Dealing with Overwhelm in the New Year

I love the beginning of the year, and making New Year’s resolutions, and feeling excited about all the things I can accomplish in the coming year. Dreams are a beautiful thing, and I love embracing them at the start of the New Year when it feels like I have all the time in the world to make them happen. I make resolutions every year. My goals for this year are:

1. Finish my first novel and self-publish it.
2. Gain more clients and increase the number of projects I take on.

I begin January with big dreams, but often a few weeks later the reality hits: goals are hard. Running a business is hard. Finding time to ‘level up’ and do even more when you work fulltime and have a family is difficult. Pretty soon I start getting frustrated that I’m not meeting my goals fast enough, and that there’s too much to do and not enough time to get it all done. I mean, when my to-do list feels like it’s always getting longer instead of shorter it’s hard to stay positive.

I get overwhelmed, and start to wonder if my goals are possible and my dreams achievable.

That’s when I need to step back and remember that overwhelm is a feeling and not my actual reality.

For me overwhelm happens for a few reasons: feeling like I have too much to do and not enough time to do it, feeling like the task is too big to accomplish, and having too many options and not knowing which one to pick. Each of these problems has solutions, but when I feel overwhelmed it’s sometimes hard to remember that. I have to remind myself to step out of the loop of worrying-but-not-acting and make an actual plan. Making an achievable plan of action is the best way to get rid of overwhelm and actually meet my goals. So let’s look at each of these reasons for overwhelm and how they relate to my goals.

Having too many options and not knowing which one to pick

This is definitely an easy trap to fall into. I love listening to writing and business podcasts because I learn so much. A few good podcasts are a valuable learning tool for any writer or business person because they expose you to the many different paths possible for publishing or business success and give lots of valuable tips. Each interviewee has a different story and a unique path to success. That’s very inspiring, but it’s also a problem. Many times those stories and the advice offered within contradict each other so I’m left feeling excited about several different options but not sure which one to pick. Should I advertise my first novel with paid ads or write the next book as quickly as possible and let the writing speak for itself? Should I concentrate my social media time on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or something else? Should I write to market or write for myself first? Since there’s no official business Magic 8 Ball to tell me what to do I’m left to make the decisions myself. What if I choose wrong? It can be a scary feeling.

I counteract this a little by paying attention to what the majority of people are saying. For example, everyone says you need a mailing list so I have started one. Many people say it’s smart to segment that list, so I have done so. Almost everyone says you need to give away something as your lead magnet so I’m working on putting those together. When the majority of people are doing something, and they give good reasons for doing so, I think it’s smart to listen. Sticking to the obvious ‘best practices’ is a good way to cut down on the ‘too many options’ feeling.

Even still, there are many, many diverging paths from there. So how to pick? Another tactic I use is to follow the path of people who are right now where I want to be in the future. I want to make a fulltime living from my services and writing, so I look to several people who are doing that: Joanna Penn (thecreativepenn.com & jfpenn.com), Kristine Katherine Rusch, and Mark Dawson (markjdawson.com & SelfPublishingFormula.com). All of them are successful writers and business people, so when they say to do something I give that considerable thought. That helps cut away some of the noise. Trying new things and creating relationships with people who are at the same stage as you are important, but listening to the voice of experience is also important.

From there I ask myself a few questions when I need to make a decision:

1. Is this necessary?
2. Is this going to further my goals or distract me from them?
3. Is this the right time to start this?

Time is precious so spend it doing the things that move you closer to your goals, and stop doing the things that are unproductive. Sometimes the only way to know if an activity will be successful is by doing it, though. So if you’re still unsure about your path after all this then just pick a direction and go. Planning and knowledge are important, but action is the only way to move forward.

For my formatting business this means I will be focusing on ways to gain new clients. I’ve been trying to get a foothold on Upwork.com as a freelancer but I haven’t gained much traction there. There are tons of proposals for work to sort through to find ones that seem right to me. It’s time consuming so I haven’t spent as much time on it as I need to in order to break in. I need to decide if I think the market is worth pursuing and go after it strong, or start looking somewhere else. However I do have a couple of other options that are less time consuming that I need to work on: advertising on Craigslist.com, and getting my name listed on the Alliance of Independent Authors service providers list. Both of those could be very effective with far less time investment, so I need to work on those.

