How To Overcome Overwhelm Quickly And Easily

TRANSCRIPT AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED Hey, Hey, so today I'm going to chat to you about Q4 because I have a lot of things that are going to change in Q4. I have new offers coming up, some podcasts, tweaks happening, some big opportunities for me. And it's feeling a little like everything is screaming at me for attention all at once. It is a recipe. For overwhelm and I'm pretty sure I am not the only person who's feeling like this. Right. Q4 brings all that kind of urgency of, oh my gosh. I have to do X, Y, and Z before year end. Oh my gosh. I need to make X amount of money before year end. Oh my goodness. It's Thanksgiving. And then it's black Friday and then it's the holidays and there's just a lot going on in Q4. So I want to share with you what I sat down with to really help me focus for the quarter. Now, this may be a tool that you have heard of yourself, perhaps you've even used it, but before you kind of yang and all about this, I really want to challenge you to just take a moment and ask yourself if even though you know about it, you're actually applying it right now in your business. The tool that I'm using to just get myself crystal clear on what needs to happen. Is the Eisenhower matrix, right? So us president Eisenhower was famously quoted as saying the most urgent decisions are really the most important ones. And what happens a lot of the time is the thing that is shouting at us. The loudest is the thing that gets attention. That person who's constantly in your ear about something you're just going to do it to get rid of them. Whether or not that's the most important thing that you could be doing at that moment. So how the matrix works is if you picture like a cross in the middle of page, do you have full quadrants? The X axis. So from left to right, is urgency. Like how urgent is the task. And then the Y axis is importance from low importance to the top variable. So you land up with full quadrants. When we use this matrix, we tend to focus ourselves on that top right quadrant where something is urgent and it's important and that's great. 100%. Those are the things that you need to do now. They are both urgent and important and they need your phone. But what happens is when we're so focused on just that quadrant, we forget that something that is less urgent, but important can become urgent really quickly. If we don't take care of it. We also forget that something that doesn't feel that important, but is urgent can very quickly spiral out of control and become very important because of the knock on effects that it's having. So you want to make sure that you're looking at the entire matrix. In that top right-hand quadrant where it is very important and very urgent. You want to make sure that those things are top of your to-do list. They need to get tackled first. However, if we move over to the left and we have the quadrant where something is not so urgent, but it is important. Those are the things where you need to figure out when you're going to do. That needs to go into, click up into Athena, into the to-do list with an actual date. And that date needs to be before it becomes urgent. Otherwise you're just starting to load that top. If we jump down and we have something that's urgent, but it's not important. Remember we still want to clear these OFA plates. We don't want them to spiral have knock-on impacts and create problems that make them both urgent and important. Again, we're trying to avoid stuff jumping into that top right quadrant. So for this particular quadrant, because you're not focused on it, you're trying to do the urgent and important. You want to see if you can delegate this. Is there somebody that you can hand this off to that might be a team member? It might be a contractor. It might be, Hey, I need to schedule a VIP day, whatever it is, we want to make sure that it is getting handled so that it doesn't become important. Right. The impact right now is probably fairly minimal. However, if you let it sit there while it's urgent, that impact is probably going to grow and eventually it's going to jump and it's going to land up an important and urgent. The final quadrant is an interesting one. So that is the bottom left where something is not important and it's not urgent. And this is the quadrant that I would really. Suggest you consider whether it even needs to be done. Does this thing even needs to happen? If yes. Great. Let's put that on the list for not quite someday, maybe, but it's kind of going in the project management system with like, this'll be a great toss to get to when I get. It's pretty low importance. It's pretty low urgency. You might just want to track it just in case it gets a little more urgent and a little more important before you get to it. However, this is really the quadrant where you need to be honest with yourself and OSC. If you are doing that particular task, that particular item, that particular project, because you feel like you should be doing it, or is it something that actually needs to get done? I find it really useful to brain dump everything out of my head first to really just rot the longest to do lists that I can think of. I'm a pen and paper person for this, mostly because it stops you getting distracted with anything on your computer, but just like brain dump everything out of your head. And then spend some time putting it into the full quadrants, Oscar self. Is it urgent? Is it important? Put it in the correct category. And then when it's urgent and important, you want to put it on the to-do list for today or this week, or as soon as possible, if it's important, but not urgent. You want to put it into a sauna, click up your to-do list with. So that it doesn't become urgent so that you are tackling it, given its level of impact. If it's in the bottom right-hand corner where it's urgent, but it's not important. I E the impact isn't that great. You probably don't need to do it. So work out who you can delegate it to, whether that means hiring a one-off contractor or handing it off to your team. And finally, the bottom left quadrant. It's not important and it's not urgent. Ask yourself first, does this even need to happen? And if it does, let's put it on a list so that we don't forget about it and it doesn't accidentally become urgent or important. So that's how I'm managing my multiple spinning plates for Q4. And I think that it's really helpful exercise just to bring some perspective to a situation when you start to feel a bit overwhelmed, when you start to feel like everything feels urgent and important, the reality is very often. Quite different from what you're experiencing in that kind of fossil flat, slightly panicked mode.