- Hey there, Dan Martell here.
Serial entrepreneur, investor and creator of SaaS Academy and
in this video I'm gonna share a strategy to help you recover
from overwhelm in your work or life.
This strategy is gonna be transformational.
It's gonna help you understand where the overwhelm is coming
from and how to deal with it in a quick and clear simple way and
be sure to stay 'til the end where I'm gonna share with you a
framework called The Perfect Week where I not only talk about
The 7 Pillars of Success that I measure every week on but
also the ingredients that you want to put into your life and
how to structure those in a seven day window.
(upbeat music)
So recently I was working with somebody on my team and it was
pretty evident that they were a little overwhelmed.
And I mean the truth is I always keep my team members at 105%.
That's kind of like this beautiful place
where there's no slack in the system.
They're pushing, they're growing and I'm coaching them to success
and they didn't say anything and that's usually the challenge is,
you know, really incredible team members are just doing and
they're not saying if they're overwhelmed or things are crazy
or they don't have time to get something done but that only
hurts you in the long run.
So I prompted, I said, "Look, do you have more things than
"you know how to handle right now?"
And she said, "Absolutely."
I said, "Well, here's what we're gonna do.
"We're gonna schedule 45 minutes tomorrow.
"We're gonna do a process that I've used to really help me deal
"with the overwhelm," 'cause if you're a charging type A driven
entrepreneur then there's a very good chance you have
way too many balls in the air.
You're trying to juggle them or the plates are spinning and
you're like worried they're all gonna come crashing down.
You're not sleeping at night.
It's holding you back from hitting your goals and you're
probably stressing everybody else around you in the process.
So I want to share with you four steps, very unique.
You've never heard before to help you get really clear about
how to deal with this overwhelm
and build a process to get things done.
Number one, you need to dump it.
Take it all inside your mind put it on paper in front of you.
So this is true.
I did a video not too long ago on not sleeping at night and
what you need to do but you like literally what I do is I take
printer paper and I sit down, I learned this from David Allen.
I went to his seminar back in 2006 in New York City.
Getting Things Done, the creator of GTD.
And that's his strategy.
He just dumps it all and that's where I got it.
Where you just write all the projects that
are on your to-do list.
Personal, professional, put 'em on a piece of paper
and just keep stacking them.
Go grab everything that's outstanding.
Maybe you forgot to renew your license.
You gotta grab that notification in the mail or you know
you forgot, ton of stuff.
If you're an entrepreneur your
trunk in your car is probably full,
your personal life isn't too healthy,
and there's a ton of home things that are just not getting any
attention so you want to just get the whole thing in one spot.
So you want to dump it, put it in place so that you have the
clear master list of everything that might be
overwhelming you to deal with.
Number two, from that list we're gonna use the four D's.
The four D's are very straightforward.
Number one, we want to delete.
There are things that you haven't made a decision on that
you just need to say no to. 'Kay?
You just gotta delete them.
You like got an opportunity or somebody asked you to do
something or something came in the mail or whatever it is,
you need to grab it, you're gonna rip it up
you're gonna throw it in the garbage.
So number one is delete. Two, you need to delegate.
There's so many things that you do on a daily basis.
If you're an entrepreneur and you're making money and
you've got some level of profit,
you need to start re-investing to buy back your time.
So delegating could be asking for a favor.
You could like call a friend and be like,
"Hey, I know you're incredible at managing events.
"I could really use your help with this thing I'm working on."
So delegate to people you trust.
Delegate to people that care for you 'cause
they want to support you and help you.
And then if there's nobody else in those buckets then you want
to pay and you want hire people and this is where a
virtual assistant comes into play
to delegate some of the work.
Number three D out of the four D's is you want to defer.
There's a lot of stuff that's on your list that you
just want to push off.
They need to go in the Someday/Maybe list.
They need to go into the Year End Review list.
They need to go into the Q3 planning list
but they're not a now thing. You've tracked it.
You can put it in that bucket, in that folder,
whatever you want use. You can use Evernote.
You can use Google Docs.
It doesn't matter the tool, it's the process.
And then that way you know your mind,
if you, you know, schedule it on your calendar and put it there,
you'll get to it at some point.
So that's three and then four is you just gotta do.
'Kay? You need to take the things and say,
"This is finally the list that I need to execute against.
