PP 239: Stop Overfilling Your Plate

Transcript not yet cleaned up, but thanks for checking it out!

As a child, I can remember being told not to put too much food on my plate because there was no way that I was going to be able to eat it all. I was always told that I could go back for seconds and get more of whatever I liked, but first I had to eat what I had already served myself.

In this episode, I want to talk about how we should be doing the same thing when it comes to our to do lists so that we’re not overwhelming ourselves and stressing ourselves out unnecessarily.

Stop Overfilling Your Plate

So before you go any further in this episode, I want you to take a look at today’s to do list and count up how many items are on it. Next, I also want you to take a look at each of those items. Are they specific? Or are they big, broad and vague.

What I mean by big, broad and vague is a task like build my website. There are so many different parts of building your website: you’ve got the about page and the contact page, your blog, and so many other pages. I want you to commit right now to no longer putting big, broad and vague tasks on your to do list. When you have a big project like that, I want you to break it down into smaller to do items. I want you to put down design my about page, design my contact page, and so forth and so on.

Stop Overfilling Your Plate

Now, you know when I asked you to count up all the items on your to do list, if there are any more than three, I want you to choose three of them and cross out all the rest for the day. If you don’t want to cross them out, maybe you just add them to a separate sheet of paper or a new electronic note, but you save them for later. And you get them out of your mind when we’re putting too many tasks on our plate, just like when we’re putting too much food on our plate, often we can get overwhelmed. We start multitasking, we’re flip flopping between projects and tasks. And in the end, our efficiency is drastically reduced because we’re all over the place and unable to focus. To give another example of putting too much on our plates, I want you to imagine taking my two year old twins to the chinese buffet. Now when Dave and I get back to the table with a plate full of the foods that we know are twins, like we wouldn’t put the whole plate of food in front of them, but would instead give them an empty plate with a couple bites at a time on it. When the twins finished those couple bites of food on their respective plates, of course, then they will Get more food from us. But if we had put the whole plate with all the food on it in front of them, then there would have been overwhelmed, there would have been food on the floor food all over them, and probably knowing my twins, food thrown all over the table. We all get overwhelmed when we see too much in front of us, whether it be food or tasks. So do yourself a favor and start cutting out the extras. If you find yourself midway through the day, having already gone through the three tasks on your to do list, then add a little bit more, but stop serving yourself too much. Now with all this said, Go forth and have a positive and productive day.