Exhausted? I know how you feel.
Do you get those days when there is just so much to do you feel totally stressed and end up curling into the foetal position hoping it will all go away?
Have you had a day when you have so many great ideas that your brain feels like it will explode and you don’t know which one to start with first?
Do you have days when you only have a relatively small amount to get done but you simply can’t muster the energy or enthusiasm to get them finished?
And to be fair, who hasn’t! We all have days – some more than others – when we become overwhelmed by the tasks we have to do. We look at the clock and despair of ever getting it done in time. We wonder if our family will remember what we look like because we have been spending so many hours in the office. We look back fondly to those days when we were employed and used to clock off at 5 o’clock and we didn’t have a care in the world. Or did we?
Reality check
- Clocking off at 5pm was what the world used to do in the 80’s, it doesn’t happen for the employed or the self employed anymore. We all have access to emails 24/7 and often feel compelled to ‘check in’ at unsocial hours outside of the magic 9-5.
- Employed people can get more stressed than your average business owner because they have no control over their working life – you do.
- Everyone has the same 24 hours – we just need to prioritise.
- We are the cause of the overwhelm and stress.
What I try to do when I feel a panic attack approaching – you know, the feeling when you look at your ‘To Do’ list and realise that if you go without sleep for the next week you can just about fit it all in – is to follow Brian Tracy’s advice and prioritise. By labelling the list into categories A, B and C, with A being the money producing wins that need to be completed, B the innovations for your business and C the maintenance, you end up looking at your tasks in a new light. You then need to split the A’s into A1, A2, A3 in order of importance.
By doing this you can really see where your priorities lie. Quite often by focusing on the money making projects you can generate income to outsource which will in turn take away some of the C tasks.
By spending 5 minutes at the beginning of your day analysing what you have to do rather than simply ploughing through your tasks in the order of who shouts the loudest will put you back in control. I don’t know about you but when I feel out of control my stress levels soar and that puts an added pressure on me, all of my own making.
Look towards the small win – review your day and celebrate the small wins you achieved. This helps you to realise that you aren’t on that treadmill, you are making a difference and you aren’t constrained by some else’s rules and limitations.
Would you want to be in that rat race again? Or do you want to win your own race.
It is the small things that have a huge impact. Give it a try and let me know how you get on.
Tags: balance, organize, planning, priorities, prioritise, productive
Filed under: Success
I’m feeling old – today I bought reading glasses, and I’m not even 50!!!
