I am a self-confessed list maker. Anyone else out there? If you are, you know the satisfaction of making a list, seeing it laid out, and then the ultimate: crossing it off.
I recently faced a good amount of overwhelm, partly from looking at the few months left in this year and asking myself where I was, where I wanted to be, and what I wanted to accomplish before it ends. Part of it was outside forces too. Launching my book. I never realized how many small moving parts there were to getting that process done and on time.
So I handled it the way I’ve handled overwhelm for a long time. I made a lot of lists. I wrote a lot of things in my planner and on my calendar. At first I felt better, because I got the to-dos out of my brain and onto paper, which is my preferred method. I set reminders on my phone for everything I’d planned out. But after about two weeks of working this “system,” I wasn’t feeling any better. I also wasn’t crossing much off my list, which was very concerning to me.
If anything, my overwhelm got worse, because now I could see everything I’d decided I needed to accomplish and wasn’t accomplishing. I got stuck in that “I don’t know what to do now, I can’t even think about it” place, and that turned into avoidance. And we all know what happens when we avoid things. They don’t get done. They don’t magically cross themselves off the list.
Maybe this looks different for you. Maybe you’re not a list maker; maybe you don’t keep a paper calendar. Maybe you just have days where you feel completely stuck and overwhelmed and can’t accomplish the things you know you should. That’s valid too. I’ve been there, even without the list.
Here’s something else I do when I’m stuck, overwhelmed, and, honestly, a little confused: I start asking other people what I should do. I ask for more opinions. Or to be fair, I ask AI. “How do I handle this? What do I do first? Best way to plan your day?” And in my case, I’ll also look for a new planner or notebook because that brings me pleasure and takes the edge off the stress. It doesn’t solve anything. It just makes me feel better for a minute.
In this particular stretch, I did all of it. I asked people for their opinions on what should be the priority. I asked AI how to plan my day. I wrote in new calendars.
And then one morning I woke up with nothing on my schedule, because I’d hurt my back. Every activity, every errand, every place I was supposed to be, came off the calendar immediately. I don’t wish a bad back on anyone, but that particular day, it served me well. Waking up with nothing on the to-do list gave me time and space to think. To journal. To actually find some clarity around everything I’d been trying to do.
I’m not proud that it took being physically taken out of the day and confined to my house for this to happen. Especially as a coach who coaches women on exactly this. But I’m nothing if not honest, and this is exactly how it helped me see my way through the problem.
I talk about creating space all the time. I just wrote a whole book on it. But space can be a lot of things. It can be a calendar. It can be your home or your office. A clear counter, a clear desk to write on. An hour with nothing scheduled. Time with notifications silenced, or time just away from the phone altogether. Or it can be a day like mine, where nothing was asked of me at all. We all know those days are rare.
I didn’t spend that day feeling sorry for myself over the bad back, or lamenting what I wasn’t getting done. I used the clear space to sit with the questions I’d been asking myself for weeks: What are my priorities? What do I do next? How do I fit all of this in before the end of the year? What can I realistically expect to accomplish?
Then I asked the question we tend to skip when we’re chasing clarity: why. Why are these things on my list in the first place? Why are they important to me? Why do I feel they have to be done by the end of the year? This is the part we miss when all we’re doing is jotting down to-dos instead of thinking through them.
And it’s the part where, when I coach women, the real work happens. This is where clarity gets room to grow and overwhelm starts to lose its grip on us. What I have found, both for myself and for the women I work with, is that we give everything on our list equal importance, and we feel responsible for everything on there.
Clarity helps us prioritize, and we come to clarity by asking ourselves why. And it goes deeper than “why do you want to do it?” It goes down deep into “why does it matter to me?” For me, writing Monday with Meryl and doing my Facebook Live every Monday matters to me, not just because it’s on my list. It says something about me to you, my audience: that I am here for you. I show up, and I want to share my work with you, but it says something to me personally.
The message is: I’m consistent, I care about people, and I show it by showing up every Monday. It might get to the top of my list before cleaning out a random closet because I have clarity on why it is on my to-do list. Not everything on there holds the same place in our lives. Everything might be a placeholder, but they don’t all earn the same head-of-table seat.
For me, on that day of forced rest, I found out I wasn’t wrong about feeling overwhelmed. I had given everything on my list the same importance and urgency. Once I had enough space to ask why each item was there, I could see what truly needed my attention, what could wait, and what didn’t need to remain on the list at all. I didn’t need to do everything on my list before the end of the year. Some of it could carry over. Some of it was genuinely important and needed to move to the top.
Some of it came down to plain common sense. Holiday plans can’t be made after December, so those needed my attention right away. Cleaning out a random closet could wait. That one was just a want, not a need.
So, let me ask you what I asked myself: what do you do when you feel overwhelmed and stuck? How do you break that cycle for yourself? Or are you like me, where sometimes it takes something breaking it for you, because left alone, you’ll just keep going, keep pushing, keep making lists?
This is a strange stretch of the calendar. There’s still time to get things done this year, and that should feel hopeful, but it can also feel like the walls are closing in when you think about everything you said you’d finish and how little time is actually left. The clock is ticking either way. So how are you feeling right now? And if the answer is stuck or overwhelmed, will you let yourself create some space, mental or physical, to think, to process, and to find your own clarity?
As for me, I’m still a list maker. I don’t think that’s changing anytime soon. But now, before I make the list, I try to make space first.
Talk to you next Monday, Meryl.
Part of the Monday with Meryl series.
