Feeling overwhelmed by all the tasks on your to-do list? Struggling with which to tackle first when everything seems equally urgent?
In this episode of The Business You Really Want, hosts Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo discuss the challenge many entrepreneurs face: managing the overwhelming sense of urgency that leads to paralysis. Together, they explore how to prioritize tasks, the myth of multitasking, and practical tips for regaining control when everything feels equally important.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Where To Begin When Everything Feels Urgent
Introduction To Feeling Overwhelmed
We are here to talk about where to begin when everything in your business feels urgent. Gwen, this episode could be all about me because this is a big problem for me. I don’t think it’s about me, because every woman who owns a business, whether she sells services, whether she has digital products, physical products, store owners, or online store owners, experiences overwhelm to the point of paralysis at some point. I used to call it analysis paralysis, but sometimes I recognize I’m not even analyzing anything. I’m paralyzed. I know that you are somebody who has worked with so many women in business that you have some specific insight here and can help me walk through this process. Are you willing to do that for me?
Yes, because I probably am one of the only people in your world that you don’t see that with very often as another female business owner, and it has taken time, and there are tools and techniques that I have been able to develop and use, and part of it is also everyone’s unique situation is different. We’ll talk about that too because that plays into it, but there’s a lot that we can talk about, and I am positively sure you are not one who feels this way.
Everybody reading will now recognize that part of the show is helping me feel better about myself and being me. I like what you said because I do feel like you are more on the other side of this problem than I am, but I also know that we don’t see everything under the surface. I appreciate you saying that you are a few years after having this as an acute problem. Could you kick us off and share, in your experience, why it is, do you think, that entrepreneurs find themselves overwhelmed, especially with urgent tasks?
There are a lot of potential reasons for this, but I would say the biggest reason is that entrepreneurs have 1,000 ideas. Part of it is because they are often trying to implement as many of those ideas as possible at any time. Women, in particular, have bought into the lie of multitasking, which compounds this in a lot of ways and I say lie because we don’t truly multitask. We switch from one task to the other exceedingly fast. We can’t truly do two things at once.
We have bought into the lie of multitasking, which compounds the issue in many ways. It’s a lie because we don’t truly multitask; we just switch from one task to another exceedingly fast. Share on XWe may be listening to something and our hands are doing something, but there’s a fast switch-up going on in our brains during that time. The more effort either one of those activities takes, the bigger it becomes. I think we have bought into this belief that we can do 16 things at 1 time and do them all well, which could be true if they’re easy enough, we’ve got enough skill, it’s boring enough there are all sorts of descriptors on it. That could be true, but we don’t realize that as we start raising the complexity, that’s using a tremendous amount of energy. A lot of times, this is where that overwhelm comes from. We aren’t valuing activities at the same level. Three activities of one type are not the same as three activities of another type.
I wrote some things down here because this was good, have you seen the video? This is a little bit of an insight, but there’s a point here. The video of it is a Mars Rover. It’s a robot, and the robot gets stuck because it can’t prioritize its tasks, so it’s like thrashing. Like it starts something and it stops it, and it starts something and it stops it. I feel like you described that, and I feel like that is frequently the feeling that what we are talking about illustrates.
At first, when you said we, as entrepreneurs, have 1,000 different ideas. That was like, “Visionary leaders. Blah blah blah.” Everybody reading should appreciate the fact that I censor myself for this show but when you talked about the lie of multitasking, and I think that a lot of us have heard that, but I have never heard it described. I have heard people say, “You don’t multitask you can only do one thing at a time,” and then usually what’s not said is, “You are doing one thing well, and everything else you are not doing well at all,” which doesn’t feel true in many cases.
Your point is that you are monotasking in a rapid cycle, which is what made me think of the robot. Now I’m closing that loop for everybody reading. That feels so true. I have oftentimes blamed this level of overwhelm on my career as a journalist, the fact that my first career out of college was deadline-driven, and if I screwed up, if I forgot something, or if I wanted to hold a hard line on the deadline like, “No, I’m sorry. The deadline is 11:00 PM. It is 11:10. The paper is going to bed.” It would have meant a blank front page hitting people’s doorsteps the next day. That wasn’t a choice.
Recognizing Paralysis And Taking First Steps
I had to learn to prioritize according to the deadline, which is urgent. Now, however, life is different, but I can still get into that firefighter mode, which is what I’m recognizing is what you are talking about in terms of doing this thing, then doing that thing. My question for you is, somebody who’s experiencing this we’ll use your example. They are rapidly cycling between tasks so fast that it looks like they are multitasking. What would be the first step that you would recommend to them if they get to a place where they feel paralyzed? It works for a while, or as you would say, it works until it doesn’t work. What would be the first step, once they are paralyzed, to get out of that paralysis?
