Archive for the ‘Dealing with overwhelm’ Category

How to Create Time When There’s No Time

“How do I make time for (marketing) (writing) (business-building) (the escape plan from my day job) when my schedule is already packed?” It’s a question I hear a lot from coaching clients, from workshop participants, from friends. A colleague recently asked me this question on behalf of someone she knows—a mother of three who couldn’t […]

Learning to ask for help

I’m in the middle of a couple of big, valuable, but tiring and potentially overwhelming projects. One is a paper I’m writing with a small, all-volunteer group, on behalf of an organization I’m a devoted member of. There’s a lot of conflict and dissension involved—not on our writing team, but around the situation that we’re […]

The dreaded backlogged project–now less overwhelming!

I’m big on gentle accountability. So I’m a fan of Cairene Macdonald’s monthly Bite the Candy sessions. You spend the morning working on a backlogged project, with moral support (via phone check-ins) from Cairene and your fellow project-doers before and during your work session, and celebration after. My project for last week’s Bite the Candy […]

Pacing myself, plus aphorism of the day

It’s been an intense two weeks of doing-things-other-than-blogging. I had article deadlines—the assignments were for beloved clients, but the articles were troublesome and energy-draining. I had three presentations to prepare, two of them workshops that I was giving for the first time. Normally I try to schedule things so that I have space between energy-and-anxiety-intensive […]

How to write a marketing plan in half an hour

…and by “marketing plan,” I mean whatever big project you’re stalled on because (a) you can’t figure out how to do it and (b) you doubt your ability to do whatever it turns out you’re supposed to be doing. Ask yourself this question: “If I knew how to [insert the thing you’re stumped about] what […]