Ep #79: How to Get it All Done WITHOUT Overwhelm

episode summary

Ever wonder what it would feel like to end your workweek with with everything checked off your to-do list, and energy left to spare?

Managing an overwhelming number of tasks every week can feel like a never-ending struggle. But it doesn't have to be.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

A simple three-step strategy to stay on top of your weekly to-dos.
How to create a realistic plan that ensures you finish your tasks without overworking.
The secret to maintaining a calm mindset even during a busy week.

Listen now to discover how to get everything done in a week without feeling overwhelmed—plus, start your next Friday feeling accomplished!

Featured on the podcast:
The Good Life group coaching waitlist
Ep #51| The Calendar Clean-Out
The Calendar Clean-Out worksheet
Spark Mail email management

Listen to this episode on Apple or Spotify!

For the full show notes and transcript, head over here.

If you are sick and tired of feeling overwhelmed, I can help. I coach clients on 1 on 1 to create a more calm, relaxing, intentional life. The first step is to set up a complimentary discovery session right here.

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Want to learn more about me or my work? Head to my website at www.michellegauthier.com

Discover practical strategies to overcome imposter syndrome, manage time effectively, and cultivate a calm and positive mindset while setting boundaries and combating negative self-talk in high-stress jobs, all while learning how to say no and prioritize self-care on the 'Overwhelmed Working Woman' podcast.

Music Used: Pop Guitar Intro 01 by TaigaSoundProd, Licensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-licen

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CHAPTERS:

3:00 - How Do You Want to Feel?

