Divide your tasks into buckets to stop feeling overwhelmed

Everything is urgent and everything is important!

Well, that’s how it feels when you’re overwhelmed with work and you keep getting new work to do.

Having an effective way to divide your work up can relieve some stress and allow you to get more done.

Firstly, know that something is only urgent if it needs to be done soon. If it can wait a few days, or even until next week, it’s not urgent. Secondly, whether something is important or not can be subjective. You must choose what’s important based on what is a priority to you and be clear about how important something actually is.

Based on your understanding of what is urgent or important, you can divide up your tasks to make them more manageable.

If the task is urgent and important – do it. No need to question that it needs to get done now.

If the task is urgent and not important – delegate it to someone, so it can get done quickly, but doesn’t require your full attention.

If the task is important and not urgent – diarise the time to do that task or put a future due date on the task.

If the task is not urgent and not important – delete it off your to-do list, and maybe put it on a list of tasks you might do someday.

The image below illustrates these buckets to put your tasks into, which is based on the Eisenhower matrix method.

What you can do today:

• Take a look at your to-do list.
• Decide whether each task is urgent or not.
• Decide whether each task is important or not.
• Based on the matrix, divide your to-do list into the tasks you will do now, diarise to do later, delegate to someone else to do, or delete off your list.
• Feel less overwhelmed knowing that everything doesn’t need to be done now or by you! 🙂

Being systematic about your tasks can lift some of the burden of having to think about these considerations on the fly. You can be confident that any new task that comes to you can be put through the system and come out with a direction.