How to Do More and Stress Less!
In light of International Women’s Day this week, I thought I’d write about something that we all feel. Some of us feel the overwhelm of life more often than others, but as women, we all feel it at times. Most of us wear multiple hats each and every day. You may be a wife, a mother, a chauffeur, a caregiver (ya’ll know what I am talking about if you have a sick kid or husband), an employee, a business owner, and most of us moms turn into teachers and coaches at night too. It is exhausting! And then the guilt that comes from being overwhelmed and the endless “to-do” list(s)… am I right? So today I wanted to share two useful tips on how to do more and stress less. Sounds good right?
The first tip I want to give you busy women out there that have to juggle a zillion schedules and try to remember to get Joey to baseball at 5, you have a dentist appointment at 2, your husband has to work late today, and oh- what was on the grocery list that you left on the counter? GET THE COZI APP! This is literally a lifesaver for busy families, even couples. I used this for years with my family- even as a divorced family to keep track of things. If you ever used the old fashion “moms” calendar that had a column for each person it is similar to that. Each person in your family has their own calendar but they all sync together so that everyone can see all from your phone. It is brilliant. And you can have your grocery list on there! Each person can access it and add what they want you to get. Now you don’t have to try to remember where someone is or what time practice is- just pull out your phone and look. A major time and stress saver.
My second tip to save stress is to break down tasks into smaller bite size pieces. For me personally, I always have major projects that I want to undertake- clean out my closet, clean out the garage, clean out the kitchen cabinets. But it seemed so overwhelming that I would never actually do them. This year I enacted a 15 minutes a week rule. I take one project and tell myself “just take 15 minutes of focused, intentional time on it this week.” That adds up to 1 hour per month. It is truly amazing how much you can get accomplished if you have true focused and intentional effort towards an item. Now I feel that I am accomplishing my projects and it is taking the stress of not having them done away, without having to try to several hours to set aside to tackle this project. Even though it takes longer than one day to complete the project, the pressure is gone because I am working on it and that is way better to me than procrastinating the project forever. Remember, imperfect action is ALWAYS better than no action at all!
By implementing this two tips alone, this should alleviate a lot of your stress and get you to being more productive. I have always been an extremely productive person and get things done thoroughly, but fast and efficiently. I will share more of my tips to “Do More and Stress Less” in future blogs.