Feeling overwhelmed at work? What to do in the next 10 minutes

Why overwhelm freezes you

Unfinished tasks don't sit quietly. Psychologists E.J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that unfinished goals keep popping into people's minds, and even made them worse at unrelated tasks.

That's the freeze. You try to answer one email, and the deadline, the invoice and the meeting prep all shout at once.

But the same research found something hopeful. When people made a specific plan for their unfinished goals, the intrusive thoughts and the drop in performance went away. You don't have to finish everything to feel calm. You need a plan for it.

Calm your body first

When you're overwhelmed, your body is on high alert: fast breathing, tight shoulders, a racing mind. Planning is hard in that state.

So start with your breath. In a Stanford trial, a pattern called cyclic sighing (two breaths in through the nose, then one long breath out) improved mood and calmed the body more than meditation did, at five minutes a day. Two minutes at your desk is enough to start.

Get it out of your head

Take one page and write everything down: tasks, deadlines, emails you owe, worries, the thing you promised a colleague last week. Don't sort it. Just empty your head.

Most people are surprised twice. The list is shorter than it felt. And once it's on paper, it stops spinning.

Now ask one question: "If I only got one thing done today, which one would make it a good day?" Circle it, and write its first physical step. Not "the report". "Open the report and write the three headings."

Everything else gets a quick label: a time this week, someone to hand it to, or "not this week". That's the planning step that quietened people's minds in Masicampo and Baumeister's research. To take it further, block the items into your calendar, as in time blocking.

Protect the next hour

Overwhelm feeds on interruptions. In a study by Gloria Mark and colleagues, people who were interrupted finished their work faster, but reported more stress and frustration.

So for the next hour, mute Slack or Teams and email if you can. Set a status: "Focusing until 11." Put your phone in a drawer. Give the one thing you circled a clean run.

If you feel like this every day, the problem may be the workload, not you. Take your written list to your manager. A list on paper makes "which of these should wait?" much easier to ask. And if stress is affecting your sleep or health, please talk to a doctor.

Your 10-minute reset

Here's the whole thing, start to finish. Two minutes of slow breathing, with each breath out longer than the breath in. Five minutes writing every task and worry on one page. Two minutes to circle one thing and write its first step. One minute to close everything that step doesn't need. Then start. If you can't tell which thing to circle, the Eisenhower matrix helps you sort the page.

The hard part is remembering this at the exact moment your head is full. That's what CatchScroll is for: tap "Overwhelmed", and it walks you through a short version of these steps in about two minutes, then puts you back into a focus block.

So, what's the one thing that would make today a good day?