When I quit working back in 2019, I thought I will have all the time in the world, now that I don’t have to commute to work, and spend most of my waking hours doing meaningless things that others want me to do.

I thought I would wake up leisurely each morning, go over the newspaper over a cup of tea, spend a couple of hours writing, then go out to visit a gallery or meet a friend, before heading home for a long, interesting evening.

Instead, I was chasing my tail all day, doing things I never thought I would have to do. Things such as writing articles, social media posts, newsletters, doing marketing, web calls, seminars, and webinars.

I had contracted the overwhelmed virus.

The virus incapacitated me for years. I kept soldiered on. I reduced the number of articles I published each week to just one. I made them smaller. I stopped writing on my website and concentrated just on Medium. I ignored Facebook and LinkedIn completely. I still couldn’t manage.

I was about to quit, but before that, I gave writing one last shot.

What I did might sound contradictory, but I set myself a challenge to write 100 articles in 100 days.

From 13 April, 2021 to 21 July, 2021, I wrote 100 articles without missing a day. How did I do that when I was finding it hard to write even one article a week?

You might think the answer lies in increased ability, yet that’s not it. I didn’t suddenly become more talented in those days.

You might suggest I somehow had more time to write, but it wasn’t even that. During those months, I wrote and published my first book.

So, how did I do it?

I stopped fretting and kept ploughing ahead.

Writing and publishing an article day becomes a task just like cooking or doing dishes.

As soon as I stop writing (and publishing) every day, writing becomes difficult again.

Prior to 100 articles, I had taken part in NaNoWriMo several times and I knew if I could meet the challenge of writing 50,000 words in 30 days, I can write an article a day.

Surprisingly, I don’t get overwhelmed when I am participating in a writing challenge or publishing an article a day.

That overwhelm comes from less, not more.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been part of a 30-day challenge, but a simple challenge like that can solve your problem of overwhelm forever.

Then I have another ace up my sleeve, and it’s called “planning”.

When faced with writing 7 articles in a week, you can’t just sit down and write each day. Your brain is fried with the thought of having to create such a high volume of work on a constant basis. The only way forward is to sit down and work out a plan. And that’s precisely what I do.

Without the plan, I would be soon flounder. To get those articles out day after day without fail, the only lifesaver is a plan.

Time and time again, the people who are overwhelmed will almost always not have a plan. When you know you have to write something every day, you will read online magazines, or go to the library and come back with an armload of books, you will keep your eyes and ears open for stories.

You will make notes, collect headline, have draft articles ready for the next day. You are ready. Just like you stock your fridge and pantry for the week to cook every night, you stock your draft folder with draft articles for the week.

If you go back to the root of overwhelm, you will almost always find a lack of planning.

Once you get down to planning, you realize it’s a bit like being on the road.

You may have the plan to get to your destination, but things have changed since you got into your car. There might be too much traffic, or an accident up ahead. Every lousy driver seems to have shown up on the road at the exact point you started on your journey.

When we start a project, we realise things change and our plans have to change too. That’s fine. Yet planning helps.

They say plans are worthless, but planning is priceless.

It is during planning that we are prepping our mind for the task ahead. And most of the time the only thing standing between us and our goal is our ‘mind.’

Usually, it takes much less time to do a task when we ‘feel’ like it. But when we don’t, a simple task feels like a mammoth.

There are ways to trick our ‘mind.’ If you can make the task a routine, the mind allocates the task to the ‘autopilot.’

Autopilot is the subconscious part of the brain that takes care of all routine mundane activities, such as brushing our teeth, washing the dishes, turning the TV at news time.

When article writing become a routine, subconscious mind takes over and it keeps working on it all day in the background.

Most people who get things done have similar routines

They first set a plan in place, and then turn it into a routine.

The people who are overwhelmed never have a plan, and hence no routine either.

Check out the busiest, most productive people you know and they’ll have plans and routines. Find someone who is overwhelmed all the time, and they’ll tell you they have plans and routines, but they often have none. They complain they have no time to plan. Well, there you go — it’s all downhill from thereon.

A plan needs to exist, or nothing happens.

Planning also stops us from taking on too much.

When your day is already filled with drawing lessons, writing articles, and learning software you really should master — you know that you’ve got enough on your plate. Without the plan in place, it seems you can slot in more stuff.

I plan my year, my months, and then my weeks. But I don’t plan my days. My days have routines. Even then I keep most of my days flexible so that I can handle emergencies and make room for spontaneity.

To get off the overwhelm bandwagon, you first have to work out a plan.

Then the plan has to become a routine. But that’s just the starting point. It doesn’t help if you take ages to get something done.

Productive people also have another superpower. That power is called fluency. Fluency is the ability to do a task quickly and effortlessly.

Look at all the work you’re doing, and you can be sure you’re wasting massive amounts of time.

Let’s take the simple act of finding interesting images for your articles. Do you do that each time you write an article, or you set aside half an hour in a week and download a bunch of free images to use in your articles?

The difference between people who get a lot done vs those that struggle is merely the lack of fluency.

We fail to create such shortcuts because of course, we’re busy. We fail to implement new features because we have a life. But it’s all a lack of fluency, and it leads to a drain of energy.

Once your energy is drained, you’ve heading towards a state of overwhelm.

You can get a high-quality article done in 90 minutes flat or sweat over it for days on end.

People who are overwhelmed take the longer route

The way to get away from that overwhelming feeling is to ask yourself: How can I do the task in ‘x’ minutes?

Or x. hours?

It is not as hard as you believe. In reality, most of us can reduce the number of hours we spend on writing quite dramatically.

What the word ‘overwhelm’ suggests is that we have lost control.

The word ‘overwhelm used to give me negative feelings. I have eliminated it from my dictionary and replaced it with ‘fully optimized.’

Now, when I feel I am losing control, I don’t think ‘overwhelm’ I think of re-prioritizing. It changes my perspective. I don’t get negative feeling about the situation I am in. Rather, I feel energized to review and realign my priorities.

If you use the word overwhelm, that alone will kill you. The way out of overwhelm is not exactly easy, but it starts with a word change.

‘Optimized’, or ‘Re-prioritize’ are good start. Once you have replaced the word, you can start working on achieving fluency.

Takeaway

Anyone can get to where he or she wants to be and do it without feeling overwhelmed.

It’s a combination of several elements, but in the end, those who are able to meet the source of their overwhelm head-on and become fluent at it, can be free of the virus forever.