Argh! by Lynne Cazaly: how to outsmart your overwhelm and make sense of everything in your brain
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\nAbout the\xa0book
\nThese experiences of overwhelm can be a common part of a normal day or week in our life. Yes, the world can be an overwhelming place. We might have an emotional experience of being overwhelmed. We can experience the \u2018too much on\u2019 of workload\u200a\u2014\u200atoo much to do and not enough time in which to do it. Or we might feel like we\u2019re submerged under an endless pile of information, reports, books and reading.
\nAt other times we can just be plain \u2018drowning in\u2019 it from a wicked combination of all three: emotions, workload and information.
\nIn today\u2019s world, it\u2019s these three that can be the cause of repeated and unending overwhelm. And it\u2019s not good for us. Burnout and health issues are waiting. We need to find ways to acknowledge our emotions, manage our workload\xa0\u2026 and filter all of that information.
\nOur overwhelm CAN be outsmarted. Once you get the powerful techniques explained by Lynne Cazaly, you\u2019ll find new ways to make sense of overwhelm, new ways to work, and new ways to cope with information. You\u2019ll be all over overwhelm\u2026 it won\u2019t be all over you.
\nSource: https://www.lynnecazaly.com.au/
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\nAbout the\xa0author
\nLynne Cazaly helps individuals, teams and businesses transition to better ways of thinking and working.
\nLynne is an international keynote speaker, multi-award winning author and a master facilitator.
\nShe is an experienced radio broadcaster, presenter and producer having presented more than 10000 hours on-air. Her background is as a communication specialist, having lectured in under-graduate and post-graduate programs in several of Australia\u2019s Universities and consulting to different industries and sectors on change and transformation.
\nLynne can help you think better, make sense of information and handle the realities of workplace overwhelm and information overload with her clever hacks and ingenious processes, tools and methods.\xa0
\nLynne is an experienced board director and chair and an #avgeek, loving everything aviation, helicopters and air traffic control.
\nSource: https://www.lynnecazaly.com.au/
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\nBig idea #1\u200a\u2014\u200aThe three types of overwhelm.
\nOverwhelmed has become the new busy, a bit of a catch all for when we\u2019re feeling up against it.
\nBut we need to get better and dig a little bit deeper to understand the type of overwhelm we\u2019re experiencing, and therefore better be able to create strategies to fix it or overcome it.
\nLynne suggests that there are three types of overwhelm;
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- Overwhelmed, which is the emotional overwhelm.\xa0 \n
Once you\u2019ve identified you can help redefine it by digging in a little bit deeper and find out which emotions are overwhelming and are they positive or negative? We can be overwhelmed in a positive way, with excitement or joy.
\n2. Overloaded
\nIdentifying this means we can redirect our attention to understand how we\u2019re doing it and how else we can do it.
\n3. Overworked
\nBy identifying this, we can redesign the work to take back control of what we, what we\u2019re doing and what we\u2019re working on.
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\nBig idea #2\u200a\u2014\u200aWrite it\xa0down
\nWithout oversimplifying or trivialising the overwhelm you might be feeling, a lot of this can be alleviated by writing down everything that\u2019s going on and using this list or this brain dump to make sense of what\u2019s going on.
\nSense-making is another core theme of this book. By asking the question \u2018what\u2019s going on and what do I need to do about it?\u2019 we can move forward.\xa0
\nBecause otherwise it\u2019s easy to sink into overwhelm and let it fester without actually doing anything about it. (And let\u2019s face it, often we avoid doing anything about it, because we then would have to do something about it!)
\nLynne offers some models and frameworks to help sort everything in your brain and actually work out what\u2019s going on.
\n(Note: this reminded me a little bit of a light version of Getting Things Done by David Allen. You can read or listen to my three ideas from that book.)
\nOnce everything in your brain is all sorted and out on paper (paper is better,so grab a pen or pencil and a piece of paper and write everything down) you can then work out, what\u2019s important, what\u2019s junk and what\u2019s someone else\u2019s problem.
\nLynne shares a great little tip from a lady she used to work with called Patsy (a name which obviously immediately makes me think of Absolutely Fabulous). Patsy always had four folders on her desk and that contained everything she needed to do. The folders were labeled sooner, later sometime and never.
\nA few times a day, Patsy would go through those folders, working her way through the sooner stuff, keeping an eye on what was in the later folder to see if anything needed to move from later into sooner. When she had some extra time, she\u2019d go to sometime and some stuff eventually made it into the never folder (and then straight in the recycling bin from there).
\nYou can also obviously use things like the Covey/Eisenhower matrix as well to help organise your brain dump of things into more manageable chunks of how they need to be dealt with, and when they need to be dealt with as well.
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\nBig idea #3\u200a\u2014\u200aWhere did it go\xa0wrong?
\nOne of my favourite models in the book is this 2x2 matrix that helps you work out why you got to the stage of overwhelm in the first place, in order to help you avoid it next time.\xa0
\nIn the top left-hand corner, it has \u2018I created it\u2019. Maybe you just kept on taking more and more work and created your own bed of overwhelm.
\nIn the bottom left-hand corner, it says \u2018I allowed it\u2019. Maybe you didn\u2019t say no to something and you allowed the overwhelm to happen.
\nIn the bottom right corner, you\u2019ve got \u2018I ignored it\u2019. Maybe you\u2019ve been procrastinating on this particular thing for a while, and by ignoring it, it\u2019s now become a bit of a problem and you\u2019re overwhelmed by it.
\nFinally, in the top right corner is \u2018I outsmarted it\u2019. This is ideally where we want it to be, where we have outsmarted our overwhelmed by putting the strategies in place by saying no, prioritising, asking questions, asking for help, and generally managing it in advance.
\nGoing through this process and working out what went wrong in the first place isn\u2019t to beat ourselves up, but it helps to identify what happened and means we can reverse engineer this for future situations.
\nThis level of self-awareness will show us how likely we are to fall into overwhelm, know how it feels, how it shows up, so that we can identify in advance next time.
\nLynne suggests it\u2019s good to build this kind of reflection into the end of our daily routine, not just in those moments where we\u2019re already overwhelmed when it\u2019s probably a bit too late.
\nAt the end of the day you can go back and just think about what you\u2019re ignoring, what future overwhelm you might be creating, assess how you\u2019re feeling like and where creeping overwhelm might be lurking, in order to take remedial actions.
\nIf you liked this episode, you might also like Ish, also by Lynne Cazaly
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