Almost every disaster that I have had in my life, from closing businesses to choosing bad partners to signing horrible agreements, came in times when I felt overwhelmed. You know exactly what I am talking about. Those sleepless nights, walking around like a zombie, not knowing what to do next in a sea of tasks and commitments. In the past decade, I’ve spent many, many hours trying to decrypt how and why we are being so overwhelmed and how to defeat this shitty feeling once and for all.  

In this session, I will show you how NOT to be overwhelmed. I’ve tried this technique on the busiest of busy business owners and the results were amazing. As long as the business owner was willing to work with me and trust my plan, all went swimmingly. There is no need to open your wallet, pull out your card, or buy any software. All you need to do is listen and take action to rid yourself the overwhelming feeling of being, well, overwhelmed.  

Try the method I will be talking about for a few days. Heck, give it 5 or 6 days and you will see results. Without rambling on too much, let me show you how it works. One of the main problems is that we as humans are limited in how many thoughts we can run per day. One study was saying that humans can run up to 12,000 thoughts per day, one was saying 50,000 thoughts per day, and another even said over 80,000 thoughts per day! The results vary a ton from study to study, but that’s beside the point. The main point is that we as humans are limited to how many thoughts we can have per day.  

While I was continuing my research, I found that people typically think the same thoughts every day. The same thoughts, the same things that they do - repeating the same thoughts, waking up every day to a magazine full of thoughts. So, are we just wasting time on nothing? Imagine a soldier going to war. Instead of running all his ammunition and fighting the bad guys, he just shoots the air, wasting all the ammunition he just had. That is exactly what we are doing on a day-to-day basis and it’s the reason why we eventually become overwhelmed.  

Now that we understand the problem, let’s talk about the solution. The solution is taking all the shit that you have in your brain and dumping it somewhere where your brain will know you will take action on it all. Everything that is trying to remind you the brain is a survival machine. The brain wants to keep you safe and that is exactly why it is floating around with a bunch of thoughts all the time. More and more thoughts keep you safe.  

In my case, to organize my thoughts, I’m using the Notebook. It’s a free application that you can use, but if you want to use something else, be my guest. Do whatever you have to do to organize your thoughts. You can use the Notebook app, pen and paper, Wordpad - whatever you want as long as you’re going to take action.  

Here, I am creating multiple buckets on your Notebook. I will create buckets for general ideas, urgent tasks, and things that need attention. The ‘needs attention’ bucket means I will take care of them, but not now. Tasks in this bucket can be taken care of in the next few days. Now let’s say that I have one more bucket and this bucket is called ‘projects’. In each of these buckets, I can have a list. For example, ‘pick up Jerry from the airport next week’ and these lists allow me to see what I have to do and get it done. Now if I want, I can also have attachments - simply drag and drop any files I may need. I can also do it all from my cellphone when I’m not around a computer. There is also an option to record audio which is convenient when you have to go hands-free (while driving, for example). I can record what I need to do over the weekend, in my case, it will usually be my Sundays. I will sit down, open what needs attention, add everything urgent to ‘projects’, and begin taking action on those items. Usually, half of the things on the list will be gone because they’ve already been figured out by themselves. Let’s say I need to drive Jerry to the airport, someone from the family will call me and say I need to pick them up, so that is off my list. You will see that 50% of the things you have on your list don’t need any action because they’ve already been taken care of.  

Now imagine you didn’t have this list. You will probably try to take action everywhere without realizing 50% of them have already been solved by themselves. The things that do require action will be categorized. There will also be things that consume time but are not worth it. Let’s say that I need to do some research - I can pay someone five bucks per hour to do the research for me and all I need to do it go over it and summarize it. That will save me many hours, but will also cost me, let's say $20. I’m perfectly fine with the solution and it lets me pay more attention to other tasks on my plate I need to complete. From here, I will start to allocate the things that I need to do on my calendar for execution the following week. The urgent list will be a list that I will check on a daily basis around every day at 4 pm, while the other lists I check on my Sundays.  

I can tell you from experience than when you start having the ‘garbage collector’, the urgent list will be huge because of all shit in your brain that was just dumped somewhere. But once you start working with this system, you will not have as many urgencies anymore. All the things that became urgent started in the ‘needs attention’ bucket, but because you don’t fire them out in time, they became urgent and now they are biting you in the ass. This is the way that I am running my garbage collector and I advise you to do the same.  

If you like the way that I am procuring the overwhelming feeling and you understand how much it impacts our lives, please leave a comment and share your feedback with me - your feelings on that matter and what you think about this approach. If I get enough feedback, I may create a free course on how to deal with the overwhelming feeling from A to Z. The problem I gave earlier was only one that I was dealing with, but there are lots of other things that make us feel overwhelmed and eventually, by solving them, it will improve your outlook on life, your business, and make the decision-making process much easier. Thank you very much for trusting me and staying with me until the end of this video. Will see you in the next session!