For me, it’s always GI Joe knowing is half the battle. Years and years ago, that was always the end of GI Joe. Most people are not old enough to have seen these cartoons, but that was always it. Knowing is half the battle, and it is. The first is being able to say, “Why am I here?” Then to be able to say, “I was multitasking six things.” Then you can start to pull those six things out and separate them and say, “How much focus does one take? How much focus does thing two take? How much focus does thing three take on?” You can realize that it was like, “Two of these things are what I’m going to call background tasks. They don’t require a lot of my brain power.”
Four of these things aren’t background tasks, and trying to run them coherently at the same time is what’s creating the paralysis because your brain has vapor lock. That’s an old engine term. That’s usually what happens if the brain has said too many things all at the same time, “I can’t figure out the order to do them in anymore.” What will happen sometimes is this was a background task until it wasn’t. As my friend, Joe Polish, once said, this is for entertainment purposes only because I am not a parent, but reading parents, if your kids are playing in the playground, keeping an eye on them can be a background task until it’s not.
Until something happens that requires your attention now. Maybe they fell and they wanted attention, and any other time, if no one was around, they wouldn’t even stop playing but maybe they broke their leg. This is an extreme example, but that happens a lot with us that we are in the process of doing these things that don’t require attention, then, all of a sudden, they do, and we don’t realize that we are putting a lot more energy there, and that is part of the whole vapor lock that all the sudden it’s like, “There are way too many things for my brain to be switching between.”
I feel like that resonates, and the idea is that there are certain tasks that, as you said, are background tasks until they are not. Checking your email can be a background task until one of those emails points out that you made a critical mistake, and that critical mistake is a two-hour fix and then suddenly, you were going to check your email for five minutes and clear through some things, and now checking email derailed your entire day. Do you think that’s a fair example of what you were saying?
Certain tasks are background tasks—until they’re not. Checking your email, for example, can be a background task until one of those emails points out that you made a critical mistake. Share on XThat’s exactly it. I think it was what I’m going to call the internet rabbit hole that can be the same thing, where I’m looking at one thing, and as you do, it’s like, “I need to understand more about this and this.” It’s most people’s lives. I know you have way more tabs open. I’m looking over my tabs are, than I do because you always do but still, I’ve got 15 or 20 tabs open, and a lot of people have dozens, if not possibly hundreds. That, to me, is an exact example of this thing. It’s a little background thing, and then all of a sudden, our brain gets overwhelmed with it.
Identifying Urgent Vs. Important Tasks
What you were saying is when you are in that place of overwhelmed the first thing to do is to step back, take a step back, recognize what it is that you are working on, and figure out what are the high-attention tasks and what can be the low-attention tasks. I don’t know if it comes before, it comes after, or if it’s parallel, but this other issue that I struggle with is when I’m looking at it all, sometimes I can’t figure out what is urgent and what feels urgent.
This is a problem everybody deals with, and part of the problem, if I were to try and take it down to one thing, which it never is one thing is we have created a society of urgency. We used to be completely okay if we ordered something and it showed up in three or four days. That was good. Now, if it’s taken three days, we are like, “Why is it not already on my doorstep?” It’s because we have increased that urgency. The same thing for access.
We have created a culture of urgency. The level of urgency around everything has become so high that it's hard to distinguish between what is urgent and what is important. Share on XI am old enough, you are old enough to know that your parents trying to get a hold of you when you were a teenager was not like texting or tracking your phone or whatever. It was like we had to call. It was a thing. Urgency is on everything and has gotten so high that it’s become hard to distinguish urgent versus important. Unless the importance is so overwhelmingly obvious. Otherwise, it’s easy for us to think urgent is important, which it can be but being able to distinguish between those two and so, we have gotten to where everything is urgent and you know, my favorite line from The Incredibles movie is when everybody’s special, nobody is. When everything’s urgent, nothing is.
Do you have any advice on wearing our business owner hat this is a problem in various sectors of life but putting the business owner hat on. How can I tell what’s truly urgent versus what feels urgent? Is there a framework? Is there maybe an if this, then that scenario?
The first is getting back to GI Joe. Knowing is half the battle. Being aware of it and asking yourself the question will create a whole lot more awareness right off the bat. It may not answer the specific saying, “Is this urgent, or is this important, or is it both?” Then saying what happens if this doesn’t happen right now? To me, it’s the question about urgent. If I don’t I’m going to use a social media post. Let’s go back to email. Emails are a good one. Email is a great one.
