At any given point – whether at work or in your personal life you may just be overwhelmed with all the tasks that you have to do or complete. It may cause you great anxiety or just be an annoyance. Still these “things” or activities need to get done. There may be time pressure, peer pressure, family pressure or pressure from the “hated boss”, supervisor, manager or even your spouse or best friend.
What to do? The activity or all the activates may be minor or they may be overwhelming. It may be just too great an amount of tasks or it may be just perception – not that much really, or too many activities yet the last one is the straw that broke the camels back – or at least it seems that way. In the end all that matters is how you feel about it or put another way – it’s all your perception that matters.
If you want to make an analogy – that if the task seems too large or the number of tasks seems too many for you to cope with or handle, then try to do only thing at a time. Our life is made as it were, of little grains of sands passing by the narrowest part of an hourglass. Those grains of sand can pass easily one by one – but try to force the flow through that smallest limiting part of a sand hourglass and indeed the flow will stop dead and the hourglass can even be ruined. So is it with our lives, the anxiety and worry created and in the end how we cope, or do not cope, and ultimately what we accomplish and finish with our lives, its work and our activities.
Most people, your self included, can only do one thing at a time. That is all you should try for. If you can juggle multiple tasks (commonly called “multitasking”), then great. However if you encounter tasks that overwhelm you to the point that it stops you dead in your tracks with dread , then a most useful and accomplished tactic is to take bite sized pieces. Split the task or task into smaller pieces or components. Try to accomplish only one of these tasks at a time. In your mind think of the task as a number of simple attainable tasks that you complete one at a time. Finish and accomplish these tasks one at a time to completion.
Most people can finish to fruition a number of smaller tasks. If the sum of these tasks was attempted by the same people, as one large giant task then in many if not most cases, little or nothing would get done.
Break the large task into a number of smaller tasks. The smaller tasks are not only less intimidating in nature, but the inertia of accomplishment as well as what you learn along the path of completion will help you guide you and speed you along the way. It might be called an approach of cutting the salami into slices or eating an elephant. In the end it’s a way of breaking down a task or series of tasks that may see overwhelming or beyond your skills and attributes into smaller segments and pieces that can be done, accomplished and finished.
Most people can only concentrate on one task at a time. Even if your job or personal life makes demands to “Multitask”, you may find the whole concept of “multitasking “way to difficult and demanding. Break down the tasks into smaller tasks and segments. Do these to completion one at a time. Remember in the end – it is the results that matter. Any journey is completed through small and smaller steps, done one at a time.
