How I Plan My 2023 to Decrease Stress & Prevent Overwhelm
Ohhhh New Years. It can be such an exciting time of new possibilities, opportunities, and clean slates. But it can also be overwhelming…
we can set too many goals. we might not know what are the “right” goals. we can overschedule and overcommit ourselves.
so, how do we avoid doing that?
So, here is a little sneak peek into my process for doing exactly that. In this blog, and in the accompanying YouTube videos and podcasts, I’ll be breaking down my exact process for how I plan my year to decrease stress & prevent overwhelm. To help, I’m going to break it down in the different systems that I use because I do think it’s all about our systems…
Without having good systems in place, we lose track of what we already have on our plate and how the different pieces of our lives fit together—and that’s where burnout and stress come into play. Because if things that we put on our plate don’t fit together well, that’s when we get overwhelmed and stressed. That’s the importance of good systems. So, let’s take a look at mine…
01. in notion
I use Notion for task management and goal planning. In a nutshell. But, the most important part of this is that I use it make sure that I don’t have too many commitments, goals, or projects on my plate. It also helps me determine if I have too many competing priorities. How I do this is by using a personal growth planner to coordinate and visualize all of my goals and how they fit together. For example, check out the dashboard below…
You can see that I’ve set-up my goals and separated them out by quarter. I don’t have more than 5 goals any given quarter that I’m focusing on and those goals are spaced out over the quarter.
For example, in Q1, I have a goal that’s due on February 28th, 2023 and I the remaining 2 are targeted to be done by March 31st. In Q2, my target deadlines are similarly spaced out. This makes it so I’m not overloading myself any given month. Instead, I’m spacing out my goals.
But I’m not just spacing out my goals by target deadline. I’m also spacing out my goal tasks. This is an example for my goal of starting to work with the therapist. You can see that, even though that goal isn’t targeted until the end of Q1, I have benchmark and milestone tasks scheduled out leading up to the target deadline.
Last, but not least, for the most part my goals are also spread out between the different parts of my life. I have goals for business mixed in with goals personally and goals for my physicality.
The things that are denoted “scheduled” in my task manager are the appointments that are actually on my calendar. If I have a lot, I rework my task list to lighten up my to-dos…
Spacing out your tasks and goal deadlines is—obviously—important to make sure you’re not overexerting yourself. But, spacing them out between the different parts of your life that are important to you keeps you from burnout by making sure you’re fulfilled and taking care of yourself: mind, body, and spirit.
So, this is the first step in my systems for planning my 2023: I use my goal setting systems in Notion to decide what goals I’m going to focus on over the course of year, working quarter by quarter, spacing out my deadlines, priorities, and tasks to accomodate the various things I’m working on.
The other miscellaneous things I do in my Notion to decrease stress and prevent burnout:
Synchronizing my meetings and Google events into my Notion so I can see those things too and start keeping my to-do lists light on meeting heavy days (something I struggled with in 2022)
Self-care trackers to make sure I’m resting, prioritizing my self-care, and engaging in my habits
Plugging in and planning for my speaking engagements
This is a screenshot of my health tracker from my weekly review. Here, you can see my habits and my health stats. I check-in on them week to week and month to month to ensure that I am giving myself what I need.
02. in google calendar
Google Calendar also has a place in my workflow. After all, those meetings and appointments that populate in my Notion come from my Google Calendar. But, my Google calendar serves another really important function: protecting the time that I don’t want to be working.
Perhaps the most important function of a calendar, in my opinion, is about automating your boundaries. My clients can only be schedule me during certain hours each week. When I have social commitments or vacations that I want to block out of my schedule, I do so on my calendar. Google has a very nifty out of office feature that I love for doing this. Whenever you’re scheduling an event in your calendar where you want to completely block out your calendar, you can select the “Out of Office” feature.
The beauty of this feature is that you can indicate that you want to automatically decline meetings that get added to your calendar during that time—either new meetings or existing meetings. Additionally, if you’re using things like Calendly or other schedulers, they automatically block off that day in your scheduler so that people cannot book you on that day either.
I do this for my vacations, self-care activities, and for social activities because I need to protect my time. And this nifty, easy feature in Google calendar is really helpful with that.
This—with my Notion Automation for syncing events to my Notion task manager—helps keep me sane and keep me from overwhelming myself.
03. on my wall calendars
You might not know this about my systems, but last year, I bought 5 big ass wall calendars at Target and it’s become an invaluable piece of my puzzle.
Because Notion is great for handling the logistics of the day-to-day and Google calendar is great for the schedule component. But, sometimes we need to see things way in advance. Sometimes I need to see if I have launches back-to-back with speaking engagements back-to-back with important events in my day job. I need to see that bigger picture.
That’s exactly the purpose and the point of my wall calendar system. It allows me to see further ahead and also allows me to see the space around my busiest times and seasons. For example, if I have back to back speaking engagements and conferences (like I do next September), the wall calendars allow me to plan for rest and rejuvenation in the weeks leading up to that busy week and the week after.
so, that’s it! That’s my system for plannign 2023 to decrease stress & prevent overwhelm.
What do you think? Did it give you any ideas or things to try for yourself?
Drop a comment below!
