How to Prioritize Even When You are Feeling Overwhelmed

Are you paralyzed by all the new decisions that you have been making lately, or wanting to run and hide when the next decision comes your way? You know decisions need to continue being made, so what do you do?

In both our professional and personal calendars, there are things that yes, we personally need to continue doing, but there are also things that we can delegate to others, and most often there are things we can actually delay (or even delete)!

Heres the truth: continuing to spend your time doing today what you did pre-March 2020 is most likely not going to be the best way to spend your time moving forward.

Doing all the things yourself is likely what got you where you are today. But in order to move forward with less overwhelm, anxiety, and paralysis, you cannot continue doing the same things that you have been doing. If you do, you’ll stay exactly where you are.

What to Eliminate from Your Plate

So, let’s figure out what we can start eliminating from your plate so that you don’t feel so paralyzed and exhausted.

Pull out your calendar from last month and look at everything you did, personally and professionally.

What are the things you can delegate to others? Think about the things that must still get accomplished, but that you don’t have to personally do. Like some emails you send, the things you schedule, the projects you have been leading for a while. Very often, the things that we can delegate to others are things that are pretty easy for us to do, but they are no longer the best use of our time.

So, find someone else that can do them. If there is absolutely no one on your team that can take any of these, or other, responsibilities off of your plate, consider asking someone to help you voluntarily or hire an assistant, even just part-time to help you. The less time you spend focusing on the things that absolutely need your personal attention, time, and focus, the more everything and everyone around you suffer for it.

I worked with an executive leader who knew in her heart that she needed to delegate much of what she was doing on a regular basis. But because she has a hard time trusting people, she simply wouldn’t do it. It’s not that she can’t (everybody can), she wouldn’t. And her team suffered for it. She lost so many talented people over the years because of her inability to empower others with true authority and power simply because she was unwilling to let go of responsibilities that she personally did not need to be doing at her level of leadership.

When it comes to your personal calendar, the same is true. What can you delegate to others? Do you have to do the grocery shopping? Do you have to do the laundry? Who helps you with childcare? Who prepares your meals? Who does the cleaning? Yes, you are capable of all of these things, but should you be doing ALL these things?

Sure, finances may prohibit you from welcoming professional help in some of these areas, but imagine if finances weren’t an issue, what would you immediately empower someone else to help you with?

For my husband and me right now, it’s grocery shopping and lawn care. We love to cook, but with a newborn and toddler, grocery shopping has become really challenging to do on the weekends, so we have people help us with that right now. When we moved into our home, our yard was a disaster. And while we absolutely could nurse it back to health ourselves, we decided that spending the time on it that it would need in order to get healthy was not worth the time it would take us in this season of life when we want to spend time with our little kids playing, so we enlisted the help of others to do that for us.

Here’s the reality, we spend practically nothing on gas these days, our car insurance has dropped, and we personally aren’t eating out (we wouldn’t be even if there wasn’t a pandemic right now). So the money that we were spending on those things pre-March 2020 (our second baby happened to be born one week before the world turned upside down) we spend on other things that we’ve decided we personally do not need to be doing right now in this season and yet they are things that still need to be done weekly or monthly.

If delegating does not come naturally to you, take heart, you are not alone. The reality is that yes, you absolutely can do all the things. The question is not can you do them. The question is, should you be doing them? Just because you can, does not mean you should.

Click here for the exact method I use for delegating every time.

Put it Off Until Later

And then, what can you delay or delete altogether? When you hold up your calendar against your values and your priorities (which might have changed post-March-2020), there are things that can be delayed or even deleted off of your calendar.

For knowing what to delay, the best question I know in figuring that out is to ask, “When does a decision have to be made?” If it’s right now, okay, make the best decision you can and move forward knowing that you can change things down the road. If it is not now, move it on the calendar for when a decision actually needs to be made. Just because other people want you to make the decision right now, but you know that it doesn’t actually need to be made right now, then put it off and simply let them know when you will decide by.

And then based on your values and priorities are there things that simply can be deleted from your calendar?

And now that you’re starting to figure out what you can delegate to others, delay or even delete, ask yourself, “what are the things that I absolutely must personally continue doing?” As you go through your calendar asking these questions, you may identify a few more things that you can delegate to others, delay, or even delete altogether.

When change happens, one of the best things to do to move forward well is to grieve what used to be in order to make space for what can be. It’s not easy. Most of us want to shy away from grief, but we need to do it in order to create space for new things.

I want to encourage you to set a 60-minute timer in the next 24 hours and do this exercise so that you can move from a place of indecision, decision-fatigue, or paralysis and start moving forward again confidently!

If you need help going through this process, please let me know! I’m here for you!