Are You Feeling Completely Overwhelmed?

Where Shall I Begin?

Have you heard of the fighter pilot’s paradox? A great fighter pilot must master two contradictory skills; a laser-like focus on his target while maintaining a floodlight-like awareness of his surroundings. A pilot who fails to strike this delicate balance can develop target fixation, trying so hard to hit something that he flies right into it.

Something similar happens when running a small business. If you spend all of your time on vision, learning, and planning; you make no progress toward your goals. If you spend all of your time executing all of the small details, you will end up somewhere but probably not where you wished. It can be very challenging to strike the fine balance required. Why is it so difficult? Because we all get overwhelmed by the details.

It often feels like there are a billion fires to put out, a billion opportunities we should investigate, a billion things to learn, and a billion items on our to-do list. Where do we start? How are we ever going to get it all done? I want my business to be successful, but I would still like to have a life. We get frozen in our tracks before we even begin.

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one." ~ Mark Twain

You will often find that your most productive and profitable executions come when you focus on just one thing very intensely for a short period of time. Distractions occur when this one thing requires different skill sets and disciplines to complete. If you are doing a task and find that you are interrupted because you need additional skills or resources to complete, then your task management is too broad.

For example, building a web page is a goal, not a task. Writing copy for that page is a task. Doing keyword research for your copy is a sub task. You don't begin working until you have a goal broken into tasks and sub-tasks. At the sub-task level, you can see all of the skills required to complete the main task.

This will allow you to break out sub-tasks that are temporarily beyond your skill set so you can remain productive. It is nearly impossible to remain overwhelmed when we are focused on sub-tasks because they are like little self-contained nuggets. This process has the added benefit of keeping you focused on only those things that you have decided are critical to your mission.

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