emotional support [calendar]

Triggered by taking on new projects or simply reflecting on goals, people often feel overwhelmed by all of the Very Big Things that need to get done. Instead of this vague feeling of alarm, consider how different it is to have the thought, “I have 8 things on my to-do list and only 3 hours of work time.”

This latter thought — arguably nothing more than a more concrete version of the former — is so much more solvable. Breaking things into component parts, budgeting time for tasks, identifying conflicts and prioritizing? I’ve done that a million times!

That observation holds the key: Your moments of feeling overwhelmed are begging for concreteness. Once you make things more concrete, they become much more manageable. The goal is to thus create the habit of immediately responding to general feelings of too much important stuff to do into something much more concrete. Often, just a little bit of concreteness is enough to start the process of getting things done and feeling better. So how to do that?

My go-to hack for making things more concrete is to start adding things to my calendar. This is often all it takes to stop feeling overwhelmed by a gigantic project and start thinking in terms of component parts, timelines, and priorities.

-ben