That Overwhelmed Feeling Hits Again
Okay, so last Tuesday? Total mess. I sat down at my desk after breakfast, coffee steaming, ready to conquer the day. I opened my notebook… and just froze. Stared at this huge, blank page. My brain felt like scrambled eggs. “Work on the blog,” “Fix the email list,” “Learn video editing,” “Research SEO” – it was all buzzing around, loud and important. I grabbed a pen, scribbled like a maniac for five minutes. Page was full, but it felt pointless. Zero direction. Just noise. Sound familiar? Yeah. Goals felt like this impossible mountain to climb before I’d even taken step one.
No More Fancy Systems, Just Action
Fed up. I slammed the notebook shut. Forget complex frameworks or expensive apps. Right then, I grabbed a single post-it note. Yellow, small. That’s all I allowed myself.
- I closed every distracting tab on my laptop. Seriously, just whacked that ‘X’ button.
- I wrote down just ONE thing making my stomach churn the most: “Figure out what next week’s blog post is actually ABOUT.”
- Under that? I broke it into three stupidly small questions: “1. What problem does someone reading this have? 2. What’s one simple answer? 3. What’s the absolute easiest way to show it?”
No essays. Just questions demanding answers. That tiny slip of paper became my whole battle plan.
Cranking Out the Work (Without the Drama)
Armed with just my little yellow square, I started. Didn’t “brainstorm” for hours. Nope. For question one, I thought about my notebook meltdown that morning – the chaos. That was the problem: too many things feel important, no clue where to start. Simple answer? A stupidly easy way to find one thing to focus on first. Easiest way to show it? Walk through exactly what I did with the post-it note, screw-ups and all. Just… doing one tiny piece after another. Wrote the first draft in under an hour. Didn’t even check my email once. Felt wild. Felt good.
What Actually Stuck
This wasn’t magic, just stupidly practical. That messy Tuesday taught me:
- Overwhelm starts vague. Concrete questions kill vagueness. “Fix the blog” is terrifying. “What problem does the reader have?” is something I can tackle.
- Physical limitation works. One post-it. Forces you to strip out the fluff. If it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t belong. Right now.
- The goal isn’t the huge outcome (“Become a famous blogger”), it’s the very next step you can physically take (“Write down the reader’s problem”). Do that step.
Now, that messy notebook pile? Still there. But buried underneath is a clean, stupidly simple stack of yellow squares. Each one holds just enough to start, not enough to panic. It works. Simple works.
