How to make better decisions and not feel so overwhelmed.

Good decisions create time, bad ones consume it. Good initial decisions pay dividends for years, allowing abundant free time and low stress. Poor decisions, on the other hand, consume time, increase anxiety, and drain us of energy. ~ Shane Parris

One thing I hear from almost every leader I talk to is that they feel overwhelmed.

“There’s too much to do and not enough time to do it in!”

Our inboxes are overflowing, our calendars are jammed, our to-do list full of overdue and ignored items, we’re running from meeting-to-meeting – reacting – frantically trying to make headway.

Stop the madness

One of the most important lessons I learned from David Allen’s productivity classic, Getting Things Done is to separate the planning and thinking from the doing. If I first spend time organizing and planning my work, I get more things done in the time I have left!

But in the rush of back-to-back zoom calls and too many client demands, we forget that lesson and instead rush right into doing.

We know that multi-tasking makes us worse at almost everything, and yet we still feel like we’re efficient!

And that rush to doing means that we dig ourselves a hole.

No planning means poor decisions

Because we’re not slowing down to think and plan, we make short-sighted, or just downright bad, decisions. Those decisions then require us to do more work to dig our way out of them, which makes us move overwhelmed…

Do you see the pattern?

So if you are feeling overwhelmed with too much to do, you need to block some time daily for thinking and planning.