dealing with overwhelm

Summary

overwhelm is the cousin of indecision. when too much is on the plate, most people freeze and produce nothing in any area. the move is not to grind harder. the move is to prioritize and execute.

the four-quadrant Eisenhower matrix, plain English:

1. important AND urgent. do these yourself, today, in order.

2. important, not urgent. schedule these. they are usually the highest-leverage work and they’re the first thing to get pushed when the day blows up.

3. urgent, not important. delegate these. if you do not have someone to delegate to, that’s the gap your business is telling you to fix.

4. not urgent, not important. delete these. all of them. without guilt.

the workflow: write down every single thing on your plate. all of it. then triage. in the SEAL teams they call it the closest alligator to the boat. the threat closest to capsizing you gets shot first. not the loudest one. not the most fun one to handle. the one closest to the boat. that mindset breaks the freeze.

Transcript

introduction to dealing with overwhelm and its impact on performance

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. What do you do when you are just completely overwhelmed? This is the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon, and I’m sure you felt this, right? I’m sure you felt completely overwhelmed. Maybe you feel overwhelmed right now.

It comes and goes for me. Sometimes I am completely overwhelmed. Too many things crept in or too many things came to a head all at the same time, and that sense of overwhelm comes. And I don’t hate overwhelm because it causes me some anxiety or some discomfort. The real reason I hate overwhelm is because when I’m actually overwhelmed, I know everything in my life, everything that I’m giving attention when I’m overwhelmed is not getting my best.

discussion on the nature of being overwhelmed and its effect on life and business

It’s not getting my best. I might be able to get a lot of things done, but nothing is living up to my own personal standard. I’m not living up to my personal standard as a father, as a business owner, as an athlete. I’m not living up to any of my standards. I’m just getting things done. And when I’m going through the motions, I start to feel very, very bad.

I don’t feel like myself. I feel like somebody, like a robot, like an alien, just somebody who’s not me. That’s why I hate overwhelm so much, and I’m sure you can relate to not giving your best effort when you do get completely overwhelmed. When I was in the military, I had a commander who used to say, what’s the closest alligator to the boat?

He would ultimately look at our biggest problems, our biggest threats, and be like, okay, this is the one we have to deal with now because there might be a bigger problem that you know is coming your way. It could be a giant alligator by the shore that you feel like is just going to stop you, but you can’t focus on that one.

explanation of the eisenhower decision matrix and its application

You have to focus on the one that’s right next to your boat that might sink you right now. And that could be one of two things as a business owner, or even in life in general. The first could be something that’s just actually time-sensitive, like I have to submit my taxes tomorrow. Yeah, it’s important, but you put it off or whatever, so now it’s a hot item.

It has to get done today. It’s just time-sensitive. But then there are other items of what do I need to do that’s actually the most important thing that needs to get done that’s going to move the needle in my business? Can I let some of these administrative tasks go that aren’t as important and focus on the big things?

And so you can look at this two ways. What’s the biggest alligator that I could conquer that’s going to move the business forward, or which one’s most dangerous because if I don’t do it, I could be in trouble? So you can look at this as preventing bad things from happening or creating good opportunities.

practical tips on prioritizing tasks and scheduling them effectively

And something you can work through or look at if you want to Google it, I’ll try my best to explain it briefly, is the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, if you’ve ever seen it before. There’s basically four quadrants. In the upper left-hand corner of this quadrant, it’s important and it’s urgent. So of the two things I was talking about, important and urgent need to be done now.

If you have a marketing campaign you need to finish, super important, because you have an event tomorrow, now it’s urgent, you need to do it right now. That’s important and urgent. Now if we go down to the bottom right quadrant of the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, if it’s less important and less urgent, delete it.

Just try taking it off your list altogether. Now in the top right is less urgent but important. So it’s important but it’s not urgent, we’re going to schedule it. Just put it on the calendar somewhere. And now if it’s, you know, the bottom left of the quadrant is urgent but less important, you’re going to delegate it, hand it off to a team member.

insights on how to maintain focus and manage tasks during overwhelming periods

And the Eisenhower Decision Matrix is awesome. And it’s kind of the process I go through, I don’t sit there and try and put things in each quadrant. Really what I do is when I get completely overwhelmed, I make the full list. Because a lot of times overwhelm is simply you’re trying to keep too many things in your head and when you’re trying to keep too many things in your head, you start to get a little bit overwhelmed.