"This is my to-do list.
"This is the list that's got everything that's
"overwhelming me and I'm gonna take a shot at it."
Number three is chunk. 'Kay?
If you have your master list, things you're gonna do,
then you need to start looking at the task and activities
underneath these key projects and
start chunking them together.
And the reason why if you've ever heard of batching work,
it's way more efficient.
So one of the no brainer stuff is probably a calls list.
If you don't have a calls list you should create one because in
this list of to-dos there are people that you need to call to
move these things forward.
And just taking them and adding it to the calls list.
Or things that need to be done kinda like creative work.
Maybe it's writing. Maybe it's filling out forms.
Maybe it's reviewing projects.
Whatever it is you want to start chunking like type of activity
together because your brain when it gets into that zone of flow,
you're more likely to crank through a batch outcome of work
than if you're context switching all the time.
So one of the things is once I've got this and I say okay,
well these kind of look similar
so I'm gonna put those over here.
Put these over there and this over there.
And I kinda start seeing these patterns for chunking and
grouping stuff together that's gonna allow me to take action
and be way more effective than if I just,
most people do a priority list and da-da-da.
That's not the way we want to do it yet.
First we want to chunk and group things together so that we can
get a good understanding of what kind of head space and resources
we're gonna need to attack those specific projects.
Four, we want to sequence the work.
This is where the prioritization comes into play.
Too often we're taking a to-do list and
we're starting to prioritize it.
First we want to chunk it.
Once we've got it that way, then we want to sequence and say
okay, here's my goals for the week and for the quarter.
These are the projects that need to get done
to actually hit those goals.
So these are priorities and then for me when I sequence not only
do I prioritize, I block time them.
I put 'em into my calendar. I take the list,
I type it in the description of the calendar entry and
I'll block typically 50 minute block times.
You can do 30 minute pomodoros, you can do whatever you want but
the big idea is to grab, you know,
a sixty minute chunk of time in your calendar,
ideally in the morning 'cause that's usually when we get the
big rocks done, and just block it in there
and put all the details.
This is key, put all the details into the description of your
calendar invites so that when it prompts you and it says,
hey, you got to go do this work everything is inline and ready
to go and then you just fill out your calendar.
When you can take your to-do list,
chunk things together and sequence them into your calendar
using block time and actually putting it in there.
And that's what I love about link-ability.
You know linking to emails, linking to Google Docs,
linking to project files online in the calendar entry so that
when I get into that head space I can just click and open up all
the tabs and I know this is the work that I need to process,
it's like ridiculously efficient and the big idea at the end of
doing these four steps is that there won't be any outstanding
items that you're worried you're gonna forget about
or it's gonna fall through the cracks.
You've processed everything.
You've been super efficient on it.
You've deleted, you've delegated,
you've done it, you deferred it and then now you're actually
doing your best work and focus on the outcomes that are gonna
move your dream forward.
So quick recap, number one, dump it out of your mind.
Two, use the four D's.
Delete, delegate, defer and do to process the list.
Once you have the master do list,
chunk it together.
Group it into like activities and from that you want to
prioritize or sequence.
Number four is sequence those items together so that you can
get the work done in batch mode and block it into your calendar.
As I mentioned in the beginning of this video,
I want to share with you my Perfect Week worksheet.
It's a strategy that I've been using to manage my week
and really design my life.
So I start off with The 7 Pillars and these are the
seven areas of my life that I measure myself on
a 1 to 10 every week in a spreadsheet.
So I've got the wheel of success with those listed for you below
so you can click the link and download that and included in
there is the Perfect Week worksheet where you list all the
ingredients that would make an incredible work week for you
including the personal and the professional stuff and then you
lock it in your calendar.
Here's what most people realize in doing that exercise.
They have way more free time in their week than they think.
And it is a very powerful exercise especially if you just
finished doing the sequencing.
You've got these block times to schedule.
You can put that in your calendar so that you know on a
weekly basis those things get done.
You're gonna feel super productive and high output.
So if you liked this video be sure to click the like button.
I'd highly encourage you to subscribe to my channel and also
share this video with somebody you care about that
you think I can serve.
As per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger
life and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.
- [Jaret] Say Four D's.
- [Dan] Yeah. Yeah, dump.
Is this the right spot? - [Jaret] Yep.