Say Goodbye to Overwhelm: A Step-by-Step Guide to Prioritization

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In this week's episode of the podcast, I dive into one of the most critical skills for living an ambitious and balanced life: prioritization. I break down a simple, five-step process that will help you tackle your busy workload without feeling overwhelmed. I also share insights from a real coaching session that highlight why knowing the process isn’t enough—execution is key. If you've ever felt like you’re drowning in tasks but not making real progress, this episode is exactly what you need. Trust me, you don’t want to miss it! 

Topics in this episode: 

  • A five-step process to focus on what matters. 

  • Tips to handle your workload smoothly. 

  • How prioritization leads to success. 

  • “More time" isn’t always the solution. 

  • Simple ways to organize and get things done. 

Show Notes & References:   

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Transcript

Intro

One of the most important things you need to learn how to do to create an ambitious and balanced life is learn the art of prioritization. 

Prioritization is essentially deciding what the most important things are to be spending your time and energy on, and then executing on those things first, no matter what. 

In today's podcast, I lay out for you a 5 step process to prioritization. 

I wanna take the mystery out of what it takes to create a priority first life. And I'll share with you 2 reasons you may not be executing on your priorities in the ways that you want. You ready? Let's get to it. 

Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms podcast. Your go to resource for integrating your career ambitions with life as a mom. I'm distilling down thousands of coaching conversations I've had with working moms just like you, along with my own personal experience as a mom of two and sharing the most effective tools and strategies to help you quickly feel calm, confident and in control of your ambitious working mom life. You ready? Let's get to it.

Working moms, hello. How is everybody doing today? 

It has been such a big week with ambitious and balanced, my new group coaching program opening its doors, and I have women that are signing up and I have women that are signing up for the 30 minutes consultation with me to make sure this is the right program for them. 

You are really going to want to get in on this. I am only taking ten women into this very first cohort because I want to make sure that I can take care of each and every one of you in this group, that I have the capacity to coach you and support you in every way that you need over the course of this 3 month program. 

Now, I say it's a 3 month program because that truly is what it is, but because it takes place over the holidays, the dates end up being closer to four months actually. 

So I know some of you have been a little bit confused by that, so I just wanted to clear that up for you. 

This first cohort is actually going to be essentially October 1 to February 1, so a little bit longer than three months. 

Monthly coaching calls bonus!

Also, if you haven't heard, there are a few bonuses for this cohort. The first one is that the whole cohort is going to be receiving monthly group coaching calls after the program is complete. 

So we end in February, and then starting in March, all the way through the end of 2025 through December, there's going to be a monthly group coaching call that you get to join in on to make sure that you are getting all of the support you need, that the habits and behaviors and the priority first life that you created with me in this program actually sticks. And the only way I can really know that or do that is to make sure I'm supporting you through all of that. 

So I'm offering this first cohort. I don't know if I'm going to offer it to the rest of them. I haven't really decided yet. 

But I know for this first one, you are going to also get monthly group coaching calls through 2025 when you join. 

The second bonus is only for the first five women that join. And that bonus is a 90 minutes coaching session with me. 

Just a one on one coaching session where we're going to dive into the most impactful exercise that all of my one on one clients tell me, and that is naming and defining your value. 

So the first 5 women that sign up are going to get that 90 minutes session with me. 

I'm going to walk you through that same process that I take all of my one on one clients through. 

There's going to be a workbook that goes with it, and then we're going to spend, I call it like an intensive, a 90 minutes intensive going over your values, defining your values. But I'm only offering it to the first 5 that join the program. 

So if you don't know how to join, you can obviously just go to the show notes. There's a link there, but it's really simple. It's www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/ambitiousandbalanced

I cannot wait to have you in this program and to be a part of this first cohort. 

Okay, so our topic for the day comes from a session that I had with a one on one client not that long ago. And when I asked her what she wanted to talk about in our session today, she asked this question of me. She said:

“How do I manage my busy workload and not always feel overwhelmed?”

