If I asked you if you ever feel overwhelm, I would bet that 95% of you would give me a resounding yes. I know that, as bloggers, we struggle with overwhelm due to the fact that there are always so many tasks to accomplish and sometimes, many times, we aren’t sure which task we should work on first or which one is most important.

The reason we feel overwhelm is that we don’t have a plan. If I go into my day without any idea of what I hope to accomplish, how will I know what to do first or second? How will I know if I’m doing the things that are most important? The things that will move my business forward?

IE 60: 5 Steps to Beat Overwhelm and Get the Most Out of Your Day

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I know that even within my group of coaching clients, there are women who are at home all day with little children, women who work a full-time job along with trying to build their business, and women in every other combination of schedules you can imagine. My goal is to help you get the most out of your day no matter what your schedule looks like.

Progress over Perfection

The mantra I want to give you to adopt is progress over perfection.

I’ve been told more than once that I move too quickly. And I get that it may look that way from the outside. But what I do is try to determine what I need to do to move my business forward and then I do it. And if I fall on my face, I get up, dust myself off, and keep going.

What I want to do today is give you 5 steps to beat that feeling of not knowing what to do and help you create a plan to get the most out of your day. Let’s jump right in.

#1 – Beat Overwhelm by Figuring Out Your Schedule

How much time do you have? What time do you put the kids on the bus? What time do you pick them up? What time does that baby take a nap? How long can the kids play on their own without you having to interfere? What time does your family eat dinner?

If you listened to the episode with Katie Hornor, you know that she talked about the fact that as Moms, our businesses don’t run on a 9-5 schedule. Jennifer, from The intentional Mom, talks about getting up well before her kids get up in the morning so that she can get some work in before their homeschool day begins.

When I was teaching full-time, I was getting up at 5, but that wasn’t to work on my business. It was to get ready for my “real job”. I had quite a commute and had my 2 girls to drop off on the way. Then I taught all day, only to leave work, pick my girls up again, and come home to make dinner and do all the Mom stuff.

My blog work happened between 7 p.m. and midnight or 1 a.m., or however long I could push myself.

Your schedule may not work like anyone else’s here, so it’s important for you to figure out where your pockets of time are and how you can make it work. But somehow, someway, you have to figure out how to get your content created and your blog work done.

#2 – Beat Overwhelm by Determining Your Tasks and Projects

As bloggers, there are certain tasks that you need to accomplish on a daily basis. Things like your prioritized social media platforms need to be scheduled. You should have 2 platforms that you are focusing on in order to grow your following and grow your traffic to your blog.

Aside from tasks are projects. Let’s say you are working on growing your email list. You need to have a high-quality opt-in for that, so maybe you schedule time to work on that during one of your pockets of time. Projects require tasks in order to get them completed. Growing the list is a project and how you do it are the tasks.

The first thing to do to beat that feeling of overwhelm is to sit down and figure out what the weekly tasks are that you do every week without fail. If you’re a member of Pitch Perfect Pro, you need to be reaching out to brands every week. If you are working with sponsored posts, you should be promoting them every week.

If you have a blog, which I am guessing you do since you are here, you have to create content every week and share and promote it. You need to be emailing your list every week if that’s something you do. If you’re a food blogger, you should be developing recipes and taking your pictures every week for your content.

#3 – Beat Overwhelm by Labeling Your Tasks

Once you have your list of tasks, I want you to label them in one of 3 ways: full-brain, half-brain, or no-brain.

Are you laughing at the “no-brain” label? Why? You know as well as I do that there are tasks that really don’t require any brain power. Scheduling your pins into Tailwind doesn’t require brain power. You just plug them in and wait for Tailwind to refresh and show you that it accepted them.

On the other hand, things like writing a blog post or writing an email to my list requires full brain power. The point is that you have to know which label your tasks fall under so that you can figure out where you can fit them into your day.

#4 – Beat Overwhelm by Assigning The Half-Brain and No-Brain Tasks

Once you have your tasks and they are all labeled, the next step is to fit the half-brain and no-brain tasks into the pockets of your day.

If you’re home with kids all day, it’s going to be vital for you to know where your pockets of time are and which tasks you can fit into those pockets. If you have 10 minutes at some point during the day, you can look at your list and do a 10-minute task instead of wasting those 10 minutes scrolling Facebook.

I know you have had the same experience as I have, wasting hours scrolling Facebook or watching Instagram stories. As bloggers who are trying to grow their businesses, we can’t afford to waste hours on senseless scrolling when we could be working on our blogs.

#5 – Beat Overwhelm by Prioritizing the Projects that Will Move Your Business Forward

I know that this is the hardest part of owning a business; figuring out what those big projects are that will move my business forward.

Scheduling Facebook is not a project. Growing your email list is a project. Creating a product is a project. Building a series is a project. A project is something that involves multiple steps and multiple tasks that go into that project.

Okay, I can already hear your question: “How do I know which projects I need to focus on first?

Well, you can bet I have an answer for you and that it’s going to be fun! Morgan, of Morgan Manages Mommyhood, and I are going to be starting a book club to help you all with these things. For the month of March, we are studying the book The One Thing, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.

I read this book the month that I started my Jenny Melrose site and has completely changed the way I see my business.

You can buy the book through my link, you can listen to it on Audible, you can check it out from the library, whatever. Just get the book. And every week, there will be a prompt on my Facebook page telling you what to pay attention to for that week.

We will also be sharing what we are learning on Insta-stories. I’ll be giving you a prompt to use in your own Insta-stories. And we want you sharing! Tell your friends and fellow bloggers so that as many people as possible can benefit from it.

I am here to help you move your business forward without it costing you thousands of dollars. If you are a podcast listener who isn’t interacting with me in any other way, I would love to see you jump in with us so that we can get to know you. Come out of the woodwork and join us!