Mini Edit: A System to Reduce Weekly Overwhelm

Now, let's get to today's mini edit on a system to reduce weekly overwhelm.

At the end of last year, I had a conversation with the wonderful Sarah Hart Unger that made me rethink my rather curmudgeonly outlook on longer range planning.

Definitely listen to that full conversation and get Sarah's book, Best Laid Plans, A Simple Planning System for Living a Life That You Love.

In a nutshell, she helped me reframe my commitment-phobe perspective to one where the act of longer-range planning meant protecting space for the things I care about, as well as adding in meaningful things.

That conversation led me to develop a sketch of the coming year and a monthly planning ritual, which I share about in the episode, My New Planning Routine.

I will link that up in the show notes.

This system served me well until it didn't.

Over the last few months, I've been deeply immersed in work around my strategic advisory practice.

It's been amazing, and it's also been a lot.

Adding on a tremendous amount of learning and doing for my practice on top of my current clients, podcasts, substacks, and everyday adulting left me feeling pressed to the edges and overwhelmed.

Incidentally, the point where I knew I needed to enact change was reflective of something I say to my clients when I can sense that they are about to boil over.

I say, if you're going to bed, waking up, or falling asleep fretting about something, it's time to do something different.

I am, after all, extremely passionate about sleep.

After several nights of crappy sleep, going to bed, waking up and falling asleep, fretting about to-dos, what I might be forgetting, and whether I was behind on things, I sat down to think about my pain points and what to do about them.

I want to share about this process because it has been so helpful and I hope it might offer relief if you're in the same boat.

First, I identified the problem.

I took a quick inventory of how I was keeping balls in the air.

I was already doing my monthly holistic planning, which I referred to earlier.

I was already doing a quick weekly look ahead of my calendar on Fridays and then a refresh on Monday to just get a sense of what was on tap and what that meant for my working blocks.

And I was already using Todoist as my airtight capture system for tasks.

I'll also link up a quick episode on how I use Todoist.

It didn't take long to realize that I was missing a critical layer between planning and action in terms of what is truly essential on a given week.

And while it is possible to priority flag items in Todoist, since I usually have 40 to 50 granular tasks on any given weekday, I know, each morning I found myself arriving at my morning planning check-in already feeling scrambled and overwhelmed.