Are you feeling overwhelmed?  It seems being overwhelmed and overworked has overtaken baseball as the national pastime.  A 2007 study by the American Psychological Association found that three-quarters of Americans feel stressed at work.  The survey also found that this stress hurt productivity .  There are obviously a lot of people who are feeling stressed, but what should you do when you feel overwhelmed?

In today’s post, I outline 5 things to do when you feel overwhelmed.  While there are many coping strategies out there, these 5 will help get you back on track.

1. Take some time away.  Take a few minutes to get up and walk around campus.  Even better, take a day or a week away.  Just like in a maze, distance gives you perspective.  It may seem counterintuitive, but taking time to get away will help you make more progress.  You can sit at your desk banging your head or you could get some fresh air.  When you keep pushing even when you’re exhausted and overwhelmed, you aren’t helping anyone.  You are just flogging yourself.  The value of perspective will help you not only do the other things on your list, but it will stop making you more overwhelmed.

2. Establish goals for the day and week.  You should be doing this for the day, week, month, and year.  But, it is particularly important when you’re feeling overwhelmed.  I especially like Donald Miller’s Storyline Productivity Schedule.  The crux of his schedule is to come up with three most important things to do today.  That’s it!  You’ll be amazed at the feeling of productivity that will ensue if you complete three important tasks today.  Try it, you won’t regret it!

3. Stop multitasking.  What do we do when we get busy?  We start multitasking.  Never mind that every study we have shows that is the worst way to be productive.  Just stop doing it by any means necessary.  Clear off your desk so you only have the item you’re working on at that moment available.  Close the other windows open on your computer.  Shut off your email.  Let the victory of one completed task build to another and another.  When you jump from unfinished task to unfinished task, you are only going to feel more overwhelmed.

4.  Stop doing 3 things.  If you’re like me, your feelings of overwhelm often result from saying yes to too many unimportant items.  These things may be important or significant to someone else, but they aren’t to me.  Identify 3 things you are not going to do.  I’m not suggesting you go back on your word if you’ve said you will do something.  Rather, I want you to focus on the most important and significant items on your to do list.  Do you need to respond to that email discussing some mundane issue?  Do you need to sit in on a meeting that doesn’t really pertain to your work?  Would no one care if you didn’t do that task?  Even if everything on your list is important and significant, you can’t do everything.  You still only have 24 hours in a day and finite energy reserves.  If everything is important, find the three items that you can hand off to someone else and stop working on them.  If there is no one to hand your work off to, then just identify three things that you aren’t going to do.  And release the guilt of not getting it done.  There is only so much you can do and you have to release those things that you can’t finish.  Your mental and physical health demands that you do this.

5.  Change things up.  This is one of my favorite strategies.  Just change things up.  Find a new coffee shop to work in instead of slaving away in your office.  Start a new routine waking up earlier or hitting the gym.  Bring in fresh flowers.  Treat yourself to a nice lunch after a morning of productivity instead of eating those leftovers.  Start using a new app to track your to do list.  Now you have to be careful and not let changing things up become a distraction and technique to procrastinate.  But I often find that a slight change of scenery or process can energize me and jumpstart my productivity.

You don’t have to just sit there feeling overwhelmed.  I’ve given you 5 things to do when you feel overwhelmed and there are plenty of other ideas you may use.  Remember, you’re not alone in feeling stressed and overwhelmed at work.  But life is too short to stay that way!  Today is a new day.  It is time to make a change!

Question: What strategies do you use when you’re feeling overwhelmed?  Share your most effective in the comments below. You can leave a comment by clicking here.