Just the other day a friend of mine was having a chat with me and said that he was having three key projects that he is working on right now and he is not sure how to handle these three projects as all need his attention and he was feeling really stressed out. While listening to him I remembered recently how I was also having a similar situation and how I overcame that.
One day around 10 am I was feeling really uneasy and I could tell that I was getting stressed out due to something, I was not being the usual myself. Though I could not pinpoint it at first I knew something was not right.
The first thing I did was to close my eyes and go on my dream vacation, this is a mental picture I have of a quite calm place that relaxes me. For me of course this is walk on a beach with the sun on my back and the sound of the waves in my ears. I just closed my eyes and took a deep breath and I could literally feel the smell of the sea, and the warmth of the sun. This just quickly got me out of my stress and put me immediately in an empowering state.
After that I just thought about what was bothering me, and I knew it was the projects that I was working on. What I did was I quickly opened a worksheet and listed down all the projects that I am working on. It came out that I was working on over 20 projects at the same time. No wonder I was getting stressed out.
In the next column I put down by the end of the day what state I wanted each of these projects to be in (what were my outcomes), and what is the purpose of each project. This gave me a chance to reflect back on my outcomes and I saw that for half of the projects there was nothing major to achieved by end of the day. So that meant I only had to work on half the projects today.
In the column after that, I put down what is the current status of each project I needed to work on today. This gave me chance to see where I am right now in each project and now I was empowered by knowing at this moment the status of my projects.
In the next column I put down if I had to work on the remaining projects, what would my immediate three things (tasks) be. This gave me a chance to see what things I can do in parallel as well as how big the next step in each project is. It also gave me the chance to see if I can leverage , delegate or enlist the help of someone for any of these tasks. To my surprise most of the tasks could either be done in parallel or I could find people who I could enlist the help of.
In the last column I prioritized the most important three projects and started working on the immediate tasks. This was either my self working on the task or leveraging. Also I was able to identify the less important projects and I immediately called / fired mails to the relevant projects stake holders and informed what I have planned to do in their projects and that I will not be able complete some of the items in their projects today as I have some other priorities and when I will be able to do them.
This whole process took me less then 25 to 30 mins but it allowed me to work on my projects without being stressed out. I know if I had planned these projects out early I would not be in this situation, but I think sometimes no matter how much we plan we get in to situations like this. The most strangest thing was that after I started this process I was able to work on almost all the important projects and achieve my daily outcome for almost all the projects.
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