying during the day, to the point when I was feeling utterly miserable, and because of the sheer magnitude of this “to-do” list in my head, I wasn’t getting anything done because I simply didn’t know where to begin.
Very often, the most difficult part of of getting things done is actually moving from anxiety to action. I knew that I had to change my approach if I wanted to get anywhere, so here is what I did to get out of that unproductive state:
- Communicate: It is easy to feel overwhelmed when you feel that you are carrying the entire burden yourself, but you don’t have to. Share your worries with someone close to you - simply doing that will make you feel a lot better. And guess what? You don’t have to always do everything yourself. It’s OK to ask for help. When I shared my feelings with my husband, he said “Tell me what I can do to help”, which immediately eased my anxiety because now I knew had someone who was willing to share the burden with me.
- Write it down: When you try to keep everything in your head, it’s easy to become overwhelmed because there seem to be a million different things that you need to be doing, and as soon as you start working on one, another one pops into your mind and you can no longer concentrate on the task at hand. Before you can be productive, you need to create a clean slate in your mind by doing a “brain dump” - writing everything down on paper. Simply take a large pad or a sheet of paper, and start writing things down as they come to you. It doesn’t need to be in any particular order, or any particular level of importance. Even the smallest tasks such as returning a phone call should go on that list. I did that by sitting down with my husband, and it literally took not more than ten minutes to do. Everything went on that list: things to buy, appointments to make, home improvements to do, emails to write. At the end, when I could no longer think of anything else that needed to be doing, the list looked to be about 50 items long - still a lot, but actually much shorter than I had imagined it to be during those sleepless nights of tossing and turning! The best thing about doing that was the feeling of relief. I knew now that I wouldn’t forget to do anything important, because it was right there on the list, and for the first time, it all seemed quite manageable.
- Assign owners and due dates: As the next step, go down that list that you’ve just made and assign owners to each of the items. In our case, it was either my husband or me, or both of us. Write down the owner next to each task. At the same time, write down the timing for getting it done (for example, “before July 31″). This way, you won’t miss an important deadline and will be able to track your progress against those milestones.
- Make it visible: One thing is to write things down, and another is to actually remember to do them. Make sure that you have this action list visible to you every day. You can do it by either putting specific tasks into your calendar or posting the entire list where you will see it every day, such as the bathroom mirror or the fridge (which is what we did).
- Get to action: Now, there are no more barriers to getting all of those things taken care of - just start going down the list and getting things done! As you do them and cross them off the list, you will get a tremendous feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. Aim to do at least one thing (or something that moves you towards getting one one thing done) every day. If you do it together with another person, you can even have a little friendly competition to see who can cross items off their list faster. The most important thing is that you will no longer feel overwhelmed and anxious - instead, you will feel in control and finally have peace of mind.
I have shared these tips with you because they really worked for me. We are now about one-half of the way done with the original list, and now as soon as something new comes up that needs to get done, I simply add it to the list. No longer do I carry all those things in my head and let them worry me. Now that I have all my action items in one place, I control my to-do list instead of the other way around.
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