I know that we always want something more. We need to do more, to create more, to produce more, and so on. I don’t think that someone else asks for us about that, but that’s our own expectation. It is in our nature that we will never be satisfied with the current situation. So, what do you need to do if you feel overwhelmed by the work?
And, that’s ok, until we start feeling overwhelmed by our own pressures for more. The most dangerous part is that we can lose more of what we have now in such a situation where we pressure ourselves.
On the other side, if we can become more productive, we can do more things in the same period.
1. Accept the Destiny That You Can’t Done Everything You Want if You Feel Overwhelmed by the Work
We want to do many things. But, can we do everything that becomes part of our wants? Probably, we can’t. Why? First, we are limited with the number of hours each day. Second, our productivity will impact how many things we can do on an everyday basis. Also, the quality of the work done is something that will impact what and how many things we can do.
So, there are many things that you will need to take into consideration when it comes to how many tasks you can finish in a specific time frame.
If you want to stop feeling overwhelmed with the work, you need to accept the reality that you can’t do everything that you want to do. How quickly you accept that you will say no to many things, you will start delegating those things.
When you accept this reality, you have three options:
- Say no, and remove many things from your to-do list that you think are obsolete or not so much important for you and your company.
- Postpone some of the things for tomorrow, next week or next month according to the importance for you.
- Delegete some of the things to your team members.
2. Pay Attention to Other Things in Your Life
I know that work is essential not only for work but also for our personal life. However, sometimes we can really be fanatics when it comes to our work. Simply, life goes on, and it doesn’t depend on you.
You need to pay attention to other things in your life if you want to escape being overwhelmed by work.
If you feel like you are overwhelmed by the work, the quality of your work will not be on an expected level. So, If you feel excellent and satisfied with what you are doing, you will be more productive in your work.
Because of that, you can do several things:
- Spend some time with your family.
- Talk with your friends, don’t think about the work you need to do.
- Go outside in the nature and spend several hours with people you want.
3. You Only Have 24 Hours in One Day
We have limits on how many things we can do in our available time. It’s just 24 hours in one day, and we can’t increase the time we have. But, we need other stuff except for the work.
This means we need organization, productivity, and systems that will help us to finish our work without being overwhelmed by the work.
You must organize yourself to do what you like most, be happy, and live the life of your dreams in that timeframe of 24 hours daily.
You can do the following things:
- Analyse what you work and start measure how prodictive you are. You want to bring continious improvement of your own productivity.
- Build systems in your small business that will help you and your team members to be more productive. The systems are also something that will help your business to not be totally dependent on you and only you.
- Implement the systems and use them in everyday operations in your small business.
4. You Can’t Have Second Chance in Life
Sometimes our behavior is in such a way that we can have a second chance. In life, we can’t expect a second chance. We can’t change something that we have done from yesterday. We can only minimize the consequences today of what we did yesterday.
You are the most important person for yourself. If you are happy with your life, your family also will be happy. Don’t allow your work to take away from your ideal life. It would be best if you become much more organized.
So, implement procedures that will ensure that you will do everything right from the first time.
5. Prioritize Your Tasks
Everything that you want and everything that you do is not with the same weight. You have different priorities. If you want to escape being overwhelmed by the work, you need to keep up with tasks that are the highest priority for you—everything else you can delegate, postpone or ignore.
- Analyze what you are doing on a daily, weekly, and monthly level.
- Group all your tasks into very important, important, medium important, and not important categories.
- Give priority to very important things as something that will need to be done immediately. Try to delegate some of the medium and not important things and delete some of the not important things.
6. Ensure Completing First Priority Tasks
You need to ensure your tasks with the highest priority are must-do things for you. When you complete your high priorities, then you are free to do everything else that you want.
7. Learn How to Say No If You Feel Overwhelmed by the Work
It is a challenging task to say no. But, it would be best if you learned through exercising and practicing to say no in a different situation. If you learn, you will not be feeling overwhelmed by the work.
8. Start Delegating, You are Not the Only One
If you analyze your to-do list, you will probably see tasks that are repeatable, easy to do, and not so crucial for your work. If you can predict that they will repeat and know what you need to do, why can you not delegate such a task?
- Analyze all the tasks, especially from the group of moderate importance and not important tasks.
- Check if there are procedures for the implementation of some of those tasks. If there are no procedures start creating them the first time you work on them.
- Delegate these tasks for which you have created procedures.
9. Organize Your Workflow
Sometimes because of our disorganization, we will need more time to do things that we usually can do it quickly. Do you find yourself in a situation when you can do something for one hour, and you finish that in two hours? Why? Because you are not ready and organized to do those things in the right way.
When you only work on the right things, the second is to improve workflow to ensure you will finish your work in the right way.
Think about the following things:
- Clean workplace, so you can find quickly and easily anything you need for your job.
- Implement time blocks that will tell you when you will work and what type of work you will do in each of the time blocks.
10. Do Only What You Want to Do
If you look again in your to-do list, you probably will find tasks that make you very frustrated. You need to get rid of such a task as soon as possible.
