Two weeks ago I found myself in the unpleasant situation of being overwhelmed. You know how it is – you’re putting in the extra hours, or a client backs away from a deal that you needed that week, and at the same time you receive a fresh set of deadlines and financial pressures are building up.
I just couldn’t help but turn tiny mounds into monstrous mountains in my mind. I panicked over the course of a few days and was not able to get much work done at all. At the end of that week, I realised that I was overwhelmed by work and not finishing my tasks as efficiently as I could have been. I had also let my meditation practise slip in an effort to devote that time to other more pressing things…
It’s really hard for us to try and prioritise and organise our lives when it seems like there are too many things going on at once. This can easily lead to anxiety and depression, or at the very least, will leave you feeling very tired by the time the weekend comes around.
When I finally took a few moments to myself to reflect, I got my perspective back and got myself back on track with these two things:
- Getting back into my meditation routine with an old Zen quote ringing in my mind, “You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes, unless you are too busy, then you should sit for an hour.” I actually ran with a 15 minute productivity meditation at the beginning of each day visualising myself powering through all the tasks on my plate.
- Taking the advice from the book, “The One Thing” by Gary Keller. I had read the book a long time ago and implemented the ideas to great effect initially. But then, over time the one thing became two, two became three and so on until the point of overwhelm hits. So what’s the overriding theme of the book that I have re-implemented? “What is the one thing I can do today such that by doing it, everything else would be easier or even unnecessary?” That’s it. After that, everything else follows in a calm fashion. Once I was clear on my number one priority each day, everything else just fell into place. Sometimes this means just focusing on one task for the day, other times there will be multiple tasks but the most time and energy is focused on that number one priority.
It’s very easy to get caught up in everything that ‘needs’ to be done on a daily basis. But the reality is there aren’t enough hours in the day for us to do everything we want. I am a firm believer in keeping things simple and straight forward. The last 2 weeks has been a valuable lesson in what can happen when I don’t follow that thought.
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