Do you ever find yourself mindlessly clicking a retractable pen for minutes at a time, or frantically scrolling through documents without even really reading them? Below are five tips from Psychology Today that can help you gain some calm and clarity when feeling overwhelmed or when finding yourself procrastinating:
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Clean up your immediate surroundings. When you are feeling overwhelmed, tidying the area around you restores order to a little corner of your universe and allows you to move forward.
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Focus on one task at a time. Our brains are not designed to do two or three tasks at once. Constantly shifting our attention from one task to another can be draining. Single tasking can help us enhance focus and therefore become more productive and less stressed.
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Unload your thoughts. If you find that you get distracted by random impulses/thoughts, keep a sticky note next to you and jot down your impulses/thoughts as you have them. Unloading the thought, even if you don’t follow through on it to find the answer, can be enough to vanquish it.
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Rethink your to-do list. If you are feeling overwhelmed, consider a to-do list makeover. Chunk like items together (put all your phone calls together, or all your writing tasks together) to make a long list more cohesive and efficient. Or write out your list in accordance with your schedule: plan big projects for the morning when you have the most energy and focus, and leave tasks that are less demanding for the 3 p.m. energy slump.
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Accept what you cannot control. Accept that uncertainty and uncontrollability are part of life and focus your energy on the things that you can control rather than dwelling on what you can't.
