9 Strategies to Manage an Overwhelming To-Do List

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Managing a to-do list is important for productivity and efficiency in our lives. Being strategic about how our lists are managed can be the difference between checking boxes off your list quickly and never checking them off at all.

Here are 9 strategies to manage an overwhelming to do list:

1. Practice self-compassion and self-awareness

The Process Communication Model (PCM), often used to describe depth of our personality, specifies that perfectionism is an indicator of distress. Moreover, perfectionism is used as a way to feel safe and avoid confronting unwelcomed feelings, situations, or tasks. Oftentimes we can be the biggest obstacles in our own productivity such that it can hinder us from even getting started. Make a conscious choice to be self-aware of how you speak to yourself. Simply put, perfectionism can be the enemy of success.

2. Learn to prioritise

While learning to prioritise is arguably the most important strategy on this list, it can also be a challenging skill to develop. Former U.S. president, Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” Later, Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, coined the “Eisenhower Principle”, a prioritisation strategy used to organise work by urgency and importance. With this tool, you can split your tasks into four separate sections:

• To be completed urgently

• To be scheduled (and completed at a later date)

• To be delegated

• To delete

This is one of the many prioritisation tools out there that can help you reach your efficiency goals. By clearly mapping out your list, you can easily gauge what is most urgent and what can wait.

3. Learn to say no, or not right now

In reference to strategy #2, if something on your to-do list falls into the “to be delegated” or “to delete” bucket, this will likely require you to be communicative with others about your workload. Compassionate communication is the best way to share with your team what you are and aren’t able to manage. If certain projects fall out of your “important” and “urgent” buckets, sharing with your team creates an open line of communication for everyone to reassess goals and objectives.

Transparency plays a key role in being an advocate for yourself as you want to be honest about where your focus is while also being realistic with expectations of others. Compassionate Communication is a skill which teaches us to speak our truth is a safe way by taking out the emotional charge of a message. How someone choose to interpret it is up to them, but what we can do is take out the major triggering things to avoid a defensive reaction when we share something which is difficult to communicate.

4. Log every time you freeze in front of your list

If you’re often paralyzed by the sight of your to-do list, this is a sign of overwhelm and anxiety. Try jotting dow

58% of Britons say they have high expectations of themselves, according to the YouGov UK study. If you identify with this group, consider working towards lowering the expectations you place upon yourself. By adjusting the bar for yourself, you can create goals that are more quickly attainable thus giving you a more frequent sense of accomplishment and confidence. You may also find that this tactic can help to relieve yourself of stress, anxiety, and overwhelm which can frequently cause self-doubt.

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