The better approach is to step back, take a deep breath, and reboot, just like you do with your PC when it starts acting weird
Here’s the reboot routine I use, and that I recommend my colleagues use when they’re feeling overwhelmed or finally coming up for air after a rough week. You’ll need to turn off the world for an hour, but the time always pays off in increased control when you turn it back on again. So let your boss and teammates know that you’re going dark for an hour, or come in early/stay late to get some quiet time.
This doesn’t mean you actually do whatever tasks are unearthed, unless they’re shorter than 2 minutes in duration. But you do wrap your brain around what needs doing. Capture the actions you need to take, and file any resource material in the place you’d naturally look for it when it comes time to do it.
The most important part of this step is to communicate these decisions. It’s OK to renegotiate ahead of time. What is not OK is to stay silent and just hope they don’t notice when you miss the deadline. That’s a breach of your commitment. And you want to be someone who is trusted to follow through, in all the areas of your life.
What condition is your brain in? If you’re fresh and feeling creative, or if you’re brain-dead and exhausted, pick a Next Action that you can be successful with. There’s little point in starting a strategic planning session if your brain is only capable of doing some filing and calling it a day.
Urgency and importance. How timely and high-stakes are the Next Actions on your list? If you can’t tell definitively which task is most important, then they’re about equal, so don’t agonize over it. Just pick the oldest one.
When you’re done working on that first task, update its Next Action description. Either you’re done and can mark it complete, or there will be a next step. In that case, you’ll relabel it with the very next, physical action you need to take to move it forward
Don’t leave it as it was when you started – that description probably isn’t accurate anymore. The task isn’t “Read about B2B marketing best practices.” You’ve done that, so the task is now, “Write a B2B marketing plan outline based on the best practices you just read about.”
By doing these two things — keeping your Next Actions up to date and making a daily routine of getting “in” to empty — you can stay on top of your system most of the time. And when things do go off the rails, and they will, you don’t throw up your hands in defeat. No need for dramatics. Just take a minute, reboot, and then get back to work.