Overwhelmed with Work? Here's How to Prioritize!
We all know that feeling. You wake up and suddenly thoughts about everything you need to do today start overwhelming you like a swarm of wasps, and anxiety is usually not far behind either. You may even find yourself completely paralyzed, not knowing what to do first, and then paralysis gets tucked in by guilt and feeling like you’re not productive enough, capable enough, good enough – I’m sure you get the gist.
I’m going to describe a four step process that will help you decide what to focus on, but first, let’s discuss the types of tasks we all encounter in our work, no matter how important our work may be. I have a threefold classification that I find quite practical. It’s illustrated in the image below.
When panic sets in, we lose perspective. Just recently, I was coaching a surgeon who struggled with this issue. Her work, of course, is important. She saves lives daily. In her desire to be as helpful and as productive as possible, she developed rather unhealthy ways of constantly thinking about everything that she needs to do: surgeries to perform, patients to see, reports to write, hospital administration to get done, then her own kids to spend time with, etc. She came to me always feeling anxious and overwhelmed with occasional panic attacks all caused by her inability to distinguish what’s truly important.
I presented her with the classification above, but at first, she couldn’t use it. To classify things, you need criteria and she simply didn’t have any. Either she got the job done, or she didn’t. Because there were always leftover tasks, her impression was that her job was never done.
Therefore, we needed to start with defining what is inconsequential. I gave her an arbitrary but useful distinction: no matter what you do, half of it has to be inconsequential. She was able to define “inconsequential” as things that don’t kill people, paperwork and things that could be delegated. Then, we proceeded to define the latter two categories from the image above, with another arbitrary but useful distinction: only one thing per day can be urgent.
The process involved the following four steps:
1. Do a massive brain dump every morning. Write down every task you can possibly think of. Let your productivity-obsessed brain work its magic and come up with whatever it wants. Write everything on a piece of paper. It doesn’t matter if it’s yoga, picking up the kids from school, heart surgery, coffee with a friend, texting your mom or filling in insurance papers. EVERYTHING.
2. Eliminate at least half of it. Everything that doesn’t kill people or get you fired is inconsequential. For people who are not this particular client, it’s useful to consider your values, the most important one for that day is the one you judge the tasks by.
3. Once you’ve eliminated the inconsequential, the rest requires more careful consideration. Take two highlighters, a blue and a red one. And then consider the following: only one thing per day should have the kind of urgency that it must be done. Everything else is important to do but the world won’t crumble if you don’t. Highlight the red one and mark everything else in blue. You’ll be tempted to cheat and make exceptions – don’t. Imagine me rolling my eyes at you the second that thought appears in your mind.
4. Once you complete the urgent task, write down what’s left of the blue tasks on another piece of paper and repeat the procedure. Only one thing can be red, everything else blue.
The point of the process: if you do your red task, you have done enough!
When I presented this model, she thought it would make her inefficient to the point where she might even lose her job. Experiencing panic attacks and constantly being anxious, she was willing to give it a try.
The first week, she felt anxious and tense about what she was doing even though she immediately noticed that her ruminations were somewhat less present and that the initial brain dump and classification did help create some clarity into her thinking - and that she had more time to rest. She remained tense because she was still anticipating negative feedback from her colleagues.
I encouraged her to ask for feedback and she did so setting herself up for negative feedback asking her superior: did you notice that I did a lot less work this week? But it was his response that took her aback: “I did”, her supervisor said, “but now you’re doing as much as the rest of us. We are fine with you being human, I’m glad you’re becoming fine with it too.”
When she told me that, I couldn’t help but chuckle.
The method I presented here is rather crude even though it does work well. It’s the simplicity that makes it work. In my subsequent work with this client, we expanded and refined this method to make her not only more focused at work, but also to make the whole scope of her lived experiences more diverse and, therefore, her life more fulfilling without having to give up on her career.
Ultimately, this method isn’t merely about fixing one particular day, it’s about teaching your brain how to classify its thoughts and tasks as a default approach, instead of getting swept away by the sheer number of tasks. For this to happen, with any method, some tweaking and customizing is needed, but always based on what works for you in real life.
Classifying tasks is a matter of repetition and, therefore, a habitual thing. We often consider habits to be behaviors like brushing teeth, but thinking is also habitual. By using this method daily, you are training yourself to see things a certain way and to, consequently, act differently.”Only one thing per day can be urgent” is at first an imposition, something you have to shape your thinking against, but after a while, you approach your day with that idea as your new default: today, I will only do X because only X is that important. Everything else gets marked with a blue highlighter and it’s done if there’s leftover time and postponed if not. When you prime your thinking like that, you know your job is done.