3:39 - A Big Ole To-Do List

8:51 - Don't Overschedule Yourself

12:36 - Do Less for More Success Tip

Just imagine this next Friday afternoon and imagine that on that Friday afternoon you have completed everything that you needed to get done for the week. No last minute scrambling, no feeling overwhelmed or exhausted, just calm and satisfied that you got it all done. You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less. I'm your host, ichelle Gothier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach. On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's working woman experiences, and in each episode you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease and relaxation to your life. Hey friend, thanks for listening and joining today. I want to talk to you about how to get it all done without feeling overwhelmed. It's not a magic trick, it's just a strategy, and there are really just three simple steps that you need to take in order to be able to finish your week feeling totally accomplished and checking everything off your list. By the end of this episode, you'll know exactly how to do it. If you haven't planned your own week yet, maybe you've finished listening to this episode and you do it today. So last Friday I coached my last client of the day and I finished at about two o'clock in the afternoon and I looked back at my to-do list and my schedule for the week and I thought yep, good to go. I did it all. I got everything done that I wanted to do. I will tell you right now that that feeling is the best - to be able to finish the week and just know that you checked all of the boxes that you put out there for yourself. And also, I was feeling completely fine. I was not totally drained like I spent every last bit of my energy. I also don't miss at all that I used to have to work until 6, 7, 8 o'clock on a Friday night to get that feeling. It was 2 o'clock. I called it a day and I made a note to myself to record a podcast on this very feeling and exactly how you can get it too.
Michelle Gauthier:2:06
So today I'm going to tell you about exactly what to do so that you can get everything done in a week and you can feel calm and productive throughout the week. First I'll teach you how to set the tone by deciding how you want to feel. Then I'll walk you through my weekly planning process using the calendar clean out method, which I describe also in episode 51. And then, finally, we'll talk about staying on track each day by sticking to your plan without overworking or adding in extra tasks. Okay, let's jump right in. So I'm going to tell you exactly how I planned my week this very week, and you can take that as an example for you. I've got lots of resources that you can use. There's a worksheet to go along with it if you want to use that to plan your week, but I'm going to give you all the details about how I planned this week, which is honestly the same as how I plan every week.
Michelle Gauthier:3:00
The first thing that I think about is, how do I want to feel this week? I focus on the feeling and the intention before I even think about what it is that I have to do. So maybe one week I want to feel really energized. Maybe I want to feel really focused. Maybe I want to feel excited. This week I chose calm and productive, and I chose those because I knew there would be a lot to do, but I didn't want to feel frantic or overwhelmed. So just ask yourself - a step one, before you even start - what's the feeling that I want to carry through this week? And then we'll use that feeling to guide your decisions as you decide what to do when.
Michelle Gauthier:3:39
Okay, now you're ready to create your schedule for the week. So, if you haven't already, you'll gather up everything you need. You need your to-do list. You need your calendar. If you have a separate calendar, like for your kids' sports or something like that, grab that. If you have a specific work schedule - just get together everything that you'll need in order to create your plan for the week. Now that you have all that, you're going to create your to-do list for the week. So if you had one from the prior week, that's always a great place to start with anything that you didn't get done. If you have recurring tasks that you know you need to do, anything that's specific to this week, just make a big ole to-do list. I like to separate the page into two for myself. I like to do a personal on one side and then a work on the other. So you take a look at your whole big to-do list and then what you want to do is you want to eventually you're going to estimate how much time each one of these are going to take. Now, some of them like my to-do list,
Michelle Gauthier:4:38
this week, I had to call my insurance company about something, I had to call and make an appointment for my daughter, a doctor's appointment, et cetera, so I'll group all those things together. So I'll make a group of things in my personal that are phone calls I need to make, or things I need to look up on a website. And then I made a second group - I had to run errands that were in-person, like returns. I'm always talking about returns on here. I feel like returns are just like part of my life because I do so much shopping. So I had to do returns and go to a bunch of different stores, and so I grouped all of those together, even though they were separate to-dos.
Michelle Gauthier:5:12
On the work front, if it's something that I'm going to work on, like, for example, writing and recording podcasts, if I want to do this week's and next week's, I'll group those together and estimate that to take, you know, two or three hours or whatever that takes. So what you want to do is first write everything down - I'm just recapping - write everything down, then group where possible and estimate how much time each one of those are going to take. Now you could do a little spot check here and just add up what you got on your to-do list. So sometimes you might find that you have 25 hours of stuff to do, but your calendar's already full for the week. This is actually really helpful and good information, and we're going to get to that right now. So now you're going to create your actual calendar. What I do, and this may or may not work for you, you just have to do whatever works for you, but I have my calendar on my phone,
Michelle Gauthier:6:04
but I find that it's really powerful to take a blank page - I use that remarkable tablet that's like a notebook tablet - and I just get a blank page that has the week on it and then I just write out the times that I have things for the week, even though it's on my phone. Just because that is my own preference, you don't have to do that. But there's something I really like about having it written down, and when I write it down it helps me kind of remember and visualize how the day is going to go. So then you write down everything for the week.
Michelle Gauthier:6:33
For mine, I start with when I have client sessions, because those are my for- sure committed times. I put in everything I know I have for my kids. So my daughter always has a horse lesson, maybe there's a soccer game et cetera. So I put in commitments I have for my kids. I put in my workouts. I can't work out at the same time every day, just based on my schedule. So when I see how those things are playing out I choose which times I'm gonna work out, put that on there.
