Overwhelmed & Stress Over Getting Things Done

September 2022


This one is fairly simple. This situation is "bad" because it leads to a lot of stress. So the approach here is to look at organization and stress management.

This applies to:

  • Work, when you start having too much to do
  • Home, when you put pressure on yourself to do stuff all the time

Why does it happen?

There could be a few reasons, the more at once the worse the stress:

  • Tasks are open-ended
  • Too many things to do
  • Taking too much upon myself
  • Self-expectation is not clear or not realistic
  • The project is being taken too seriously
  • Spiraling thoughts and anxiety related to some tasks

What can you do about it?

The first step is to turn off your mind. That bastard is just being a nuisance right now.

  • Divide your work into broad categories (Activity planning, general ambassador things, coding)
  • Create a piece of paper for each
  • Write down everything you want to do for each one - leave nothing out

Go full GTD:

  • Setup reminders in the calendar for future stuff
  • If something takes less than 5 minutes, JUST DO IT
  • If something isn't clear and doesn't need to be done now, just discard it
  • If something is too big, and you can't be taking on the responsibility right now, DELEGATE
  • If something isn't clear, split it into multiple tasks to MAKE IT CLEAR
  • [Home] Only keep 1 or two projects. Just dunk everything else in "un jour peut-être"

At this point, you want to be able to rely fully on this system and, brain still off, just do the small tasks one by one. We don't need none of this stress in our town.

If any task makes you particularly anxious, refer to the anxiety page.