When I find myself a bit overwhelmed, a bit “oh my word where do I start first”, my tendency is to do more things. Do as much as possible so I can tick things off my endless (and ever-increasing) list so I feel a bit of relief.
All that achieves is a very small amount of temporary relief, followed by more overwhelm.
Because when I complete one task on my list, like creating the draft content for a new sales asset, I send it off feeling great about myself…..and then I get replies, and feedback, and suddenly my list has expanded once again.
I was talking with my accountant recently about this seemingly endless list and some days not even knowing where to start first.
“Well, when that happens,” he said, “instead of doing more, often the best thing to do is to ask yourself what you can remove. It’s a matter of subtraction, not addition.”
Naturally I immediately felt the truth of it…and at the same time thought, “but I don’t even know what to remove”. And that’s because removing things takes energy and brain space, too.
You need a clear mind to say yes, this thing is important but it is not urgent. Or maybe it’s not even important: it’s simply the next thing on your list. You need perspective.
Everyone will have suggestions and their own perspective to share. “What about removing this?” “If it were me, I’d stop that.”
The toughest part for me is considering removing anything on my list with a longer-term impact. Whilst it’s tempting to cut things out which aren’t immediately urgent, and don’t need dealt with straight away, I do also want to consider the bigger picture.
For example, these emails I send out weekly: sure, I could cut those out. But at the same time, I love writing them, and it fills my cup a bit to take an hour to stop and look around and meditate on the past week a bit. These Creative Headspace emails are also a smaller part of the bigger picture of being an author and a writer, and future books I’m writing and will be sharing later this year.
For me, it usually comes down to one question: “Am I doing this solely because I feel obliged to?”
I’ve cut out a few things already this week. All of them were things I felt obligated to, felt like I owed it to people because I’d said I would do it, or because I started it back when I had lots of energy and didn’t have the multiple fires which all popped up in the past few weeks.
Even when you’re fighting fires, you still need to stop for a minute in between the fighting and breathe. Step away from the smoke. Drink some water. Clear your head. Then go back in and beat those fires back. (After that you can deal with restoring the ground and preventing future fires.)
You usually know what it is you can remove. You’ve been avoiding it – because you feel obliged, because it’s actually enjoyable, because you started it and hate to leave things undone.
But what if this was someone else? Knowing what you know about what they have on and what fires are going right now, what would you recommend they remove?
Step out of yourself for a moment and look at it practically rather than with obligation (or habit).
Given all that, what can you subtract? What is one thing you can remove?
