From Overwhelm to Whelm

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/or actually – with your work to 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. How can you get to the place of “whelm?” Whelm literally means the opposite – “to roll or surge over something.” It implies mastery and control.

I’m writing to share a couple of tools that help me whelm. (It’s a word. Look it up.) When you’re overwhelmed with tasks and ideas and concepts, you must find a way to converge, i.e. select, choose and prioritize. As a very strong ideator, convergence has never been my strong suit. That’s why I share these tools. Before I could ever whelm, I needed to learn to converge. So, the moral is: If you seek whelm, converge and take the helm.

Magic Convergence Tool #1: Four Eyes

Take your list of potential tasks and put an I by each of them that is Interesting to you. Next put an I by each that is within your Influence, i.e you can do them, and they’re in your purview. 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 need to be done Immediately. 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.

Magic Convergence Tool #2: How Now Wow Yow!

Draw yourself a box and divide that into four boxes. In the upper left, you write the word “how,” lower left “now.” In the upper right you write the word “yow” and the lower right “wow.”

The vertical axis is for How difficult it is to implement. The horizontal axis is impact. So take your ideas and tasks and sort them.

• How= tasks you’re not sure how to do, but will impact your biz
• Now = tasks that are quick, in your wheelhouse and just need doing
• Wow = something easy to do, but has WOW impact on your biz
• Yow = an idea that you have no idea how to pull it off, but it would have major impact so you don’t want to lose that idea/intention.

Now it’s much easier to see what to do first. Concentrate of Wow and Now tasks, and set a schedule for when and how you’ll learn to cycle in the How tasks. Keep an eye out for that Yow opportunity though. It might be a great shortcut, or just a lot of fun, but you’d hate to miss out.

There’s one more Magic Tool #3. It’s so simple it almost shouldn’t be called a tool. Instead of calling it my To-Do list, I just call it my “Might-Do” list, and I immediately feel better about my life. The pressure is gone and I’m just doing what comes, what I can and what will have impact. I’m having fun, basically. And that’s the real magic.

These three tools have literally put me in business because I long suffered from the “all my ideas are so great” disease that kept me overwhelmed and trying to do everything. Some people call that Shiny Object Syndrome. I would consider it less of being easily distracted and more of a Magpie syndrome. I wanted to keep and shine and adore all of my shiny objects. And now I can see which are gems, and which are not. I hope this helps people who might be overwhelmed.

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If you’re looking for clarity of vision and more ideation and convergence tools and techniques, be sure to take in the free Master Classes that are part of the Write Without the Fight Club  (a paid monthly membership.) The Club is a treasure trove of programs about how to activate and maximize your creativity – and these four courses are free. So join us in the Clubhouse.  Sometimes, clarity is everything.