Reducing Stress and Overwhelm through Strategic Task Management

It’s the official 300th birthday of this podcast! And to celebrate, I’ve been digging into the archive to put together a comprehensive guide to getting better at managing your time and mastering productivity.

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Episode 300 | Script

Hello, and welcome to episode 300 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

Over the last six years—yes, that’s how long this podcast has been around—I’ve answered around 300 questions sent in by you, and I’ve noticed there are a few common themes where a lot of people struggle. So, in this special episode, I thought it would be a good way to celebrate to give you some tips and tricks you can use every day to solve many of these common issues. 

So, let’s get started.

The first issue many people face is the one of overwhelm. I would guess around 70% of the questions that have come in relate in some way to this problem. 

Now, overwhelming lists are created by us. We make these lists. Sure, other people may have given us all these tasks in the first place, but we accepted the tasks and added them to our lists. So, ultimately, the responsibility for these overwhelming lists rests with us. We could have explained we were already “fully committed”, so to speak, but we didn’t. We said yes, and that has led to a situation where we now have too many tasks and too little time to deal with them. 

The solution here is to learn to say no, but that is too simple, right? So what else can we do to eliminate this problem? 

Well, first is to group all similar tasks together. For example, all your admin tasks can be grouped, equally, and your communications, errands, and deeper-focused work can all be grouped together. You can use tags or labels in your task manager to do this. 

Next is to create time blocks on your calendar for these critical sessions of work. I’ve found admin and communications need to be allocated time each day, but project work and other unique types of work can be spread out throughout the week. For example, I have one project work session each week because I don’t have many projects to work on. I do have a lot of processes to get my work done each week, but unique project work is quite low. You may be different and have multiple projects going on at one time. If that’s the case, ask yourself how much time each week you need to stay on top of your project commitments. 

Grouping similar tasks together and working on them at specific times each day has a number of advantages. Primary of these is you reduce the number of times you are attention shifting, which is a huge drain on your mental energy. It also means at specific times of the day, you know what you should be doing and that reduces the number of decisions you need to make. 

Another advantage is you are working on these every day, and while you may not be able to clear everything each day, you will at least be keeping things under control, and nothing will get missed—which creates issues later. 

I would also add that you want to stop trying to complete everything in a day. Most things do not need to be completed in a day. A lot of overwhelm is created by our false belief that everything must be finished today. While some things may need to be done today, a lot of what you have on your plate doesn’t. 

Doing a little spread out over a few days will result in less stress and overwhelm and give you better results than rushing to complete something in a day. 

However, that means you will need to be doing a weekly planning session to ensure you know when the deadlines are. 

And that leads me nicely to the importance of a weekly planning session. Now, if I am being honest, most of your plans for the week will be torpedoed by Wednesday. And that is perfectly okay. Weekly planning is not about creating a plan you rigidly stick to. That would be impossible—there are far too many unknown emergencies and unexpected deadlines. 

The purpose of the weekly planning session is to give you a clear view of what needs your attention that week. I see it as setting out a number of objectives that enable me to stay on top of my work and my projects and goals. 

In essence, the weekly plan is where you get to decide what needs to be done and allocate sufficient time for those tasks and activities to be done. It goes you a direction and, more importantly, if something new comes in, you can judge whether you have sufficient time or not to complete them. 

With that knowledge, you can confidently explain to someone that you will be unable to do something this week but can do it the following week. (Or whenever) This is a polite way of saying “no”. 

When you don’t do a weekly planning session, you will be less likely to know what’s on your plate and will accept new work and rushed deadlines, which will result in you not doing your more important work, which will lead to more and more backlog. 

I know it’s hard to say no—particularly to your boss or an important client, but if you do not learn to do this, you will never be able to reduce your lists and will always be overwhelmed. 

The art of saying no is really all about learning to negotiate. You’re not really saying no you won’t do whatever you are being asked to do; what you are doing is negotiating the deadline. If you have six hours of meetings today and 200 emails to deal with, you are not going to be able to put together a “quick presentation” for your boss. But you may be able to do it tomorrow afternoon when you don’t have any meetings. 

And always remember, the worst that can happen is your boss insists you do it today. And given that you have no choice, you can then review your plan for the day and decide what you won’t do in order to accommodate your boss. 

Another area where you can quickly become overwhelmed is to create long lists of follow-up and waiting for items. There can be a lot going on here. If you have a long list of tasks you are following up with your team, you have a trust issue, not a follow-up issue. If you ask a team member to do something and you feel the need to add that to a list of follow-up items, that means you do not trust your team member to do their work. Perhaps it’s easier to follow up with them than to address the trust issue, but if you want to reduce your follow-up lists, that is something you will need to do. 

But there is something else here. Waiting for and follow-up items are an indication of an incomplete task. For instance, if I ask my colleague Jenny for a copy of a document, the task is to get a copy of the document. Until I have that document, the task is not complete. The task was not to ask Jenny for the document. Until I have the document, I cannot complete the task; therefore after asking Jenny for it, I simply reschedule the task a day or two in the future. I may add a note in the comments section to say I asked Jenny for the document, but until the document is in my hands, the task is not complete. 

How many waiting-for and follow-up tasks do you have like that? You could radically reduce that list if you remove them. 

The next one causes me a dilemma. As a teacher, I know how important it is to help people develop the habit of collecting everything into their inboxes for processing later. This is a critical first step in developing a good productivity system. Collect everything, then allow yourself a little time at the end of the day to process what you collected. However, the more you collect, the more time you need to spend processing and processing is not doing the work. 

Part of the solution here is to use your inbox as a filter. Rather than treating everything in there as something that needs to get into your system, you want to view this as a place where you get to decide whether something needs doing or not. I generally delete 40% of what I collect because, on further reflection, I realise the task does not need doing. 

Always remember, a task that does not need doing and is deleted is one less thing for you to do. And, if, at some later date, the task does need doing, there will be a trigger, and you can re-add it. Once you learn to get comfortable with deleting, you soon find very few things come back onto your list of things to do. 

The goal is to keep your task list as clean and tight as possible. Only allow things that genuinely need to be done to get into your system. While I encourage you to collect everything, that does not mean everything has to be processed into your system. Look for the things that don’t need to be done and remove those. 

Now, back to the planning. I mentioned earlier the weekly planning sessions; well, equally important are the daily planning sessions. Now, don’t worry; the daily planning sessions are easy. All that’s involved is looking at your calendar for tomorrow and making sure what’s scheduled is realistic and you have not forgotten anything important. Your daily planning can be done in less than five minutes at a push, although it’s a good idea to take a look at your inbox to make sure there are no fires burning in there, and if you have time, clear that inbox. However, cleaning the inbox is less important than knowing what you have planned tomorrow and knowing it’s realistic. 

And that’s how you avoid overwhelm. Matching categories of work with time blocks on your calendar, being consistent with your weekly planning. Learning to say no politely and making sure when you finish the day, tomorrow is set up and realistic. 

Simple things to do; the only question is, will you do it? I can promise you it’s worth it. No more overwhelm and backlogs. Just easily controlled days where whatever is thrown at you, you can handle. 

Thank you for following this podcast. It’s been a wonderful journey, and it’s not stopping. You can email me anytime with your questions. Just put Podcast in the title, and I will be sure to answer your questions. 

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.