Stop Overwhelming Yourself: A Practical Guide to Getting Stuff Done

Hi and welcome to this episode of the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. My name is Angela Mondor, also known as the Geeky Girl. I want to talk to you about something really cool today. Now, a couple of weeks ago, I talked about SMART goals and I know not everybody likes SMART goals, but I did take a different take on it.

So you could look, go back and listen to that one. That was a couple of weeks ago. And one of the things that we talked about during that episode was the reason why sometimes our goals don’t come to fruition, sometimes things that we plan don’t happen and maybe we feel bad because we think we’ve failed when really there’s a lot more reasons why things happen.

Okay. So led me to think that, you know, this would be a really great thing to create for you as a worksheet or a way for you to look at your tasks a little differently. Two of the major pieces that we talked about during that episode was about when things don’t go well. according to plan. And sometimes what that means is that we didn’t take the action steps that we thought we were going to, or we said we were going to in order to move our needle closer to the end goal, or to actually achieve the goal that we set.

Now sometimes when we’ve not taken the action, so we’ve said, oh, I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do that, and I’m going to do that. One of the things that can occur is that you just have too much else on your plate. There’s so much going on that you just don’t, you literally don’t have the time for it.

That’s one reason why you might not be taking the actions in your business that you would like to take in order to hit different goals. Another thing that we talked about is the concept of setting yourself these actions and really hating them, let’s be honest, there’s a lot of things that we have to do in our business on a daily and a weekly, monthly, yearly basis.

And some of those things are just downright terrible. And for me, I might really enjoy tasks that you find absolutely horrid and vice versa. So it’s important for us to understand ourselves so that we can make better decisions. In her business for ourselves. So this is going to help you. I’m going to give you some flow, some ideas so that when you do you know, if you decide to say, Hey, you know what?

Maybe she’s got a point. I want to check out this worksheet that she’s got. Once you download it, you’ll have the background that’ll help to support yourself as you move through this worksheet. To help you with these things. Okay? There’s lots of different ways to do this. When we are talking about overwhelm, typically the overwhelm is you know, we talk about it, lots of people say it’s procrastination, but really, really procrastination isn’t as bad as you think it is.

A lot of times procrastination can simply be the symptom of what’s actually going on. So procrastination could simply mean you just don’t know where to So for example, let’s take something easy like Writing a blog post. Most people understand writing a blog post, you’ve got to choose the title or what the, you know, the content is, then you have to kind of put an outline together of what you want to cover during that blog post, then you have to write it, you or somebody else is to ask to edit it, right, then it has to be posted to the website, there’s pictures that need to be created, you want to share it on social media, there’s a bunch of steps.

If I just said to you, yeah. Go write a blog post, you might not know where to begin. Maybe you could write the blog post, but you wouldn’t know how to post it on social, you know, maybe you wouldn’t think about posting it on social media. Or, you know, there’s a bunch of different steps in there, maybe you’d miss a few.

Maybe you’d post it and whatever. So, it’s really important for us to break our tasks down into chewable chunks, mouthfuls. Because if you look at a task and think, ah, that’s too heavy, that’s too much, I don’t even know where to begin, then instantly you’re going to put it on the shelf. You’re just going to put it away.

Our brains are good at that. It’s like yeah, too hard, okay, over there. Or you’ll sit and stare at it for hours and hours and you’re wasting the same amount of time. Maybe you start scrolling social media because you’re frustrated. Those are just indications of things that you can change to make things different.

So one person might want to break down a task into 50 pieces and another person might say, you know what? I only need to break that down into 10 pieces. Again, that’s totally up to you as to how far down you need to go down that rabbit hole. So we’re going to talk about some tools that you can use to help you kind of dig through that rabbit hole inside the worksheet, but ultimately what you want to do is you want to take one task and break it down into all the pieces that make sense.

To you in your brain. Now, if you have a team, the next step is to take it to your team. If they’re helping you with this and say, Hey here’s how I break it down. Here’s your part. Is that broken down enough for you or too much? Or you can figure out what that looks like for your entire ecosystem of your team to make sure everybody has what they need in the breakdown of the task.

Notice how I said team. Even if you don’t have a team now or maybe you’re like, I need help, but I don’t need full time help. That’s totally okay. Your help does not need to be full time. Can I say that again? Your help does not need to be full time. You can hire somebody to come in and do small jobs.

Maybe you have somebody who does accounting for you quarterly or once a month or once a year. That’s not somebody that’s full time, that somebody comes in and does a job for you at a specific time. Maybe you have somebody that comes in, does graphic design for a specific item during, you know, your year or something.

It doesn’t have to be somebody that does things. on a full time basis. So just because they’re coming in once in a while doesn’t mean to say that they’re not also going to you know, be helpful here, okay? And so don’t shy away from oh, I can’t hire somebody full time so therefore I’m not going to hire anybody and I’m just going to suck it up.

That’s a recipe for disaster. There is no way that I could do all the things inside this business that I do My team. I’ll underline that because there’s no way I could get it all done. It’s impossible. And as it stands, We are all pretty busy on this team. So, one of the pieces of this worksheet is about taking that task and breaking it down so it makes sense to you.

So you have all the different steps. This is really helpful and saves you a lot of time. Essentially what you’re doing is you’re building a process or an SOP. You know, right? Scary. But the best thing about this is that next time you go to do this task, you don’t have to go, how do I start this? You can go back to this because you can use this over and over again to do the same task.

