How to Reduce Overwhelm in One Single Step

Summary. We all experience overwhelm as we go through our days. To-do lists grow and the urgencies pile up. This simple exercise will allow you get out of your head and engaged with what you need to do to make progress.

My mornings are fairly straight forward. After I’ve meditated, exercised and had breakfast, I sit down for a quick journaling session where I write down the day’s most important tasks. After I’ve defined these, I answer three simple prompts to get myself in a positive and prepared state of mind. The last part is time-blocking where I move each piece of the jigsaw into the calendar for execution.

This sets me up pretty well for the day ahead.

Planning Needs Recalibration

In an ideal world the process of navigating the day would be done at this point - only execution would be left - but as most of us have found, with the progressing day there’s a constant recalibration to be done. As we interact with the people and systems we work with (email, notifications etc.), it’s pretty easy to get directed off course, away from our original plans. 

We find ourselves in a place where our to-do lists are longer instead of shorter as the day goes on. We take on actions from meetings. We receive requests in our inboxes. We have to deal with the various balls life throws in our court.

Pretty quickly we can find ourselves overwhelmed by all that’s left to do. We end up a bit like the preverbal rabbit in the headlights, except we’re staring down our to-do lists.

A Deadlock With The To-Do’s

The way most of us try to deal with this is to do everything at once. It sounds a bit crazy, but how many times have we had loads of tasks in progress and convinced ourselves we could multitask? We find ourselves in a scenario where our attention is constantly split between all the stuff, and our stress levels are feeling it.

Sadly this kind of erratic way of working moves us away from our optimal mental state. As we task-switch we experience what psychologists call the Zeigarnik effect – where we continue to think about the various interrupted and unfinished tasks as we work through new ones.

What this means is that we end up less productive, making more mistakes and most importantly, more stressed out.

Depending on how high we feel the stakes are and how well we feel we’re equipped to deal with what’s in front of us, anxiety can start to creep in as we feel unable to move forward. We pull out the Eisenhower 2x2 matrix, but everything feels important. Eventually we’re in our heads in a standoff with our growing lists of obligations.

If we’re not savvy, we can find ourselves burnt out with nothing to show for it.

How We Got Here

The question around how we got here is more of philosophical and cultural one. Today I’m here to talk about the practical immediate next steps you can take to manage this kind of overwhelm, now. I’m here to talk about a tool that’s helped me. A tool that’s allowed me to manage overwhelm and does so to this day. 

And that tool is a simple question. A question that I find focusses the mind and lowers the volume on all the noise.

Focusing Questions and The Power of The Smallest Next Step

There’s a book by Caroline Web called How To have a Good Day. In the book, she talks about the idea of the smallest next step where you ask yourself “What’s the smallest next step I can take to move things forward?” Amongst the benefits of this question, Caroline describes the following “...the smallest step question also reduces the load on your brain by redirecting effort from something it finds difficult (conceiving of an unknown future) to something it finds easy (thinking about an immediate action to take) ...”

This question achieves a few things: It brings back clarity over what we’re trying to do. It gives us a sense of empowerment by focussing our minds on the very immediate minuscule thing we can do to get us back on track. It gives us a sense of direction over what we’re working to achieve and ultimately that’s what reduces the stress and overwhelm.

Another version of this is by Gary Keller in his book The One Thing. He presents it as “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

Cutting Through The Noise

Each of these questions makes the important starkly clear. Each question lowers the volume on the noise and allows a cool clarity to emerge. 

Here’s an example of my to-do list from just last week. My 3 most important tasks were clear at the start of the day. But the “emerging” items list kept getting longer. A bit like a fog, each new item on the list made my most important intentions for the day less clear to see. It could have been easy to become overwhelmed. But asking these focusing questions allowed me to get back to a cold clarity.

Amongst all the urgencies, it became clear that the one thing I needed to do that day, that would make everything else easier, was to finish my programme review.

Accepting There’ll Always Be More To Be Done

What I’ve found since I’ve applied these simple questions to my daily navigation process is that overload induced overwhelm doesn’t need to stop us from moving things forward. Just like any other emotion we can deal with it positively, if we have the right set of tools and frameworks.

There’ll always be more to do. More that can be done. And always more that will need to be done. 

As written by David Allen in Getting things Done – the key is to feel as good about what you’re not doing as about what you are doing at that moment. A path to that place is through asking the focusing questions.