Inspired by Marie Forleo

Grab a notebook, pen, and a timer. (If you’ve done the decluttering already, this should be a pen that makes you feel joyful!)

Set timer for 10 minutes. During this 10 minutes you are going to do a brain dump, everything that pops in your head is going to get written down on the paper. Anything that keeps you up at night, things that you worry about, all the projects you need to get done. No editing, no stopping, no caring about how things are spelled, no looking back over your list – just keep writing what is coming up. Okay, start the timer.

10 minutes have passed and you have a page or two of stream of consciousness style lists and notes in front of you. Nice work!

Now, you get to cross out anything that is not within your control. There are things that we tend to spend time thinking about that are outside of our control and you don’t have the extra time to spend on those things. Cross them out – you get to be done thinking about them.

Now, go back through and try that again. We tend to think we have control over things we actually don’t – is that true for you here too?

One last step. Take the next five minutes and look for any thing that makes you feel blah. The things that you think you ‘should’ do but you don’t want to, things that you have been dragging around on your to-do list for years but for some reason you have just never wanted to do them. Okay, draw big lines through everything that has that ‘meh’ feeling. Do it now. Go!

Hopefully now you are left with a big list with lots of lines through it. If you don’t have lines through anything go back and try the above two steps again. Now it is up to you to figure out how you want to prioritize your list. Maybe you take your cue from Tim Ferris and schedule one thing for each day to have done before 11am. (more on this in next weeks newsletter, so have your list ready!)

Do what is going to work for you to keep productive. You know you best so you know your pitfalls, the things that get in the way of your progress. Use that to help yourself. You can do hard things.

Use this exercise anytime you want to get your head out of overwhelm and into action.

Cheers to you, and enjoy that newly created calm!

Caryn

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