When you’ve made real commitments that add up to 100%+ of the time/mental energy you have available, how do you deal with it? I’m in that situation at the moment and find myself debating whether to concentrate on one thing, get it done (while other things fall by the wayside and/or miss deadlines, causing a backlog to pile up), or continue making small progress on many fronts, but not finishing anything.
Or perhaps there are other ways? What are your thoughts?
There are two kinds of being overwhelmed. There’s the chaos that comes from having no systems, so everything is an emergency. That’s relatively easy to deal with. The more pernicious type of overwhelm happens when you actually commit to more than you can possibly do. Then, no matter what you try, you can never catch up.
My current Yahoo! HotJobs column discusses how to make sure you’re not fundamentally overcommitted. You can read my HotJobs column on how to stop overcommitting by clicking here.