Use This Workbook to Beat Overwhelm!

Does this sound familiar?  You’re answering emails, helping customers, solving problems, managing orders, and putting out the small (and sometimes large) fires that naturally come with running a business. By the end of the day the bigger projects you want to work on are still sitting untouched.

You need a simple, realistic way to see your time clearly and make intentional decisions about how to use it.  This process and the attached workbook can help! (Scroll to the end for the workbook link!)

Step 1: Get Everything Out of Your Head

Take a few minutes to write down everything that’s been living in your head—tasks, ideas, projects, reminders, things you’ve been meaning to do “someday.” Don’t organize it yet. Don’t overthink it. Just get it all out.

Your beautiful brain was not meant to be remembering lists of tasks...it's for creativity, love, kindness, and life memories.  Let's take the stress off our brains and put it on paper instead!

Step 2: Simplify with Categories

The next step is to group your list into a few simple categories.  For business owners, I suggest the following categories, but feel free to create your own!  They could be location-based (home, office, car, store, etc.), project-based (new website, customer FAQ page, daily tasks, etc.), or anything that makes sense for your life!  I use these:

• Creative

• Administrative

• Marketing and Sales

Some people notice they spend most of their time in administrative tasks. Others realize they’ve been meaning to focus on marketing but haven’t made space for it. This step helps you understand where your time is going.  The point of this exercise is to see where most of your tasks lie so you can decide if that's actually where you want to spend your time.  Are all your tasks administrative but you want to be working on long term goals?  Take a look at how your energy is currently being spent.

Step 3: Look at What’s Already Taking Your Time

Next, let's take a look at your calendar.

What commitments are already there? When you know when you’re already busy, you can make more thoughtful decisions about when you’re actually available to work on something new.  If you have lots of regularly-scheduled meetings and activities, you may realize certain days have less time for focused work, growth-oriented activities, or rest.  Knowing that ahead of time is so helpful for planning and mental health!

Step 4: Break Projects into Smaller Pieces

“Update the website.”
“Work on marketing.”
“Create a new product.”

These are all important but none of them are just one step!  Small steps create momentum. They give you a clear place to start and make it much easier to fit meaningful work into small pockets of time.  Anything on your to-do list that involves more than one step should be rewritten as a list of all those steps!  While it will make your list look MUCH longer, it also tells you exactly what you need to work on next.  That way you don't avoid large projects because they feel insurmountable, and when you have a few moments, you know where to start.

Step 5: Block Small, Realistic Amounts of Time

Now that you have a clearer picture of your tasks and your availability, you can begin to assign work to your week. This doesn’t require hours at a time.

Look for small windows—20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour—and assign one or two specific tasks to that time. Because you’ve already broken projects down, you’ll know exactly what to work on when that time comes.  Instead of wondering when you’ll “find time” to work on something, you’ll know exactly when and how it fits into your schedule.

A Tool to Help You Through the Process

If you’d like a simple, guided way to walk through these steps, I created a productivity workbook designed specifically for small business owners.

It takes you step by step through:

• Brain dumping your tasks

• Categorizing your work

• Mapping your time

• Breaking down projects

• Planning your week in a realistic, manageable way

You don’t need a perfect system to feel more organized!  You need a clear starting point and a small amount of time set aside to plan with intention.

When you can see your time and your tasks more clearly, it becomes much easier to move beyond the day-to-day and make real progress on the things that matter most to you and your business.

Download the workbook here and let me know if it helps you!