A lot of folks get in the space of, “If I don’t respond to that email in the next five minutes, my client is going to hate me.” The first question I ask my client is, if you are hiring somebody and they don’t respond to you in five minutes, do you hate them? The answer is no, because they are busy and doing things, and it’s like, “And?”
We put this urgency on ourselves that isn’t necessarily appropriate. Do I want certain people to respond to me? I do. If I’m going into the emergency room, I do want to feel some urgency there because there’s a reason for it. To anyone who’s reading this blog, most of our businesses are not life and death. If it took an hour or two before you responded, it’s probably fine. If you took 24 hours to respond, it’s probably also fine.
You may need to set some expectations so people know what to expect, but we create a level of urgency that doesn’t necessarily need to be there. When we start doing that, it creates all of our anxiety and all the rest of it. If we are okay with that, “I’m not responding to this email until I have time,” or “I have allocated space on my calendar,” or “it’s at the beginning of the day and the end of the day because that’s when I’m doing it,” whatever. That takes out a lot of those things that we think are urgent that aren’t.
We asked the question, but the second part of kicking the can down the road a bit and going, “What would happen if I didn’t tackle this right now?” The follow-up to that is like, “What would happen if I didn’t tackle this today?” Then you could say, “This week,” and then that gives you a way of prioritizing it. All of your tasks. If you ask yourself that question about every single thing, at some point, you’ve got a rank order, because, at some point, there’s a list of things that have to be done.
Avoiding The Trap Of Busywork
There are always a few things that have to be done today, but realizing we create a lot of our own busy work that creates our own urgency, and saying, “What of these things is making a difference in my business, in my life that I will regret if I haven’t done?” Truly regret. Not feeling bad about it. That list gets pretty short, pretty fast.
Before you move on, a little piece of me got a little teeny weeny bit offended when you said that sometimes we create our busy work. I need you to explain because I am way too efficient of a human to ever create my busy work. Here’s my concern. My concern is that somebody hears that, and their thought is, “You don’t know my life. I am not the person who creates busy work. I am not the person sending all these fires that I have to put out.” Yet, what I heard is some of us have a lot of years of experience of being busy at being busy, and we are so good at it, we don’t even see it and because we don’t see it, we don’t know that there’s another way. Unpack that creating your busy work for me, and if I’m in that place where I’m so good at it, I don’t even see it, how do I stop?
This society and in this case, I’m talking about the United States, but it’s at least a North American issue, and it probably happens in Europe as well. We have been taught that productivity, that activity creates value, which there was a point in time that was true, but that’s not necessarily as true now. Sometimes saying, “I don’t have anything to do this minute,” makes us feel like that means we must not be doing anything valuable, which isn’t true.
Sometimes we need space to think and rest and all of the other things that a lot of people talk about, and they are right about. That’s the first thing we have got to get out of our mindset that if we aren’t doing something, we aren’t valuable. That’s the first step but the bigger question that you asked is, “How do we start identifying it?” It is asking the question, “What happens if I don’t do this? What happens if I don’t do this? What if I don’t do this eventually? What happens if I don’t do this at all?”
We need to shift our mindset away from believing that if we're not doing something, we're not valuable. Share on XIt’s one of the questions that we ask in our quarterly planning process. Is there something on the list that you’ve been doing regularly that you could delete and not ever do again? I know the first few times our clients go through the process. They are always shocked that there was something on there that they could take off because somewhere, someone told them it was what they were supposed to do, and they are doing it but it’s not necessarily what they want to be doing. It’s not moving the needle and it’s not doing all of those things.
All of that plays into this piece but the first thing you said was, “Who’s going to help me put out all these fires?” One of my favorite quotes is from Dan Sullivan, who’s the founder of Strategic Coach, and I’m going to butcher it a little bit, but the idea is that entrepreneurs are good at putting out fires, which means sometimes they are arsonists.
I’m very guilty of being an arsonist.
He’s extremely insightful to the entrepreneurial mind. I can quote him often.
Moving from there, because we have talked a lot about the urgency. Honestly, I have spent so much time talking about the urgency because that is probably my most acute problem. The flip side in my business bestie group is that there’s the urgency that feels good to knock off the urgent stuff, but the flip side is maintaining focus on long-term goals while managing the day-to-day urgency. That tension between the two feels hard and I can say honestly, I don’t think I ever do it well. I do it passably. I don’t burn alive in the fire I made, but I’m not doing it well. Do you have any techniques for maintaining focus on the long-term goals while managing that day-to-day urgency?
One is knowing what the goal is and having it clearly identified, and in some form that you see on a regular basis, but not on such a common basis that it becomes blind to you. People will say, “Put something on your refrigerator to remind you not to eat after 8:00 or something,” If it’s there constantly, at some point you don’t see the thing on the refrigerator anymore. If you move it, all of a sudden it becomes like a whole new thing.
