There are times when all the careful preparation comes together, and the empty inbox begins to fill with projects and invitations and conversations and hundreds of little tasks.
And then a week or two later, you realise that every spare minute between now and the Royal Wedding (yup, I’m in the UK) is accounted for, several times over. Which for me anyway is when the glee of ‘ooh look, I’m busy’ starts to shade into a rising whine of panic.
It’s overwhelming.
All that stuff I said I’d do. All those things I committed to, because they were a (very) long way in the future and I forgot that there would be a time when they became real things that required hours of time.
(Like writing a CustomerLove post.)
And that in parallel, there would be new stuff and other unplanned emergencies. Like your child’s carefully planned Easter camp falling apart when she appeared to dislocate her shoulder running around. (Everything’s fine now.)
A very tiny plan of action
I feel I need to break the rhythm here and bring you something poetic, like a wonderful insight or great advice for dissolving this kind of bottleneck.
Truth is, I’m still right in the panic, riding it through. I worry that you can’t really become a goddess of online business – or any business – if actual busy-ness induces sick anxiety.
My husband sat me down yesterday and we worked out a care plan. This project goes here. These hours get spent on this customer. Then you take a break, and you don’t go off and drink a bottle of wine with dinner. Instead, you keep taking small actions, you make sure you connect. You take care of yourself. Things start again.
The sand starts to flow through the bottle. The traffic starts to move.
A small breakthrough
If I’m doing anything right, it’s staying with it and working through it, rather than getting totally thrown off-course, or spending the few spare hours in pointless self-hatred. Sitting calmly in the traffic, working it through, and waiting for clear space again.
Do you have too much going on? Are you feeling just fine with that, or are you running ragged? How do you deal with overwhelm when it happens? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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The overwhelm go bette when I learned that “Later” is an acceptable response. Taking the time to make a list, prioritizing it, then taking something off it helps. Like so many people, I make superhuman, gargantuan to-do lists. Paring them down to manageable makes a big difference.
I am wishing I could bottle some of my efficiency for the times that I’m not under pressure. 🙂 But making a list and then a plan has helped a lot.
Part of my day to day life is always having something going. I’m building one of my businesses around it, and honestly, that’s my preferred state of existence.
That said, even I can get in over my head. In this instance, my health took a nosedive and I lost a couple of weeks of time when getting through the day was just too much effort. It took me a bit to acknowledge the problem, but once I did I started cutting. The commitments I could push back a month or so, I did. I put one blog on hiatus and took in guest posts to cover the second. I (somewhat unwillingly) told a couple of my professors that my chronic conditions were flaring, and that I might need a bit of leeway as the end of the semester approached. The next two weeks are still going to be really tough, but I feel like I can actually do it now, and I’ll be able to circle back to get everything I pushed off once May starts.
I don’t really notice this stuff until it really starts to pile up. One of the things that I’ve reluctantly let go is keeping up with my main blog. Right now I will get more traction from doing all the other things that need to be done, and it will still be there.