Are you drowning in work, or just drowning in thoughts about the work?
Your body aches as if it belongs to a soldier who’s used the sharpened end of a toothbrush to defeat a platoon of highly trained commandos. Your brain feels like it has been dragged through wet cement for a hundred kilometres.
And it’s only Tuesday.
Me after going through my job list at the beginning of the day
Work has a surprising way of mutating and multiplying while you are busy working.
This is especially true if you are a solopreneur. Most days, I used to go to bed overwhelmed by the work I had left unfinished—or, even worse, untouched.
Then I read an article by Alex Mathers that made me realise I was being tormented by two different problems:
Feeling overwhelmed is a state of mind. Being overworked is a logistics issue.
Overwhelmed is when I feel the weight of the work.
I fall into a whirlpool of ‘what-if ’ scenarios:
Will I be able to finish in time?
What if I miss the deadline?
What if I cannot raise the invoice this month?
Did I really make the right decision starting on my own?
Overworked is when I have taken on more than I can practically, physically execute.
It usually happens when I have said yes to too many things, completely underestimating how much sleep I actually need.
That was my aha moment: being burnt out because I had taken on more than I could handle is not the same as feeling burnt out because I was thinking too much about an unusually heavy workload.
Obviously, this required two entirely different solutions.
Now, when the pressure mounts, I stop and ask: Is it the feeling about the work, or is it the amount of work?
If it's the feeling:
I break the job that’s stressing me out into small, manageable tasks.
If the project is to build a website, I break it down page by page.
Then I tell myself, "Okay, for today, I will just figure out the above-the-fold section of the home page." Everything else is ‘Tomorrow Vinod’s’ problem.
Usually, once the momentum kicks in, I realise that I had no real reason to worry.
If it's the logistics:
I note down every single job due this month.
I prioritise the work that has the highest probability of bringing either fame or fortune. (If it doesn’t bring either, I make a note to find out why it's on my plate.)
I segregate that shortlist of jobs into:
Needs to be done in 5 days.
Needs to be done in 2 weeks.
Needs to be done in 4 weeks.
After that I refuse to look at the 2-week and 4-week columns for the next five days.
I just execute the 5-day list until it’s all done. By the end of those five days, I am usually feeling like Iron Man who has just put on the Infinity Gauntlet.
Is this a flawless solution? No. But it works for me most days.
If you have a tactical hack that helps you manage your workload without losing your mind, let me know in the comments.