What to do When You Feel Overwhelmed

Being a Virtual Assistant can certainly be overwhelming at times: Tasks can pour in from email, clients can make last minute requests, details can start to feel overpowering. Sometimes when it’s really busy, it’s difficult to know what to do first. In this episode of the RocketGirl Show we'll talk about 5 things that will help!

TRANSCRIPT

I'm Belinda Wasser, also known as 'RocketGirl' and today we're going to talk about what to do if you get overwhelmed.

When you're a virtual assistant, it's really easy to get overwhelmed. Think about all the different ways that information is coming at you, emails, phone, text message, and it can also be coming at you through project management software and sometimes we feel that we're drinking from a hire hose. So, it's important to have a good strategy when we face being overwhelmed because it would be almost impossible to avoid them.

Here's what I want you to do when you get overwhelmed. The very first thing is quiet the noise. You would be so surprised how something just a simple as turning off the radio, closing the door, just quieting the sound that's around you, so that you can think. That's the first step.

Then, your desk, remove all the clutter. I want you to take everything off your desk that you don't need and you can go through all of it later when you're not overwhelmed but put it all aside. So again, so now you have a space to hear and you have fewer distractions right in front of you.

Now, you want to minimize distractions you can control. For example, now it would be a good time to turn off LinkedIn notifications, Facebook notifications, maybe turn the buzzer off the ringer off of your email. Turn your cellphone over so that you're not constantly getting bombarded with things. So just try to really quiet everything down.

Then, what you want to do is prioritize what you have to do because probably what's happen why you're overwhelmed is there's a lot to do. So look at your list, pick two things and do them one at a time. When you finished with the two things, then pick the next one. So make sure that you're only focusing at one thing a time and you know what's you're going to do next.

Finally, sometimes when I'm overwhelmed, it's important to just take a break. I call this, doing a lap, or taking a lap. When's it cold out, I take a lap in my house, when it's nice outside, I take a lap around my house, maybe go out at the backyard, visit chickens, but do something to separate me from the feeling of being overwhelmed. Once you can separate yourself from that feeling because it's just a feeling, then you can get back to the work and getting your work done.

Before we leave, I just want to let you know about my free online classroom The Virtual Assistant Connection. You can find it by typing the Virtual Assistant Connection  at the top of Facebook in the search bar and just click Join button. I'd love to have you. We have 8000 members in our group, it's growing very rapidly, lots of community, lots of learning, lots of trainings. So please come over there and join us. At last count, we're represented in 47 countries which is awesome. Until next time, I hope you'll try this tactic for being overwhelmed, when overwhelmed hits you. I'm Belinda Wasser and I'll you in the next episode. Bah bye