Feeling Overwhelmed?
Welcome to the club! Is your special hangout the firehose of information that never seems to turn off? Having too many people around you (or going to too many events)? Too many things to do at work and/or at home, or racing thoughts?
I’m betting you feel overwhelmed at times by at least one of those things, if not more. Overwhelm functions as a distraction, which makes it hard to have a productive day. Sometimes it’s hard to deal with in the moment… but you could also try preventing overwhelm in the first place.
Are you always going to be successful in avoiding it? Not by a long shot, unless you move to some rural farmstead somewhere with no internet and no need to work a job. But you can reduce your chances to get overwhelmed and burned out.
When it happens, in the moment try doing some breathwork, intentionally breathing slowly and from your belly to help your brain turn off the stress signal. Or anything else that can physically calm you. Hopefully though, you won’t need these tactics all that often.
In order to reduce overwhelm, you’ll need to be intentional about your time management skills and what’s essential for you to accomplish. Not trying to squeeze out more from every second you’re working, but instead allowing yourself more time than you think you need for tasks.
Deal with information overload for a more productive day
You may or may not be old enough to remember when there were three channels on TV, plus the public broadcasting system that might or might not come in clearly on your TV’s antenna. Then a fourth one came along, and then there was cable.
But even at first, cable TV wasn’t that overwhelming. I clearly recall (I was living in New Jersey when the show South Park debuted) that Comedy Central shared a channel with a home and garden network. I think midnight to noon was home & garden and noon to midnight was Comedy Central, or something like that. They didn’t have hundreds of channels back then.
And even though news channels and financial news channels existed at some point, no one thought of watching them all the time. Obviously, at the time you couldn’t get news on your phone either.
All of this is by way of saying you shouldn’t feel bad if you’re overwhelmed by all the info out there. What we seek is knowledge, not info, but the environment is just a firehose of info.
You have to be the one to set boundaries. First of all, unless you work for the news, there is absolutely no reason to have news notifications. There’s news all the time all over the world, and you don’t need to know every time something happens. After all, the vast majority of the time, there’s absolutely nothing that you can do about it.
You don’t need to leave the news channels open in your office, especially you, financial advisors. You don’t allow the crawl to determine your own decisions, if you’re any good, so don’t let it influence your clients either.
If you need to watch the news, there are always the local channels. Maybe you could watch the 11:00 news only, or whatever your preferred news-watching time is.
There’s no reason for you to constantly have a browser tab open to the news, or your phone to the news. It’s only a distraction, not knowledge. Your phone should absolutely never be the first thing you look at in the morning, news or otherwise – seriously, get an alarm clock instead of using your phone.
You can curate your feeds. You might choose to get a daily digest from your local paper online, or from trusted sources.
(While we’re on the topic of trusted sources… just going to mention that Fox has several times defended itself in court by saying that no one watching their shows could claim it’s news instead of entertainment. The documents found in discovery in the Dominion lawsuit make it very clear that Fox considers itself an arm of the right-wing in politics. In other words, if you want news, Fox won’t give it to you. I know a lot of you watch the channel, but just understand you’re watching propaganda.)
The firehose of info is headed your way, and it’s your job whether you like it or not to come up with a strategy for diverting it or converting it into a trickle. Once you’ve figured it out, you’ll be surprised how much more of your brain is available for thinking.
Is “peopling” getting in the way of a productive day?
This one may be more geared towards introverts than extroverts, though I think sometimes extroverts need to take breaks too. I did this to myself when things started opening back up after the worst of the pandemic (as far as we know anyway). I was so excited to see all the people and do all the things that I loaded up my calendar.
Boy, was that a mistake.
Most places have plenty of opportunities for networking, events, meeting other business people, and so forth. During certain times of the year, or maybe even all year, you could have a “peopling” event every single day.
And maybe there’s a little fear of FOMO especially for entrepreneurs: if you don’t go to ALL THE THINGS then you’re going to miss out on a key connection that you could have made.
But is that true? Maybe there are some people who will only ever appear at one event in your life, who would be the absolute perfect client and/or referral partner for you. And if you don’t go that one time, they disappear forever. Maybe. But more likely, you’ll see them at another event, since people who network tend to go to multiple events. You’ll find other clients and referral partners along the way.
As always, it’s about setting the right boundaries for you. And prioritizing. Who are your ideal clients (if you think it’s “everyone”, you’re wrong), and where can you find them? What events do they attend? Skip the others.
Set your calendar ahead of time. If you can only handle one event a week, then prioritize and schedule only one event per week. Belong to a club or organization that you go to regularly? Put them in your calendar at the beginning of each year when they send out the schedule. If there’s one that always happens on the first Friday of the month, schedule that in as a repeating event.
Is your to-do list too-long?
If your daily list is over five items, it’s too long. Note that I said daily list – you might have a “want to do” list that has many items on it, but looking at it all the time makes you feel overwhelmed. There’s no way you can get through it all in one day, so when you look at your giant list and see how few items you crossed off, you feel like you’re not getting anything done.
A smaller daily list forces you to prioritize and be realistic. Unless some tasks are genuinely tiny and can be completed in 15 minutes no matter what, you can’t get more than three to five important tasks done in a day.
You might want to break up your longer list into a couple of smaller ones too. What is likely to get accomplished in the near term? That could be one shorter list. Again, you have to be realistic.
Have you ever watched the show Hoarders? So many are old men who have hundreds of “projects” lying around. Which is why they “need” a stack of materials that reaches the ceiling. Women do this sometimes too.
But there’s no way for all of those things to get done, mathematically. Time is finite for each person. The hoarders are not going to get to the 600 projects they have lying around, nor are you likely to get to the hundreds of items on your list.
What’s reasonable, what’s doable, and most importantly, what are the things that you genuinely want to do? Yes, there are a few things that you may need to take care of out of a sense of obligation or duty. But make sure you’re still leaving time for the pleasurable things.
A few things you do need to have most days of the week that feed your brain (and therefore your productivity):
Sleep, 7-8 hours a night
Brain breaks during the day
Physical movement
Nourishing food
Time with loved ones
Play time
Deal with racing thoughts and reclaim your time
Everyone has a lot to think about, and that’s why we all end up walking into the kitchen (or other room of your choice) and saying blankly, What did I come in here for? Your brain prefers to singletask, and the more you can focus, the less your thoughts race.
Writing down your thoughts, especially before bed, is a great way to calm those thoughts. You’ve got everything written down so your brain doesn’t feel like it has to hold on to everything. When you write (not type) everything, you won’t have so many “What about this?” and “What about that?” thoughts.
To that end, it’s a good practice to end every workday by writing down the priorities for the next day. Not 10 or 20 things, because those aren’t priorities, they’re just a list of stuff to do that you probably can’t finish. Instead, what are the handful of things that will move you forward? Write those down.
You can also try some form of meditation to learn how to observe your thoughts instead of getting caught up in them. Then, when your mind starts to churn, you can observe it and by getting above the fray you won’t be so troubled by all the thoughts.
Recap (tl;dr):
It’s easy to be overwhelmed. There are some practices you can try in the moment, but it’s better to prevent the overwhelm from happening. Whichever form is most bothersome for you, the key is to be mindful and intentional about setting up systems to prevent it.
Overwhelmed by distractions? Take the quiz to determine your Distraction Type and how to fight it.