Dealing With Overwhelm

Overwhelm occurs when something you are doing overpowers you because it is great in amount. For example when you have too much homework at nursing school is overwhelming. A doctor who has too many patients or few with severe disease that requires much attention to treat will also be dealing with overwhelming duties.

Overwhelm causes sadness, anxiety and hopelessness in the same way it affects peoples who get such strong emotions due to happenings like illness, or tragic events.

The solution is to use strategies that help you to gain control over activities. These include:

Prioritizing Work According to Urgency

Productivity begins with prioritizing the important things. Doing everything at once is impossible. Attempts to complete too many tasks will prevent you from achieving any of them, or the work will be substandard.

Begin by separating the most important from the least significant work.

It is essential to plan the working days, weeks and months around the priorities and deadlines according to reality but not demands or influence by individuals.

Focus on one task

After determining the essential tasks, it is the right time to focus on the most critical giving attention to one at a time. Multitasking will not help you when trying to fight overwhelm. It could help you to do several things but the quality will be bad and could even compel you to make amendments. Set everything aside except the task that which you are working to complete.

An easy productivity strategy is by starting the day with the most urgent task without thinking about the other projects until you complete or make much progress. Avoid distractions like reading and composing random emails. Do not attend to every notification of new social media message. If a person sent an urgent need, he or she would call.

You can use a timer on your to focus on one task. For example, you can set the timer to an hour and ensure that you do not leave your desk until the ringer buzzes.

Automate

A reason that could make your work tedious is to consider every task as unique and start every project from scratch. It is essential that you be observant of the jobs you do on a regular basis. The things you do 2-3 times frequently should make you think of ways of systemizing it and increase the pace of work next time. For example, if you supervise a small group, you can use scheduling app that allows all the people you frequently meet to pick the time slots. It will enable everyone to know when the meeting should happen thus you do not spend the time to set them up every week or few days. Automating the regular tasks leaves you with more time for other works.

Set realistic working schedule

It is a reality that human brain cannot run optimally for over an hour without some break. If you have a massive project, it is essential that you divide it into manageable tasks that you work on with breaks in between. Do not wait until the last moments and stretch your brain by trying to work for long hours. Overwhelm occurs when the mind becomes too full and it begins struggling to process the demand you add to it. New information will become an overload. Dividing larger or many projects into smaller chunks allows you to focus on each chunk at a time until you complete. It will enable you to finish more in a shorter time and without overwhelming stress.

Dealing with overwhelming requires careful planning that creates realistic schedules to complete tasks at your pace. Before setting a timetable of activates, make sure that you the real deadline for projects because some people demand their work within short time yet it has no urgency. It will prevent instances of having too much urgent work when in reality some of it can wait.