How To Stop Stressing About Multiple Projects

Life gets so complicated, doesn’t it?

Projects, goals, and deadlines, oh my!

And when it’s all looming in front of you, you feel totally overwhelmed. Am I right?

Enter: A serious bout of analysis paralysis.

Stuck on the never-ending hamster wheel of worrying about everything you need to get done and panicking about not having enough time.

Meanwhile, the time and effort you could spend moving forward on these daunting projects are wasted on anxiety and spinning your wheels.

When I used to feel this way I’d stay stuck, procrastinate and get unnecessarily stressed.

But now with tools in place, I know how to get a handle on these situations and I want to share the magic sauce with you.

Here’s the number one thing you need to know:

Start with the end in mind.

Work backward from your goals and start planning accordingly.

Here’s how it goes.

Let’s say you have a proposal due in a month, a huge event five weeks from now and a multimedia campaign less than a quarter away. So many big projects with tons of milestones and deadlines.

One common mistake with dealing with multiple projects is setting deadlines, but not schedules. That might not sound like a big shift, but it is.

Instead of chipping away a little bit every day, hoping you’ll make all your deadlines and being completely under the gun just before they hit, start with the end. In other words,

Break this overwhelming state of mind by reverse engineering your goals.

Look at your deadline and work backward to get all the pieces of your goal completed.

That means you’ll need to first brainstorm all the action steps you must take to achieve your goal. 

Then, break down your goal into bite-sized pieces and work backward from your deadline to create milestones and scheduled tasks along the way.

This is literal people. Not just something you do in your head.

Take out a calendar, circle the deadline and start working your way backward from today.

For that deadline in two months, what do you need to do the week before? The week before that? And the week before that?

This gives you tangible, doable and achievable mini-goals. Each progression towards your bigger goal will help you stay motivated to see it all the way through.

It will also help you see where your planning is off.

Maybe you thought you had plenty of time to get all the phases of your project complete. But after reverse engineering it, you realize it’s going to require more time and resources than you anticipated.

On the other, more relaxing hand, as you work backward you may come to see that you have more than enough time and most of the anxiety has been created in your head.

Here’s an example. Want to lose 25 lbs in the next year? That’s about 2 pounds per month. Half a pound per week. Which you can then do by consistently planning 4 workouts and three extra home-cooked meals every week.

Every goal or project can be broken down and reverse engineered so you have the roadmap to accomplish the goal, step by step and piece by piece.

Remember, create schedules, not deadlines.

Now here’s what I’d love to hear from you:

What’s at least one looming deadline you could plan by working backward?

Share it in the comments below. It’s the first step to putting your plan into action and your action into results.

Here’s to getting more of the right things done,

XO,

Mridu