And so write everything down, make that full list of everything that needs to happen. Big rocks, big projects, little administrative stuff, just everything that you can think of. Now you’re going to actually triage it. Start to look through this list, you can run it through the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, what’s important and urgent, what’s important and less urgent, all those kind of things.

And then after that, the last step is just going to your calendar, estimating how much time each task is going to take and start putting it on the calendar. And that’s it. And what you’ll realize is the overwhelm might still be there because say you had a list of 37 tasks, well what you’re going to realize is I can only do maybe 2, 3, 4 of these in a day, depending on the day, depending on how much other work you have going on.

Maybe it’s one that you can get done and that’s it. But being very realistic with what you can accomplish is much better than the alternative. And unfortunately, this is probably what 80% of people do when they have complete overwhelm is they shut down. You cannot, cannot shut down when you get overwhelmed.

You have to take this prioritize and execute mindset. What am I going to do right now? What am I going to do? What am I going to schedule? Start putting things on the calendar and then you’ll start to realize, hey, this is a lot, I have a lot going on, but there’s only so much that I can ask of myself or that’s even realistic and so then you can kind of relax knowing, hey, I’m going to try and get all these things done, but it’s going to take a while.

Other things that this does, if you actually run it through the Eisenhower Decision Matrix is you’ll learn a couple of other things. You’ll learn what you really have to do and I’m talking about you as a business owner. If it’s important and urgent, you should probably do it. Now that’s because if it’s important and urgent, I’m assuming it’s a high possibility of making you a lot of money in business and it’s also urgent, so you probably need to do it.

Now the less important stuff, if you’re getting a lot of urgent tasks that aren’t very important that you should be delegating, you might start to realize you need a team and that can expose a lot of, oh, I need to hire someone. Because if you find yourself doing a bunch of unimportant tasks that are urgent though, that means you absolutely need a team, like you are understaffed somehow, somewhere.

Now when you get to the important, less urgent, that’s a good spot. I like things that are important but not urgent. That means, like for instance, if I want to write a book, I want to write a new book, that’s important. That could be important to me, important to the business, it’s not urgent. I don’t need to get anything, I don’t need to get a book done, period.

I don’t need to get it done in the next 30 days. But it’s important, less urgent. That means I can just schedule it, I just put it on the calendar and now that’s where I want most things to be. I don’t even really like important and urgent because if it’s important and urgent, that means I probably messed up somewhere.

But less urgent and important is my favorite spot because we can schedule it, work on it over time. And now what almost no one does is that bottom right quadrant. Not urgent, not important, just delete it. You don’t need those kind of tasks in your life. See if they come back. I do this all the time.

I’ll get this ridiculously long to-do list and then once it gets too long, I’m just like well, let’s see what happens if I just delete it. I’ve done that with email too. Like a lot of people, they think they need a response on something but it takes me a while to respond. So they end up finding the solution on their own and again, I’m not trying to be mean.

I’m not trying to not respond to people, I just get a lot of email and so sometimes if I get too overwhelmed, I’m like well, let’s just archive these 100 emails and see who comes back. Not my favorite thing to do but a lot of times what you’ll find out is people didn’t really need that response as fast as they thought they did.

Or maybe they could find it out on their own. They shot off the email before they fully thought through their issue or their problem. So start thinking about that. If you’re really overwhelmed, could you run some of your tasks through the Eisenhower decision matrix and could you start to triage tasks, understand what’s important, what’s not important, what’s administrative, what’s moving a big rock, what’s a big project, what do you need to be focusing on your time on and then start putting things on the calendar and getting them done and then just relax in the fact that hey, there’s a lot, I’m overwhelmed but we’re moving forward.

We’re moving forward. We’re attacking the closest alligator to the boat and then from there, it’s simple. Try harder.