The Overwhelm Exercise

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. Our topic today is a practical 4-step method novelists can use whenever they feel overwhelmed by life.

Being Overwhelmed is Normal

An author’s life is crazy busy. Many authors have a day job. Or they work as a caregiver. Or they volunteer for an organization. Or they have a chronic health issue. Or. Or. Or. And maybe all of the above. On top of this, they want to write a novel, which is a massive task at the best of times. 

So it’s normal to feel overwhelmed once in a while. How are you supposed to create a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius when you’ve got all this daily life stuff crushing your soul?

I don’t have an easy answer. I feel overwhelmed sometimes, just like everybody else. But I do have an exercise I work through when I feel especially overwhelmed. I learned it from some internet marketing guru many years ago, but I can’t remember which one, so I can’t give them credit. So this is not my solution, but it’s the one I turn to when I feel paralyzed by the overwhelm. 

I use this exercise several times per year. I set it up as a template in the Scrivener file where I’ve done all my daily planning for the last 13 years. Here it is, direct and unfiltered, an exact cut-and-paste from my Work Journal:

Overwhelm Exercise

Step 1: Write down everything that’s causing you to feel overwhelmed. Keep going until it’s all out on paper. 

Step 2: Mark ONLY those things you could reasonably get done today. Make it doable. 

Step 3: Mark ONLY those things you could reasonably get done this week. Make it doable. 

Step 4: Give yourself permission to do everything else later. 

Some Comments on the Overwhelm Exercise

Yes, that’s the whole thing. Just 4 steps. But they work. You can mark the tasks however you like. I highlight the Today tasks Green, the This Week tasks Yellow, and the Later tasks Orange. 

Some people say you should write your Overwhelm Exercise out by hand on actual paper, because writing on paper activates parts of your brain that don’t get activated by typing. I don’t do that. I just make a copy of the template as a new entry in my Work Journal and then type in my answers. But if you prefer handwriting on paper, go to it. The point is to break out a few small, doable pieces that you can do TODAY. And a medium-sized bunch of other doable pieces that you can do THIS WEEK.

I’ve found that this works very well to shut down the pulsing red Panic Button in the back of my brain. Here’s why I think it works:

Step 1 gives you permission to name all the stuff stressing you out. Once it’s out of your head and onto the page, you feel cleaner. You know you’ve been heard, even if it’s only by paper or by a computer. At the very least, you no longer have to remember all the stuff zinging in at you from all directions. And this usually takes less than 15 minutes. Time very well spent. 

Step 2 gives you focus, and focus is the first thing you lose when you feel overwhelmed. This step gives you permission to NOT try to do everything today. It gives you the right to delay things that can be delayed.

Step 3 gives you a roadmap for the next week’s worth of focused days. That’s gold. You still may have a lot of work. But you can do it without that horrible sense of panic in your gut that you’re leaving a lot of things undone. Of course you’re leaving things undone. But they’re not forgotten. They’re just less urgent or less important than the things you’re doing. 

Step 4 gives all those delayed tasks the recognition that they deserve. Yes, they need to get done eventually. Just not today. And not this week. They’re for later. 

The Last Time I Tried This

As I said above, I work through this Overwhelm Exercise a few times per year. The last time I did it was in September. I’m sure you don’t care what was on my list, so I’ll just talk in general terms about how it worked out. 

My Overwhelm List had 18 items on it. Of these:

• 10 were marked Today. 
• 2 were marked This Week. 
• 6 were marked Later. 

And how did that work out? I had a very productive day (it was a Saturday) and a very focused week that followed. But I was a bit over-ambitious in marking the Today items. Here are the results of what actually got done:

• Of the 10 that were on my Today list, I did 6 that day and 2 later on, but there are still 2 I haven’t done yet. Apparently, they weren’t as urgent as I thought. 
• Of the 2 that were marked on the This Week list, I did both that week, along with another very large task that was not on the list, because it seemed too huge to even imagine doing. 
• Of the 6 that were marked for Later, I have gotten 4 of them done, 1 is in progress, and 1 is still not done. 

To me, the important thing was that the Overwhelm Exercise bumped me up out of a rut of massive anxiety into a safe place where I could do something productive. And in the weeks since I did the Overwhelm Exercise, I’ve also cut 13,000 words from the current draft of the novel I’m working on, and polished about 80,000 words that survived the cut. 

And that’s the point of it all. Once you tame that horrible feeling of being overwhelmed, you can carve out some time from your crazy busy life for your writing. 

Now it’s your turn…

Homework:

• Do you ever feel overwhelmed? If so, save the Overwhelm Exercise template in a safe place, so you can find it in a hurry when you need it. 
• Do you feel overwhelmed today? If so, give yourself 15 minutes right now to try the Overwhelm Exercise and see if it can lower your anxiety level enough to make some forward progress. You don’t have to do it perfectly. It’s enough to make forward progress.