It's a good question, right? And isn't that sort of what we all want on some level, to be super productive, get everything checked off of our list, meet all the demands and expectations, and not feel so overwhelmed or like, exhausted. 

At the end of the day, this is going to be a hot topic within ambitious and balanced this new group coaching program, because I have a feeling all ten women in that cohort are going to want to know the answer to this question and execute on this. 

And to be honest, I don't want to leave the process just for that group. I don't want this to feel like a mystery to you on how to answer this question. 

The goal of the podcast

How do you in fact, manage your busy work load and not feel overwhelmed? Because that is ultimately the goal of this community. It's the goal of this podcast. It's about being ambitious and balanced. 

It's about being productive and not being overwhelmed. Those are kind of the same things. 

So, I wanna actually break down the process for you on how do you achieve that right here in this episode. 

And then I'm going to talk about how we're going to tackle this in ambitious and balanced the new group coaching program. 

So you start to understand why just knowing the process isn't enough and why even a coaching program is needed, required is helpful in executing on this, because this is really the missing piece of the puzzle. So we're going to talk about that as well. Okay. 

So my client asked this question, how do I manage my busy workload and not feel overwhelmed? And I started by turning the question back to her, or really the answer back to her. And I asked her, what do you know about the answer to that question? And she paused for a moment and she said, it's about prioritization. 

Yes, spot on. It is about prioritization. And then this is where things got really interesting, because we spent the rest of our time sort of systematizing prioritization in such a way that her brain could logically see step by step how to do it. 

The importance of prioritization.

And on some level, I think that all of us know how to prioritize and we know the importance of prioritization. Right? Like, you can't say yes to absolutely everything, no matter how good the opportunities are or how, how badly you want to do it. Because if you do that, you'll be over committed and you won't do any of your commitments well. Right. You won't have enough time and energy and mental space to devote to the quality of the things that you're doing if you are over committed. 

And so prioritization is what helps you not over commit and to make sure that your time is spent on the best, most strategic things. 

So I'm going to break down this process of prioritization so that it feels really crystal clear to your brain, just like it did for my client. 

And here's the thing you're going to notice as I talk about it, it's not that you actually don't know how to do this. 

Knowing the process is not the hardest part it is the implementation of the process that is the most challenging piece for everyone and where I start to see things break down for ambitious women. 

And it's such a key piece of why I decided to start ambitious and balanced this group coaching program. 

I wanted to find a really quick, I mean, three months is fast to really learn how to, like upside down, like turnover your priorities, so you create for yourself a priority first life to both learn the process, implement the process, tweak the process, get good at the process. We're going to do all of that within a three month period of time. 

So it's basically, I'm going to walk you through the idea what prioritization really is. And this program is all about how to implement it and create for yourself that priority first life quickly and effectively. 

All right, so there are five steps to prioritization. 

Gather all the things. 

Step one, gather all the things that need to get done. That's it. Step one. 

Some people are super organized. The step isn't very difficult for them. They already have a bunch of lists going. They already have a system of tracking their to dos.

And for others, this might take a lot more energy because they don't see themselves as being super organized. 

Or you might be someone that has like multiple lists and multiple places. You're gonna have to bring it all together. Right. 

Step one is gathering all of the tasks that you have committed to doing or are being expected of you and put them all in one place. Right. Gather the information. That's step one. Your brain's kind of got to see the big picture. That's the whole point of that. 

Evaluate.

Step two is to evaluate how much time you have available to work on your tasks. It's essentially how many hours do you have today to spend working on executing that task? 

Listen, now here's something that's really important, and I hope that you caught this. You are not evaluating how much time you need in order to accomplish all of the things on your task list. 

Instead, you are evaluating how much time you have available or how much time you want to put to accomplishing the tasks. 

Can you hear the difference in that? 

This is very, very important and one of the pillars to being an ambitious and balanced person. 

When you think, how much time do I really need to get this done? Your brain is always going to offer to you that you need more time than what's actually necessary. 

Your brain has been hardwired to think that you always need more time. 

