We’ve all experienced overwhelming moments with work. When you feel tired and stressed with your load, life can feel frenzied. And trying to ‘push through’ only leads to something much worse – burnout.
So what can you do?
Feeling overwhelmed isn’t about not working hard or long enough. Instead, it’s a crisis of overcommitment, communication, and prioritisation–all issues you can solve with a few strategies. They can help stop feeling overwhelmed at work, reduce the overload, and give your mind greater freedom and clarity to tackle your biggest work priorities.
These strategies are easy to follow and take minimal time to implement.
Strategies to help lighten the burden from stress sources in your workplace.
This feeling of stress can harm your performance and productivity. Here are three strategies you can follow that will reduce the feeling of overwhelm. Following them will leave you calmer, in control, and less stressed at work.
1. Plan out your day
Planning your activities for the day is a great way to stop you from feeling overwhelmed at work. Even writing down what needs to get done and deciding what order you’re going to tackle it in can be powerful. Why? It takes all the things flying around your head and puts them into an actionable list. It stops you from thinking about how you’re going to complete your work and lets you think about doing it
Checklists are also great for planning. Write down a few goals you want to reach over the day and devote your time to completing the tasks on the list.
This can help you avoid becoming side-tracked by other low-priority projects. It also feels good to check an item off your to-do list. You can even start your next day on the right track by creating tomorrow’s checklist before finishing.
2. Stop multitasking
Multitasking dilutes your focus and attention so even the easiest of tasks become harder and take longer. You may feel like you’re powering through your to-do list when you multitask. But the opposite is true, meaning you’re more likely to make mistakes when you devote your mental power to more than one task at a time.
Multitasking hurts more than your productivity. It can also lead to you becoming overwhelmed from juggling too many important details from too many tasks at once.
Instead, you need to force yourself to prioritise your task list, and then pick one to complete.
This might feel like a small task, but that’s the point. Action breeds more action as crossing off even small items surges your motivation and confidence. The key here is to pick a task that is manageable and that you can see that you’ve completed.
3. Breathe through it
When we are anxious and overwhelmed at work, it’s hard to get anything done. We also often make bad decisions as we’re not thinking clearly. Give yourself a moment to sit alone somewhere and breathe through it. The idea of this is to bring your thoughts to the present so you’re not preoccupied with things that have already happened or could happen in the future.
You can even perform breathing exercises to bring about a calm rhythm. US Navy SEALs use exercises like the box breathing method to manage their stress levels. With some practice, they can work for you too.
These mindfulness exercises work because they reduce some of the elements that trigger stress.
Utilise monday.com to beat feeling overwhelmed at work
monday.com is the ultimate Work Operating System that lets you shape workflows your way. You can streamline your work to maximise productivity, centralising everything into one system. The ease of use with monday.com goes a long way to breaking down work sources of stress. This means better opportunities to achieve your work goals.
Unleash the Kanban board on monday.com
Ever felt overwhelmed when you’ve lost track of time? This is common if you’re working a fast-paced job. You become immersed in a task and forgot that you have an assignment due at the end of the day. The feeling of overwhelm hits you, and hard.
Thankfully, monday.com’s Kanban boards have you covered. You can manage your work in one by prioritising tasks and balancing demands according to available capacity. This will help make it easier to manage your to-do list.
If there’s ever a task that you can’t complete within a given time, you can leave it in the “to do” column and begin a new task. This strategy is a great way to prevent overwhelming by making it easier to track your tasks.
Remind yourself—it will all get done. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, and these strategies will help to get you there. If you do continue to feel overwhelmed at work, don’t suffer in silence. Talk it through with your manager, a colleague, or a friend.
Contact our friendly monday.com team today, to learn how monday.com can improve your workload management.
