And seeing all the deadlines for all your tasks together helps you assign due dates more compassionately, because you realize they canвЂ™t all be due вЂњby 10 a.m. The needs of each of your tasks are fairly simple, but critical.ДЄ due date: Seems obvious, but having a deadline for a task helps tremendously. After ten years in business, hereвЂ™s what I see each to-do needs: The Needs of a Task Your business is not nearly that complex, but it can seem as if it were. Breathing seems simple, until you get down to the cellular level and see all the systems involved with the simple act of taking air in, breaking it down, and distributing it where the components need to go. HereвЂ™s why.ДЄny live creature has, oh, approximately ten gazillion different things happening physiologically to keep it alive. Sticky Notes Are Not Going to Do ItД¬hances are neither will a little pad of paper, digital or physical. LetвЂ™s talk about organizing your tasks and projects. LetвЂ™s get this thing handled so you can be a hero for your business. However, thereвЂ™s another, more practical side to handling overwhelm. The spiritual side of overwhelm is critical, because it is mostly due to mindset. IвЂ™ve also written about the spiritual answer to overwhelm, (which article was the seed for the workbook and audio class вЂA Solution to OverwhelmвЂ™ that comes with Creating Heart-Centered Websites.)

ItвЂ™s such a common theme that it was one of the very first subjects I covered, back in December, 2001. In an unscientific survey of the more than 2000 small business owners IвЂ™ve worked with in the last ten years, the most common complaint I hear is вЂњoverwhelm.вЂќ (Almost no one mentions plumbing. The dreams stopped before adolescence, and with the passage of time itвЂ™s become clear that they were foreshadowing either the realities of running of a business, or my plumbing problems.

Inevitably a tsunami would appear heading towards shore, and the dream would end as the shadow of the monster wave covered me, and I would wake up, a scared-witless seven-year old.

I would find myself on a beautiful beach facing the ocean, at my back a sheer cliff that rose hundreds of feet in the air, clearly unclimbable. When I was young I had a nightmare that repeated itself over and over again. Sticky Notes Are Not Going to Stop the Tsunami IвЂ™m now the proud owner of a basin wrench, which did just what it said it would do: easily screw the basin parts together saving my doohickies from an early death and my kitchen from an untimely flood. One of the four trips to the hardware store that weekend solved the leak. I tried for thirty minutes to screw those two pieces of the basin drain together using the tools I had on hand, ruining a doohicky (you can tell how proficient and skilled I am in the building trades by my precise technical language) and ending up leaking water everywhere. At one point I was faced with having to tighten down the basin drain, which comes in two parts: the metal ring on top of the drain hole, and the bottom part which screws into the top part, allowing water to drain down the pipe, instead of leaking out and filling the under-the-sink cabinet, something I know from experience. Earlier this year I replaced our kitchen sink.

Sticky note to do list