And when your brain thinks it needs more time to accomplish a task, you will either take more time to do it, which usually means that you are working far longer than you want to and then you're working at hours you don't want to be working in order to get it done.

Or you end up not taking the extra time to get it done in the way that your brain thought it needed to get it done. And then you feel like you failed, you feel guilty, and you feel anxious about it and not good with the product of your work. 

I talk about this a lot on the podcast, and I'm going to, like, hammer it home here again today because it's a really important pillar of being an ambitious and balanced person. 

More time is not what you need in order to be more successful. 

More time is not the solution to getting ahead or to not feeling overwhelmed or exhausted all the time, or to even being more productive. 

There isn't more time in your day. There is no way that you are ever going to create magically more time in your day. It has to stop being your solution. Okay. 

With that being said, here's the thing - I know a lot of ways to help you gain back more time. There are a lot of ways to get rid of what I like to call your time bandits. Those are the things that are sucking up your time and your energy in ways that you don't want. And this is at the top of the list. 

You have to stop telling yourself and stop believing that you need more time in order to be successful at whatever it is you're wanting to be successful at. 

Okay? Now, I told this story on the podcast not that long ago. Well, maybe it was in the spring sometime. And it's on the episode that's called the 75 25 rule. If you haven't listened to that episode, highly recommend it. 

It's essentially that you really only need to be 75% prepared for any meeting or presentation that you need to be a part of. And that other 25% is about you essentially trusting yourself and preparing yourself, your mind, and your heart to trust your knowledge and your intuition. Okay? 

Now, so I'm going to share the story that I shared back then because I think that it's really relevant to this conversation around time and not giving yourself more time. 

My client was preparing for a really big presentation. She told me it was one of the biggest presentations she had given in many, many years in her career. 

And so we were in the middle of a coaching session, and the presentation was actually the next day. And her plan was to get off the coaching call and to spend another hour or so tweaking and perfecting her deck or her PowerPoint whatever she used. And then she was going to spend time with her family, like she normally would, make dinner and so forth. And then as soon as her kids were asleep, she was going to log back on. 

She was going to prepare some more until she fell asleep, and then she was going to wake up in the morning, she was going to get back to it. She was going to look over her presentation, tweak it, edit it, do whatever she needs. Last minute preparations before she walked into the presentation. 

Here's what I want you to hear in her plan. 

It was about how much time she was devoting to what she thought would make her successful at this presentation. 

Her brain thought that in order to be successful, she needed to be overly prepared. 

And in order to be overly prepared, it required a lot of time, time that could have otherwise been spent doing some other important tasks. So she didn't feel so behind when that presentation was over. 

Time she could have been spending on getting to bed on time or resting or, heck, having quality time with her husband. 

You don’t need any more time. 

So here's what I offered her. I said, you don't need any more time to be prepared. You need to teach your brain that there is a contained amount of time that you need in order to prepare. And that preparation does not mean as much time as you can spend on it. 

Because when you believe that being fully prepared, that's in quotation marks, fully prepared means you putting in as much time as you can to do it, it will never feel like enough. 

And rather than feeling confident where you walk into that presentation like you own the place, right. Instead, you're gonna walk in and feel like you wish there was more time to prepare. 

Long story short, she made a commitment to me that she was not gonna prepare anymore. She took time to rest, to be with her family. I think she went on a walk. She got a good night's sleep. She prepared her mind for the presentation. 

And I got this message from her the next day and where she told me it had went better than any presentation she had ever given. 

She had, like, nailed it in any way that you evaluated it. It was successful, but it wasn't because she kept putting in more time. It was successful because she gave herself a contained amount of time and told her brain that was enough and that was all that she needed in order to be successful. 

Learning to contain how much time you give yourself to complete a task or complete all of the tasks that you have right, for that matter, is how you are actually going to be more productive with your time and get through that list faster. 

So step two of the prioritization process is evaluating how much time you want to give to a particular task or a set of tasks, right? 

