How to Stop Feeling Overwhelmed

Feeling overwhelmed sucks. Here’s how to stop feeling overwhelmed both in the short term and in the long term.

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[Pacorix]

The quality of your videos and their content grows exponentially over time. Congratulations!! 😀

[MarcusHoffmanMarcusRoyHoffman]

Thanks again for sharing Peter! I was feeling a little overwhelmed looking for this video, and now see a way to improve this. 😊

[themaddrummerofficial]

Your production quality has really come a long way (I subscribed years ago). Your lighting, camera, and audio settings are really dialed in. Oh yea... and great content as always. 🙂

[cassandrascott]

Thank you!! I have everything repeating and my say was already chosen for me—bogged me down because I was always “behind”. Will change that and choose my tasks for today myself😊

[smacklemore]

Awesome tip about temporarily getting rid of the organization in the Today view in Things 3 so you can reorder the tasks. Thanks!

[tspmcfarlane]

Another great video, Peter. A really nice watch of reframing overwhelm as s largely internal thing - makes it feel like something we can tackle. I also love your short-term fix strategy - I’ll be trying that next time I feel overloaded.

[sabyasachisengupta]

Amazing video Peter. Always fresh ideas and easy on implement.

[freepat]

One other benefit to focusing on the easier tasks to create some breathing room that I hadn't thought of until watching this video - there's a certain level of anxiety around knowing that you haven't called that person or emailed that other person. Knowing it would only take a few moments, but not having done it yet because there are "more important things" can feel overwhelming. Also, the optics of your boss or coworkers asking if you've done one of these easy items can make you look unorganized, undisciplined, or even incompetent because it is an easy slam dunk task.

On the contrary, if your boss asks about the big daunting project and it's not complete, it's somewhat to be expected considering it will take a lot of time and involves multiple people. If there is a big deadline looming for this task, obviously that's a different story.

Not saying don't do important things, but sometimes it's the unimportant things that weigh our subconscious down and in some cases can be the most visible to our teams.

[geoffreywarrener]

Been shuffling task managers for years. Have found the interaction of SIRI in iphone is now so mature, a quick verbal instruction 'Remind me to pay electricity bill on first of March..' and on the output something like 'Show me the reminders for the next two weeks..' etc adequately covers my routine requirements without touching a screen. On the reference side if something requires saving a shortcut stores to devonthink. The phone utilities have reached the stage for my needs I dont need to lug my laptop around. For what its worth...

[FlyingDogArt]

Hi Peter, the video was really great. Thank you for putting it together.

[elaczi]

Good video Peter. Always enjoy your videos. Keep em coming!

[poland]

wonderfully explained as always peter, thanks for the inspiration to stop being lazy and get real meaningful work done

[Abdullah-zlub]

When is it best to sort items by group? I organize things based on areas order instead. What about tags such as morning?

[Abdullah-zlub]

Do you think tasks time blocking is needed? (Inside a calendar and not only inside a task manager)

[none]

I have a little "breathing room" contribution. If you've amassed 100-1, 000 tasks, and you're trying to reconcile them, and you're wondering what to group/categorize them by, here is one less scheme to consider. Priority. NONE of them are high-priority. The high-priority tasks are the ones you've already dealt with. The ones you left to accrue in your inbox are low-priority crap.

[Abdullah-zlub]

Why things 3 over any other app? What it has extra over others? Also no calendar view at all

[timpurcell]

This is an interesting approach of picking from a huge back-log list. I have done as you suggested and put everything into a list.
It was 15 pages long! I use an outline mode in Word to collect and arrange these items.

This list will take me about the next 8 hours to parse and pick tasks for today. So, I don't think I will be doing much task completion today! How do i do this parsing each day? I guess I need to say no to many things on my back-log lists.

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