When your work is your life and vice versa, your head can spin with all there is to do. All the ideas, all the things to learn, all the places you need to go – virtually and actually – to write, speak, find your community and build your audience. It can be utterly overwhelming! And even as you look at the list as long as your arm, you sit listlessly, doing nothing, stuck.
Too much is a recipe for overwhelm.
Converge
When you converge, you select and perfect. You choose and prioritize.
And if the thought of sorting these tasks and ranking them is still overwhelming, it is likely you’re not a gifted converger. No worries. Use a tool. (Converging is the opposite of diverging. Read more about divergence, here.)
As a very strong ideator, convergence has never been my strong suit. That’s why I share converging tools. Before I could ever get out from under overwhelm, I needed to learn to converge.
The moral: To shake overwhelm, converge & take the helm.
Tool: Four Eyes
Take your list of potential tasks and put an I by each of them that has this position in your life.
- Is it Interesting to you? Give it an I.
- Is it Imperative that you do it? i.e can it be delegated, or is it in your realm of responsibility? Is it something you can act on without waiting for help or Input from someone or else. Give it an I.
- Look again at each task and place an I by each one that would have great Impact on your business or work.
- And lastly, place a fourth I for things that have Immediacy. Is there urgency around the task? It earns its I.
The tasks that have four I‘s are your priorities, three I‘s follow and so on. This is a good way to see what might wait, and what might just fall off your radar completely. You really can’t do all your ideas.
It can help to use a different color per I, since even among the I‘s there might be prioritization. One day you might prefer to focus where things are of Interest, and another day, Immediacy might be the rising priority. And the tasks that don’t earn the I for Imperative might be dealt with some other way.
This is just a quick and easy way to see your tasks in different buckets and act, based on the Four I‘s criteria.
What tasks rise to the top?
Sometimes, clarity is everything.
For more tools and ideas for how to approach your creative brain with ease, join the FB Group – Write Without the Fight. Do you get overwhelmed? Let’s talk about it!