Oh my gosh, I could write so much in response to this. ❤️ First, I loved it, and I appreciate that you shared your actual lists. I went through a similar experience when I tried to organize a Word doc of various ideas/to-do items for my book marketing - it's a typed document that grew to 20 pages, and it felt utterly overwhelming. A friend told me about Trello. If you aren't familiar with it, it might be worth checking out - I've broken all my tasks into different categories and different priority levels, so I only regularly see a short list of my "do this week" tasks, but I have somewhere to put everything else and can move things into the top priority bucket when appropriate. It's been really helping for calming the overwhelm. It also resonated when you talked about not wanting to waste time. I definitely feel you there. Another thing I've been trying to do is focus only on what I want to do. Sometimes that means having more fun but sometimes it means working if I'm working on something that's genuinely important to me, even if it's not that much fun. But getting out of the "I should do this" mindset has been really helpful. And the last thing - I love letters too. I just starting reading a book about two people who became pen pals as kids in school and their years of exchanging letters, and how that changed both their lives. ❤️ The book is called I Will Always Write Back.
This really resonates! I am literally about to buckle down and do a huge to-do list brain dump and organize myself. I know it's going to feel awful and overwhelming, so I've been putting it off. But equally I know that I need to do it. Whenever I start to feel really overwhelmed by millions of tasks that all feel equally important, I get paralyzed and either don't move things forward or do what I call “productive procrastination” where I do something random that isn't really time sensitive or moving me towards a goal. 🙈
So thank you for this post! It somehow hit my brain in a way that is helping me grit my teeth and get the overwhelming task list done and over with so I can move on to the actual doing things part! x
I am a serial "put all the to dos down somewhere" when I'm anxious or feeling overwhelmed. It's helped me somewhat at that moment, but I am not too sure if it was the right approach cause the list does not seem to reduce! I've been notion for a while now after moving from Trello, initially I had big plans for it with personal dashboards and so on but now I've stripped it to the simplicity that I need. It'll keep changing but that's me I think? I also used my agile process here in notion, you can google for free templates in notion!
Aww, so glad you found something that might work for you ❤️ And also I totally relate to the feeling of overwhelm. I’ve pulled back from social media a lot the past few years to try to reassess what it actually does for me. (Especially because the research shows that it doesn’t do anything for book sales.) My lists used to look really long but as I’ve evaluated what I liked to do and what energizes versus drains me, the list has grown smaller. As you experiment, I hope the same for you 😊
Loved, loved, loved this post. I agree with both of you, it's so good to see other people's strategies for working through the overwhelm. Melissa-Jane, seeing your actual lists was really inspiring. I love that there are like minded people here we can bounce ideas off of to increase our own creativity output. I love Trello as well, but have jumped ship to Notion lately, not sure why other than it was new to me and I could hyper focus on learning the systems instead of doing what I really should have been doing. 😂 In all seriousness, I don't know where I would be without my bullet journal. It's not pretty or fancy, it's a chicken scratch BuJo, but I find sometimes I pay more attention when I hand write. The structure of it allows for me to migrate tasks back and forth...I find rewriting and rewriting incomplete tasks really forces me to ask myself if the tasks are actually important. I've even gone as far as creating my own daily task list (I can send it to you if you want to see it) and having them printed out as 8.5x11 pads. I also love the app Structure that allows me to see a visual representation of my day (seeing clients, writing times, exercise, etc.) Can't wait to see what others will have to say too! Maybe between all of us we will come up with some ways that really help us all!
Oh my gosh, I could write so much in response to this. ❤️ First, I loved it, and I appreciate that you shared your actual lists. I went through a similar experience when I tried to organize a Word doc of various ideas/to-do items for my book marketing - it's a typed document that grew to 20 pages, and it felt utterly overwhelming. A friend told me about Trello. If you aren't familiar with it, it might be worth checking out - I've broken all my tasks into different categories and different priority levels, so I only regularly see a short list of my "do this week" tasks, but I have somewhere to put everything else and can move things into the top priority bucket when appropriate. It's been really helping for calming the overwhelm. It also resonated when you talked about not wanting to waste time. I definitely feel you there. Another thing I've been trying to do is focus only on what I want to do. Sometimes that means having more fun but sometimes it means working if I'm working on something that's genuinely important to me, even if it's not that much fun. But getting out of the "I should do this" mindset has been really helpful. And the last thing - I love letters too. I just starting reading a book about two people who became pen pals as kids in school and their years of exchanging letters, and how that changed both their lives. ❤️ The book is called I Will Always Write Back.
This really resonates! I am literally about to buckle down and do a huge to-do list brain dump and organize myself. I know it's going to feel awful and overwhelming, so I've been putting it off. But equally I know that I need to do it. Whenever I start to feel really overwhelmed by millions of tasks that all feel equally important, I get paralyzed and either don't move things forward or do what I call “productive procrastination” where I do something random that isn't really time sensitive or moving me towards a goal. 🙈
So thank you for this post! It somehow hit my brain in a way that is helping me grit my teeth and get the overwhelming task list done and over with so I can move on to the actual doing things part! x
I am a serial "put all the to dos down somewhere" when I'm anxious or feeling overwhelmed. It's helped me somewhat at that moment, but I am not too sure if it was the right approach cause the list does not seem to reduce! I've been notion for a while now after moving from Trello, initially I had big plans for it with personal dashboards and so on but now I've stripped it to the simplicity that I need. It'll keep changing but that's me I think? I also used my agile process here in notion, you can google for free templates in notion!
Aww, so glad you found something that might work for you ❤️ And also I totally relate to the feeling of overwhelm. I’ve pulled back from social media a lot the past few years to try to reassess what it actually does for me. (Especially because the research shows that it doesn’t do anything for book sales.) My lists used to look really long but as I’ve evaluated what I liked to do and what energizes versus drains me, the list has grown smaller. As you experiment, I hope the same for you 😊
Loved, loved, loved this post. I agree with both of you, it's so good to see other people's strategies for working through the overwhelm. Melissa-Jane, seeing your actual lists was really inspiring. I love that there are like minded people here we can bounce ideas off of to increase our own creativity output. I love Trello as well, but have jumped ship to Notion lately, not sure why other than it was new to me and I could hyper focus on learning the systems instead of doing what I really should have been doing. 😂 In all seriousness, I don't know where I would be without my bullet journal. It's not pretty or fancy, it's a chicken scratch BuJo, but I find sometimes I pay more attention when I hand write. The structure of it allows for me to migrate tasks back and forth...I find rewriting and rewriting incomplete tasks really forces me to ask myself if the tasks are actually important. I've even gone as far as creating my own daily task list (I can send it to you if you want to see it) and having them printed out as 8.5x11 pads. I also love the app Structure that allows me to see a visual representation of my day (seeing clients, writing times, exercise, etc.) Can't wait to see what others will have to say too! Maybe between all of us we will come up with some ways that really help us all!