Learning to Manage Overwhelm and Stay on Track with Your Goals
ISSUE 04
Learning to Manage Overwhelm and Stay on Track with Your Goals
This month, I’ve been grappling with a familiar feeling—being overwhelmed by all the things I want to accomplish. I set ambitious yearly goals and break them down into weekly milestones, but I started noticing that I was falling behind. The more I thought about everything I wanted to do, the more intense that feeling of overwhelm became. But I found some tools that have made a huge difference, and I wanted to share them with you.
The Perfect Week
The first tool that really helped is something called the "Perfect Week." It's an idea from Ali Abdaal, and it's simple but powerful. You map out what a perfect week looks like in your calendar and then aim to hit that every week. I started by listing all the non-negotiables—my daily job, gym sessions, time with family, and downtime (which for me includes an hour before bed and a day off on Sunday with my girlfriend). Then I added in the work tasks, like content creation, business planning, and everything else I needed to do. When I finished, it became clear that I simply didn’t have enough time to do everything I wanted. That realization led me to two more important learnings.
Start with the Highest Value and Adopt a Lean Mindset
As a product designer, I’m always working with my product manager to find where the value is and prioritize based on that. I realized I needed to apply the same mindset to my personal goals. Instead of trying to do everything, I focused on the highest-value tasks first. For example, I’d been thinking about rebuilding my website because I wasn’t happy with it. But when I looked at the data, I saw that I get around 2,000 visitors a month, and nearly all of them stay on the landing page with my links. Almost no one was seeing the rest of the site. So I asked myself: what’s going to bring more value—updating the entire website or creating more content? The answer was clear. Content is the priority, so that’s where I’m focusing my scheduled work blocks. Once the content is done, I can add granularity—like updating just the links page, which is what most visitors see.
Outsourcing and Automating Certain Things
At the end of the day, we all have the same 24 hours. For those of us who work, sleep 8 hours, and try to stay active, there aren’t a lot of hours left. I started looking for tasks I could either automate or outsource to free up more time. I’ve been wanting to create more YouTube videos, but I had two challenges: finding the time to work on them and the fact that editing was taking up too much of my time. So, I made a change. I added daily writing blocks dedicated to YouTube videos, which automated the thinking process for me—now, I just have to execute. And for editing, I hired a professional editor who’s been fantastic! His expertise not only improves the quality of the content but also frees me up to work on other high-value tasks.
Updates
I’m excited to share that I’m relaunching The Journals and going back to a monthly schedule! I’ve also committed to posting every other week on YouTube, so make sure to follow me—there’s a lot of exciting content coming your way. And yes, I’ve made sure to block out time for these in my "Perfect Week" plan.
Useful links!
Opal
The best app I've found to avoid distractions on your phone
The Algebra of Wealth
A great book on building wealth and managing your money by Scott Galloway
Framer
My favorite web builder, it's the one I used for my new website
