How to get back on track when you’re overwhelmed

I am very familiar with this feeling — being overwhelmed with various tasks and projects at work. Sometimes I cannot think clearly, as stress overtakes my mind and I literally get stuck. Whether you’re running a company, a division, or leading a significant project, you have to deal with all kinds of things — large and small — all competing for your attention at once.

In almost every case I’ve seen — in my own work and with the leaders I advise — the overwhelm didn’t start with too much work. It started with losing sight of the most important things, which then allowed everything else to rush in and fill the space.

I’ve noticed this pattern in myself consistently. I tend to get overwhelmed when I lose focus — when I take my eyes off the most important goals. Once that happens, unimportant tasks, low-value activities, and other people’s agendas start filling my calendar and driving my day. Suddenly I find myself overloaded and wonder why I feel so exhausted at the end of a long day.

Just last week I found myself back in this situation. Some days were tough. Here are five steps I’ve found consistently useful — in my own work and with the executives I mentor.

1. Stop and step back

When your mind is overwhelmed or too tired, you cannot think clearly. So if you find yourself stressed out with too many things competing for attention — stop doing what you’re doing. Yes, I mean it.

Take a 30-minute walk in fresh air and leave your phone behind. Find a quiet place to pray, simply breathe or enjoy the weather. Switch your attention to something completely different. The point is to physically and mentally leave the place where the pile of tasks is waiting for you. You cannot solve an overwhelm problem from inside the overwhelm.

2. Make a list of all the things requiring your attention

After you’ve stepped back and calmed down, find a quiet place where you can concentrate — a conference room, outside the office, anywhere away from the noise — and write down everything requiring your attention. Every task, project, activity, large and small, that is currently weighing on you.

Anxiety rises when we feel we are not in control of what’s happening. Making this list has helped me in similar situations to regain a sense of control and reduce the stress significantly — not because anything changed, but because everything is now visible rather than circling in your head.

3) Review your most important goals

The most effective leaders focus on getting the right things done — not all things done. Not everything on your list is equally important. Some things are not important at all.

Go back to your most important goals and review them. Write them down if you haven’t already. They are your focus, your filter, your priorities. At this stage you should have two or three most important goals for the next three to twelve months clearly stated. Put them somewhere visible — they should always be before you, not buried in a document you haven’t opened in weeks.

Goals need to be specific. Not “grow the client base” but “sign 10 000 new clients in the youth segment by the end of Q3.” Not “improve decision making process” but “reduce decision time from five days to two by the end of this quarter.” If your goals aren’t specific and dated, they’re not goals — they’re intentions. And intentions don’t direct behavior.

4) Set priorities related to goals

Now take your list from step 2 and evaluate each task or activity against your two or three most important goals. Move individual tasks under the goals they relate to. Then ask:

• Which outcomes do I need to achieve under each goal this quarter?

• Which two or three activities under each goal will do the most impact to move it forward?
• Which activities on the list don’t actually relate to any of my most important goals?

Here’s what this looks like in practice — from my work with an ecommerce client, anonymized but the numbers are real:

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Goal: Increase ecommerce revenue from €1M to €3M this year.

Key outcomes for Q1:

• Increase weekly orders to 500 by end of Q1, generating €40,000 weekly
• Get 1,000 existing customers to place a minimum of 2 orders in Q1
• Improve checkout completion rate from 30% to 40%

Highest-impact activities for January:

• Launch email and SMS campaign to 10 000 inactive customers to get at least 1 000 to place one order in Q1
• Launch targeted campaign for the best-selling brand aimed at the core younger demographic
• Implement after-purchase emails motivating a second order within the quarter
• Ensure TOP 100 products are always in stock — eliminating lost sales from out-of-stock situations
• Redesign the checkout process to reduce cart abandonment

To delegate, postpone, or remove: everything else — new market expansion, additional brand campaigns, website redesign, new product launches. All legitimate ideas. None of them the highest-leverage activity for this quarter.

Notice what that last line requires: a real decision to stop doing things that feel important. That decision is harder than building the list. It’s also where most leaders lose the gains they made in steps 1 through 3.

Everything that doesn’t contribute to your most important goals should, as graciously as possible, be delegated, postponed, or dropped entirely.

5) Plan the most important activities first

Once you have this list of goals and corresponding high-impact activities, plan them into your weekly calendar first — before anything else gets scheduled. Each activity will have its own specific tasks. All of them go into the calendar as part of this most important work, prioritized by what needs to happen first.

Each week, aim to complete one or two of the most important tasks under each priority. Not everything. One or two. Done properly, at full attention, moving the needle on what actually matters.

The overwhelm didn’t come from having too much work. It came from losing clarity on what mattered most, and letting everything else fill the gap.

Regaining that clarity is the work. The five steps above are how you do it systematically rather than waiting for the pressure to lift on its own.

When was the last time you stepped back — genuinely stopped — and asked whether what’s filling your week is actually connected to your most important goals?

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