For writing this means I will get my words written first, then work to build my email list through a lead magnet and blog and social media posts.

Feeling like the task is too big to accomplish

I love the saying that ‘the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.’ I’m definitely guilty of looking at a dream and thinking, “There’s no way I can do that, it’s too big. It’s impossible.” Then I get discouraged and put it off so of course it doesn’t get done. I did this with writing for a long time. Over the last few years I’ve come across the advice several times to set processes in place instead of setting goals. Figure out what regular steps you can take to meet your goal and then do that thing regularly. Eventually your goal gets done as you quietly chip away at each of the steps. I like that, and I can do that. Every task is comprised of smaller steps. The larger the task the more steps involved and those steps can be broken into smaller and smaller steps. This seems like a huge deterrent but remember that you can complete a small task every day. If you have an hour you can research something, start a blog post, or write half a chapter. You can even start all of those things in fifteen minutes and finish them later when you have time. The important thing is that you do something. Accomplish one task on your to-do list as quickly as possible because nothing is as motivating as success.

For writing the process would be to write a certain number of words every day, without exception, and I will eventually have written a book. That’s the theory behind The Magic Spreadsheet, which I’ve used in the past. It worked really well for me so I’ve added my name again. You can follow along with my progress here. Just click on the February 19 tab (or any of the later tabs) and scroll down until you find my name. Hopefully I’ll even wind up on the Live Leader Board eventually! (Note: I’ll probably also include blog posts and such in these word counts, so it won’t all be going to my novel. You can also check out the Facebook Page here.) My goal is 405 words a day on my novel (or 2,835 words a week) and one blog post a week of at least 250 words.

For my formatting business the process is to do something every day to put my name in front of someone new (such as looking through UpWork.com, or following up on a contact I’ve recently made, or by doing blog guest posts). Eventually this leads to new clients finding me. The more my name is out there the easier it is to find new clients.

Feeling like I have too much to do and not enough time to do it

Learning how to juggle your time as a small business owner is probably the hardest task of all. My To-Do list currently has 42 items on it. Some are small, and some are large projects that are broken down into many smaller steps. Somehow it seems that number never goes down, no matter how much I get done in one day or week. That’s frustrating, and sometimes demoralizing. Learning how to manage that list and get stuff done without becoming overwhelmed has been a definite work in progress.

I’ve recently come across a time management method that’s new to me that I want to try: The Eisenhower Matrix. It’s a way of prioritizing your To-Do list to make sure the urgent stuff gets done without sacrificing work on the less urgent but very important stuff that makes your day or business run. It’s a neat way of looking at the tasks on your list and deciding if and when to do them.

The key is to schedule and then do the important stuff that isn’t urgent and keeps getting pushed back by the urgent stuff. Of course there are things that come up that can’t wait, but if you never make time for the other things your business will never progress. This is something that I’ve known about for a while but somehow I never seemed to implement it well. I’ve had a weekly schedule set up for business tasks for a year now but I didn’t include writing on the schedule. I guess I figured that of course I would write because that’s very important to me, but since I hadn’t set a concrete goal and blocked the time on my schedule it often didn’t happen.

I recently put writing on my schedule and set a specific goal and now I actually get some writing done. Not as much as I really want, but it’s more than before. I’ll continue to work on meeting my writing goals so I can finish my novel, build a ‘backlist’ of helpful self-publishing blog posts, and provide entertaining content for my readers.

For other reading, Lauren Harris has an excellent blog post about setting goals in the New Year and establishing routines to support your goals.

In the end I just try to accept that things will not always go to plan, despite the best intentions (which is why this post is going up in March instead of mid-January when I thought of it). There are days my time will be completely taken up by a client deadline or family activities or some completely unexpected event, and I won’t make any progress on my word counts or the list of important-but-not-urgent business things. At those times I try to sit back and breathe, and remember that this is a marathon not a sprint. I want everything to happen right now, but realistically that’s not the way it works. Rome wasn’t built in a day, the best laid plans, and all of that. I just remember to have patience and compassion with myself and wake up tomorrow ready to learn and do even better than today and I’ll eventually make it up that mountain.

What are your best tips for time management and not getting overwhelmed?