Hello there creatives! Leah here with you on the blog today. I often feel like I have a million tabs open in my head. The more stressed I get, the worse that seems to get. Then the more information that is flying around in my head, the more stressed I get. It’s a spiral. When I feel too overwhelmed, it can be paralyzing. I know there is so much to do but I can’t figure out where to start. When I get to this point of feeling stuck, I have a process that helps me get the information out of my head and onto paper, and then organized in a way that allows my brain to figure out a path forward. I wanted to share this process today in the hopes that maybe someone else out there will find it helpful.

Check out my process of planning through the overwhelm in the video here -

It starts with sticky notes, lots of sticky notes. I am using the adorable Bloom sticky notes here, but any sticky notes will do. I take some time to write down every task or goal in my head I can think of. It takes me a while because it’s been too long since I last did this and consequently, my brain seems to be more jumbled due to the overload of information. This is my version of a “brain dump.” Writing every random idea onto sticky notes gives me flexibility to move the thoughts around and organize them into some sort of structure that makes sense to me.

When I’ve finished writing everything down, I start looking for common themes so that I can start grouping the thoughts into smaller categories. Everyone’s “categories” will probably be a bit different, but most of my goals/ideas/to dos seemed to fall under seven topics for now - home, budget, general to do, creative, relationships, self care, and work. I used some alpha stickers from Simple Stories to label several sheets of grid paper from the A5 Basic Inserts pack, giving each category a separate page.

Now that the million tabs I had open in my head have been broken down into a few more manageable groups, I feel I am able to sit down and plan out my day with a clearer mind, and I can incorporate some of the goals and tasks that I’ve written down into my plans.

I love the daily TN inserts because they give me plenty of room to break my pages into compartments that correspond to the categories I’ve created.

I’m keeping the sticky notes in my A5 Mint Blossom planner so I can easily flip through the pages as I’m writing out my plans in my TN. I can move the sticky notes around anytime and get rid of or replace them as I start getting some of the tasks done.

You can see where I’m simply taking things I wrote on the sticky notes and transferring them to my daily layout, doing my best to make each idea into a reasonable action item. For example, I wrote “start yoga” on a sticky note, but on my actual planner layout, I wrote “pick a new yoga routine” for this day.

I hope this method of organizing lots of random thoughts into a few more manageable categories is an idea some of you may find useful if you have been feeling overwhelmed lately. If you have a technique that you use to help you work through overwhelm, please share in the comments here, or over on my Instagram or YouTube. What works for one may not work for all, so someone may really benefit from hearing your method. Thank you for joining me here on the blog today!

Until next time friends,