I’m sure we’ve all experienced overwhelm at one stage or another during our professional careers. That feeling of drowning under a mountain of work, with no easy way out nor an obvious way to move forward. For many, there’s the realisation that you’re working really hard and tackling things on your to-list, but not getting anywhere far.

Yes, we’ve all experienced overwhelm!

Time management is the obvious culprit of overwhelm

When it comes to tackling being overwhelmed however, there is a solution – learning how to better manage your time. Being overwhelmed is often a result of poor time management. Whether you’re neglecting to give yourself breathing space between meetings and appointments, forgetting to allocate time slots for tasks in your diary, or neglecting to prioritise the tasks on your to-do list and picking the wrong tasks for those time slots, time management is a likely culprit.  

However, as with many things in life, it isn’t always that simple, or the obvious solution that’s the real issue.

Mindset plays a part in overwhelm too

Mindset plays a huge part in our feelings of overwhelm. If you want to get to the root cause of overwhelm, you need to face the thoughts and subsequent behaviours associated with it and work on them too. Here’s some of most common thoughts and behaviours behind overwhelm.

If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well

This is a good mindset to have, as long as you’re not a perfectionist! If Perfectionism is an issue for you, you’ll use this thought pattern to keep going until your happy. The problem is, you never are happy. Look instead to commit to a deadline for completion and remind yourself that done is better than perfect – as perfect doesn’t exist.

If you want it done properly, do it yourself

This is a problem for a lot of people in business – they believe they have to do everything, regardless of whether they’re good at it or not. They don’t know when to hand it over to someone else. Outsourcing can save you masses of time and energy, leaving you free to do what IS in your field of expertise.

Go big or go home

This can be a motivating mindset to have, but it can also encourage you to set the bar too high. If your expectations are too high and unreasonable, you’ll experience a sense of failure when you don’t achieve things.

Always go the extra mile

Caring for your clients is great. It ensures you’re always focused on how to exceed expectations. However, if you care more about your clients than yourself, you could end up always offering more, going that extra mile and generally trying to do too much with the time you have available.

Stress and overwhelm

Any of the above scenarios can lead to stress. However, stress in itself – regardless of whether it’s personal or work-related, can lead to impacting on your performance. This can leave you to feeling overwhelmed in the work environment.

It’s easy to look at overwhelm as a simple organisational problem. However, if you want to tackle overwhelm, you need to drill down to the root cause. Your mental and physical health can play a big part in both creating and easing the associated symptoms – and can often be key to solving what is often, at its core, a mindset issue.

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