When I was when I first started this business and you know, several years in even there was something I had to do and I know I only had to do it a few times a year. It’s probably something that was quarterly, but. I can’t remember exactly, but I remember sitting down to the task and, Oh, okay. Where do I get that information from?

And how do I get it over to there? And where’s this information? I wasted so much time in just that mindset of where is all this stuff. So as soon as I understood. the value of making sure that the process was outlined. The next time I had to do the task, I picked up the process and went, Oh, I need to go here, here, here, here.

And it was done so much quicker. Okay. So yes, it’s a bit of a pain in the butt to do it to begin with. And maybe it takes you some time and you think it’s taking me longer than to get it done. But next time you do it, it’ll be even faster, I promise. Okay, so once you break it down, now you can look at all of the pieces to that task, and you can say, well, I like doing this one, I like doing this one, I have to do this one, I hate doing this one.

You can look at the different pieces of that task, and then now is where delegation comes in. So if there is something that you’re not good at, or you just simply don’t have time for, you can start to look, oh, here’s something that I could delegate. Or get another team member to do. Here’s something that would make sense for me to outsource.

You can actually see those items really, really clearly. And now you can start to build that profile together. Like, I need someone who can edit my blog posts. Oh, cool. You know what else I need? Is somebody to I’m going to be able to edit my emails. Oh, that’s the same. I could probably use the same person for that.

You can start to put together what you’re looking for, for somebody to come help you in your business to outsource. So there are a lot of different ways to do that and you don’t need. Download our worksheet in order to happen. We’re just going to walk you through the process to help you out a little bit and give you some tips and tricks in there.

But you can certainly take what I’ve told you now and go forward and go do it with a piece of paper and a pen. You can pick up your remarkable even, and right on there. This is one of my favorite, favorite, favorite tools. Writing the word document, whatever floats your boat. Of course, writing processes and having the.

The tasks, we break those out into clickups so that we can create templates in there to reuse over and over again. But however it is that you’re going to get the stuff out of your head, get it out of your head take the, the actual what I have to do and break it down into manageable chunks so that you literally are only dealing with mouthfuls at a time.

The hardest thing to do I think from, from, from my brain, but also a lot of the other neurodivergent brains that I’ve been able to communicate with is the idea that when a task is too big, or when it is when we don’t know where to begin, it becomes overwhelming. We get stuck, we procrastinate, and then we start shitting all over ourselves.

So let’s stop shitting all over ourselves, let’s give ourselves the tools that are going to work really well for us and change what we’re doing, okay? Break it down. And like I said, you might need 50, you might need 10, you might need 3, it doesn’t matter. Whatever works for your brain and you’ll know the next time you pick up that process to do it, whether or not you broke it down the right way.

You’re never going to know until the rubber hits the road, until you actually sit down to do the task, or your team sits down to do the task, will you know for sure, yes, I captured it correctly. You might have captured too much and go, that’s too many steps. That’s okay. Take out the extras, change what you’ve written down for the process, and then keep going and try it next time.

I’ll guarantee you that there is not one process inside our business today that is the same as it was. Before. I can’t tell you timeframes cause there, I mean, sometimes they change only just cause maybe a software has changed and we’ve had to change the way the process works or we’ve changed the software.

So we have to change the process because of that. Or we’ve changed the way we do things because maybe a team member has changed or maybe somebody on the team is not doing this, but somebody else has picked it up. So there are lots of different reasons why your processes will change, but the purpose here is to just change.

Get it out of your head. You cannot imagine how many business owners that I communicate with on a regular basis, regardless of how big or small their business is. Whether, whether they’re solopreneurs or billion dollar businesses, there are people with stuff stuck in their head all over the place. And it’s not helping the entire planet inside their business to get things done.

When we can’t get it out of here, we leave a lot of room for improvement. Here’s the deal. I don’t know if you’ve ever recognized this about yourself, but maybe now that I’m saying this, maybe it’ll tweak for you. Have you ever been so overwhelmed by everything? Like literally everything, not just what you have to do at work, but like what you have going at home or what’s happening with your family or whatever the case may be.

A lot of what that overwhelm is, is it’s holding space for things. So maybe you’re holding space because you’re waiting for somebody to send you something. Maybe you’re holding space because you know you have to do this but you can’t do it for another three weeks. Or maybe you’re holding space because you’re waiting for you to hear news about somebody.

Somebody’s health in your family. When you’re holding space inside your brain it literally takes up space and now you have less room for creativity, you have less room for smiles and fun, you have less room for relaxation. It’s not good for your brain. That’s just the truth. So the more we can get out into a place where we know it’s recorded, we know we can go back to it, we can trust that it’s going to be there for us, the The better off it’s going to be for you.

And one of those things is about breaking down your tasks so that you don’t have to worry. I have to remember how to do this next time. You don’t anymore because now you’ve broken it down. I hope you have a fantastic week. I hope that you’ve taken some of these things and found your own way through. If you have comments or questions, please don’t hesitate to leave them either here underneath the YouTube channel, if you happen to be watching us on YouTube.

Of course, if you’re on our website, you can always leave us a message there. You can send us an email at clientcare at geekygirl. ca Happy to hear from you and I look forward to talking to you next time. Have a fantastic week.