Michelle Gauthier:6:59
So by the time I have that all filled in, I have a good feel for how much space I have to get my to-do list done. Because, for example, on my to-do list I don't have an item for, take Josie to horse lessons and I don't have an item for see my clients. I just do that, you know, that's just on my calendar already. So then I can look back at my to-do list and say, okay, like, for example, I told you I was going to run some errands. I see on Monday I have a nice open space, so I'm going to plug in running errands here and I'm going to plug in making phone calls on Tuesday at two o'clock because it looks like I have an opening there.
Michelle Gauthier:7:35
When I work on podcasts I like to have a good amount of time to do it, so where do I have that space, et cetera, and what you'll find - this is like the most important part of this entire episode - what you'll find is that you probably have more things than you have time. So don't shove it all in there and put it on your list and put it on your calendar when you know you can't get it done. That's how you get overwhelmed. Only put on there what you actually have the space to do. A nd you might find out as you're doing this,
Michelle Gauthier:8:07
one of my clients just told me this last week that she made her to-do list for the day, she had three tasks on there, and it turned out that there's no way she could get all three of those tasks done in one day, so she reduced it to just one task. So that can be frustrating when you don't get as much done as you estimated; that things actually take more time than you estimate. If you're like me, that's how it always is. I like to just, in my mind I estimate low, and then it actually takes me longer. So when you do that, you find out, that's great information, for next week I'll know when I'm going to write record a podcast episode, I need to book two hours instead of one hour or an hour and a half or whatever. So I just thought, I need to book two hours instead of one hour or an hour and a half or whatever. So as time goes on, you'll get better and faster at knowing how long things take.
Michelle Gauthier:8:51
But this step right here, where you're deciding what on your to-do list is going to actually go on your calendar, is critical, and this is the moment where you can decide, I'm going to not make myself overwhelmed, I'm not going to overschedule myself. And this might be something that you have never done before. Maybe every week you just have previously tried to pack everything else in. But if you're listening to this podcast, I'm assuming you want to be less overwhelmed and in that case, don't overschedule yourself. Last thing to do as you're working on this schedule piece: so now you've got all your committed appointments, you've got your blocks where you're going to run an errand or write a podcast or whatever your version of that is, and then just take a look at your schedule and see if there's anything that you want to or can remove. It's always good just to take a look and say, do I really have to do absolutely everything on here? So now you've got your schedule, and then the third thing you need to do is just check in with yourself every day.
Michelle Gauthier:9:46
So when you get up in the morning, or whatever your process is maybe you do it when you sit down at your desk, or however you start your workday, take a look at your whole schedule for the day, see where you're going to be when, see what you've scheduled in to work on, and just make sure that that still works. One of the things that I had scheduled for my week last week was to go to the DMV, and I went to the DMV and I wasn't able to complete the errand that I was trying to do because I have to just go get another form somewhere else. So that was frustrating, because I didn't get to check that one off the list. Well, I checked my first visit off the list, but I had to schedule it again because it turned out to be a longer one than I thought. So you'll have stuff like that. But every day, just check your list, make progress, and then by the end of the week you will have noticed every day that you're checking things off and getting things done and that if you set yourself up for a reasonable schedule, you'll feel just like I felt last Friday, where I got everything on my list done and I felt calm and productive. One thing I want to remind you about is that episode 51, which is about the calendar clean out method, goes into even more detail on this, and it also has a corresponding worksheet. I'll put a link to that in the show notes so that you can grab a worksheet that can be your guide, especially as you are just getting started on this new process.
Michelle Gauthier:11:06
Now let's move on to Michelle's Do Less for More Success tip. This is a tie- on to the clutter challenge that we did a couple weeks back, and my tip is to spend two minutes on email management every morning. So I think it's human nature that, as one of the things we do when we wake up in the morning - hopefully not the very first thing - but we check our email and kind of look at our day. If you are a person who gets a ton of emails - I definitely do, not for my work, I get a lot of advertisements and other things, just take the time in that moment to delete the emails that you don't want and maybe even unsubscribe. I have found that doing this just for two minutes every day keeps my inbox manageable all the time. An app that I use and I really like and suggest is called Spark and it manages all your emails. So it pulls all my emails from my various email addresses and it puts them into categories so it shows you the ones that are high priority, that come from people, and then it has a category for notifications and a category for newsletters and it's really easy just to scan the newsletters, for example, and mark them all as read. So I can just take a few minutes every day and my inbox stays totally manageable. I recommend that you give it a try. Okay, that's it for today.
Michelle Gauthier:12:36
If you are enjoying this podcast and you feel like you're really picking up what I'm putting down about how to feel less overwhelmed and how to be mindful about things, I think you would absolutely love group coaching. My group coaching is called The Good Life and if you really like this podcast and you like the advice and the things that I talk about and the approach that I take, I think you would absolutely love group coaching. To me, the most fun and useful part of it is the community that happens among women. It's all women who are trying to improve their lives and are totally encouraging and supportive to each other. I teach you all kinds of concepts and little bite sized pieces, and then you come to group coaching and you can ask me any questions and I coach each person individually.
Michelle Gauthier:13:21
So if that sounds like something you're interested in doing to finish out 2024 and start 2025, because it starts in November and it goes until February of next year then get on the waitlist. If you're on the waitlist, as soon as it's open, you'll get a notification and you will also get a discount. Okay, have a great week. See you next week. Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegauthier.com. See you next week.