Overcome Overwhelm and Make Each Day Count

2008 December 23

by Jackie

You may or may not know I am a recovering “all or nothing” thinker. It has only been in this last year I realized how deeply it infiltrated my brain and my life. Since realizing this fact, I have become more aware of it’s impact on my actions and my life and have been able to better work with and around it.

One of the things I have found most helpful is to do something every day. This was wicked hard for me in the beginning. Doing one small thing just seemed dumb to me, because it wasn’t even close to everything that needed to be done.

However, I have come to learn that doing something is always better than doing nothing. At least that one thing is done and I’ve moved forward a little bit.

When Andrea and I decided to put together the One Week Marketing module at LearnItStepbyStep.com we had never done anything like this before. We had a feeling it was a great idea and was something people could really use. We saw the value in it.

The idea itself was HUGE and to be honest very overwhelming. However, it felt GOOD! There was tons to do, and a bunch of it we had no idea how to do. We could have said that’s a great idea, let’s do some research on how to do this and then start it tomorrow. We didn’t. We made a bit of a list of what had to be done, and started doing one thing at a time that very day.

We did one thing, and then moved on to the next thing, and the next and the next. I’m not saying it was easy. In fact, quite often it was very frustrating and aggravating.

Before we knew it the site was set up and we were open for business. In fact, the whole thing took just a week!! Of course things weren’t perfect, but luckily Andrea is NOT an all or nothing thinker and we opened anyway and just tweaked things along the way. If we had waited to open our doors until everything was “perfect” we probably never would have opened! There is NO such thing as perfect!! We never would have found some of the problems without members telling us their experience.

When I was writing the content for that site it seemed quite overwhelming and I wasn’t sure how I was going to get it all done. I wanted it ALL DONE NOW, but that was impossible!! So I set a goal for myself, and that was to write 3 posts a day. That kept me moving forward, I got SOMETHING done, in addition I also knew when I was done and could stop. Without a set daily goal I would have kept writing trying to finish it ALL! Setting and accomplishing small daily goals had the content finished in less than a month.

These are the things that can hold us back and we don’t even realize it. If we let our thoughts not even let us get started, or keep us from doing SOMETHING we don’t move forward. We could have kept looking around for more information on HOW to do a membership site, and we’d probably still be looking, deciding and talking about it.

Instead we took action, by doing ONE thing at a time and course correcting as the project moved forward and it happened. Not in a month or a year, but in a week. You can do it too.

Whatever project is overwhelming you, just make a list of all the little things that need to be done to complete (at least the ones you know ~ you can add as new things show up) and then start doing one at a time. Even one a day will move you closer to your goal. As long as you are doing something you are moving in the right direction.

I saw a tweet this morning that led me to this article called How to Get Everything You Want in 24 Hours. It was a great article and it got me thinking about this topic and inspired this post. Read the article and let me know what you think. If you’re on twitter why not RT that article, and give this one a tweet too.

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