Do you ever feel overwhelmed running your business? Do you feel like you’ve got a million and one things to do and it’s all swirling around your head… you don’t know where to begin and there are a lot of things you’re not actually sure how to do… so you end up putting them to the back of your mind – sound familiar?
This is definitely how I’ve felt on numerous occasions. Trying to juggle social media, customer support, finding new customers, providing a great service, advertising, responding to emails, trying to create webinars, doing a report for people to download… it goes on and on! As time goes on you come up with more ideas, more things you need to do, more ways to reach people that you want to try and you get stuck in the middle of all these things you need to do.
Well yesterday I was on a group mentoring day and a lot of us said that we felt overwhelmed with everything we needed to do. Most of the people in the room worked on their own, with no help, so they had to do everything themselves.
Peter Thomson, who runs the mentoring day shared with us a simple, yet brilliant idea for getting things done without feeling totally overwhelmed…
Do one project at a time.
I know it sounds simple and obvious – but how often do we try and do a little bit of lots of projects all at the same time? A lot. Trying to do lots of things in one go leads to overwhelm. So, make a list of all the things you’re working on at the moment, for example, building a new website, setting up email marketing and writing the emails, starting a blog, getting a Facebook fan page built, creating a webinar etc. Pick the one that will have the biggest impact on your business right now and focus on completing that project. Once you’ve finished it move onto the next project.
It’s a simple idea, but it’s so effective. We put so much pressure on ourselves to get loads of things done all at once, but we end up getting very little done. By focusing on one thing will help you to make effective progress without getting distracted by other projects. It’s more manageable.
I’m definitely going to be focusing on one project at a time now.