If it’s too static that becomes an issue. That’s the first thing realizing that you’ve got to have the goals in front of you, but not in a way that you become numb to them and know what they are. The piece that we talked about in our process is, instead of trying to think about all the things that you need to be doing this week, this day, this whatever, what is one thing?
Inserting one thing into the list I will say the daily activities that have to be done to be maintained do not feel overwhelming. Inserting all the things that need to be done does, and this is back to is like coming full circle. This is where we get back to the overwhelm. It’s like, ‘I have got six things that I have got to do today.” Do you have to do all six today? What is the one that either moves the needle the most or is foundational for the rest?
Focusing On 1-3 Key Tasks Each Day
Ask yourself a slightly different question and say, “If I’m only doing one, what is the one?” Once it’s done, then you can say, “Do I have time to do the second?” Most people can’t do what I’m going to call important work or important tasks, more than 1 or 2 in a day because we do have a lot of other tasks that do have to be done. You can’t completely ignore your email. It doesn’t work unless you’ve got some other person completely managing that for you. You have to have some space for that but what are the 1 or 2 things today that I’m going to do instead of trying to insert all the things today?
It’s back to thinking through the process. Let me see if I can sum this up now. This is a pretty solid place for us to leave our readers. The first step is acknowledging. Part of why I feel the way I do is because I am trying to manage too many things at one time. I’m trying to manage too many things at one time that my brain is short-circuiting. That’s the first step. Then the second step is of all these things I’m trying to manage, what are the things that require a high level of attention? What are things that require less attention? Dividing those up and then going, we’ll take the things that we know require a lot of attention and go, “What happens if I don’t do this one thing? What happens if I don’t do it today? Don’t do it right now. I didn’t do it today. I didn’t do it this week. I don’t do it eventually. In order of priority, it will emerge for most of us after we have done that exercise.
You will usually eliminate some surprisingly large portion of the things.
Your point about putting the goal front and center. To me, on a practical point, that can be as easy as writing down that one thing you have to do today on a sticky note and sticking it on your monitor. Any other ways that you would demonstrate that?
I love electronic systems, and I’m an IT gal from way back, but I still use a paper planner. Part of it is I look at my electronic list of things and I write the 1 or 2 things that are the most important things to do. It’s my version of a sticky note. You could be using an electronic system and saying, “What are the things a task list, a project management piece?” Being able to analyze it and not end up with a list of 800 things.
What do you recommend? We talked about having, like the one most important thing, but let’s say we have a reader who’s never in my life, have I ever had a day where I could do one thing. What do you think is the actual max like 1 to 3 things 1 to 5 things?
It’s 1 to 3 because we are talking about things beyond the everyday things that have to happen or the everyday things that have to happen. There’s a whole number of things that I do every week that I don’t count as the one thing. Although they are super important. They are part of my client delivery. They are part of all of those things, but they don’t count as the thing. I’m talking about the additional thing on top of the every day, every week, every month activities. Therefore, it can’t be a very big number because most of us don’t have that space but if we were to do one thing every day, we would make significant progress.
Wrap-Up And Listener Invitation
That is the perfect place to end because what you clarified is that many times we look at our task list and we have 6 or 10 things, and we treat it as if those are the only things vying for our attention in a given day, and we completely discount all of the other life things that we do day in and day out that eat away hours from the day. I love that. Thank you for pointing that out. Honestly, that was a little bit of a mic drop for me, but thank you for tying a bow around the whole conversation.
Speaking of conversations that’s what we are here for we want to start conversations. This is a lovely conversation between the two of us, but I don’t know about you. I like other people to be involved as well, and one way you, as a reader could be involved is by emailing me. I would love to know from you if this is helpful or worthy. Can you see yourself applying these tips? Are these things that you are already doing? If this episode resonated with you at all, drop me a line. Email me. Email me even if it didn’t. I need to know that information too. It’s Tonya@EverydayEffectiveness.com. I want to hear from you. I want to know if these tips are helpful or maybe you have additional tips to add. We would love to bring those to our readers in the future. Thank you, Gwen, for joining me. Thank you for helping me out of this very acute problem I’m having right now, and we will see you next time.
Mentioned in this Episode
The Everyday Effectiveness team practices true accountability internally and in partnership with their clients. If you’d like to experience the Weekly Course of Action for yourself, join the waitlist here: You and Your Business are One-Of-A-Kind Form
The Mars Pathfinder overwhelmed to the point of paralysis: @thatmakessensetome
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review!
Don’t miss Episode 11, where you’ll learn whether there’s such a thing as a bad goal and how to set objectives that truly serve your business and align with your values.
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