All right. I got on my little, like, high horse about that. When you join, ambitious and balanced, you are going to get really, really good at this, I promise. 

You are going to learn how to achieve more in less time by containing how much time you give yourself to work. 

It's going to change everything. 

I promise you. All right. 

Step three is to organize your tasks based on urgency and importance. There are some things that you need to get done that have deadlines that are happening, like tomorrow. So those are urgent things. Those things should probably be at the top of your task list. Right. 

And then there are other things that are not necessarily urgent. Maybe they don't even have a deadline associated to them. Like one on ones with your direct report, or coming up with a particular strategy for a project, or evaluating progress of a client and strategizing how to get them faster, more effective results. 

Or like putting together a first draft of something that's due in a couple of months. Right. It might be systematizing something for the rest of your team. So things like systems become easier for your team or creating an onboarding process for new employees. Right. 

These are all tasks that never feel urgent because they don't usually have a date associated to them and they always get pushed to the bottom of the list, even though they're important for you to feel like a successful leader manager, getting ahead of potential problems, and maybe even streamlining things for your team so that things get easier for everyone. Right. 

These less urgent but very important tasks, some of them likely need to move to the top, your task list. 

Organize your list. 

So step three is to organize that list that you brought together based on urgency and importance. 

Decide how to execute. 

Step four is to then decide how you're going to execute on that task list now that you have organized it by urgency and importance. 

All right, there are really only four options on what you could do with the things on your list. Okay? Four. Promise. 

1: Schedule it. 

Number one, you can scale schedule it, meaning actually find a time in your calendar to get that task done and block it out. Once it's in your calendar, you're going to do it. 

2: Delay it. 

Two, delay it, meaning take it off of your list altogether and put it on a separate list. That is more like, I'm going to get to this later. This isn't important and urgent right now, but I want to make sure I'm tracking it. So I'm going to figure out where to put that in another on some other list that I'm tracking because I'm not going to do it right now. So you're going to delay it. Okay. 

That's really, really important to not have a comprehensive list of the things that are urgent and important to you today that you're trying to get done and things that may or may not get done in the future. When you have like, one full list like that, your brain actually gets very overwhelmed. So much research shows that when it looks at a task list, it wants to see only the things that it's going to tackle in the amount of time you're giving it to tackle it. 

So, like, I, you only want to put three or four things on a list for you to do today, because if your brain looks at a full list of things that, you're trying to get done over the course of the week or the next couple of weeks, it gets very overwhelming to your brain. Right. So it's important to actually, if you're going to delay a task and you're simply not going to prioritize it right now or in the near future, it goes on another list, you remove it from the list altogether. 

All right. So you can schedule it, you can delay it, you can delegate it. Right. You can give the tasks to somebody else and then let go of it. 

I know many of you probably need to work on this. It's something that we'll be talking a lot about in ambitious and balanced, because it is a very important productivity strategy that everyone needs to learn how to do and to do with more ease. I have lots of ways to help you with that, so I'll be doing that in the group as well. 

It’s time to cut it.

The fourth thing that you can do this is really it. You've got schedule it, delay it, delegate it, you can cut it. Simply decide, this is just something you're never going to get done. It's not an urgent and it will never really be important. So it's time to just let it go. 

For some of my clients, things that tend to get cut tend to be things they've thought would be like such a great idea, but it's not really a part of their job description or they kind of committed to something, or maybe they didn't commit to it, but they sort of are putting their name in the hat somewhere around something that just doesn't fit into what they do. Right. 

And so it's something that isn't urgent. It is not important, and it never will be because it's not a part of your job altogether or for whatever reason. 

So it just simply needs to be crossed off the list and not put and not tracked, not put anywhere else, because you're just never going to do it. That's it. Those are the four things that you can do to get through your organized task list. 

Now, follow through.

Step five. This is the last step. You ready? Execute. Follow through with your plan. That's step five. Now, if you remember, this is what I actually said. I said this is the hardest part. 

The first four steps you probably know…now, I'm sure it's nice to hear it like this. Like it's a process where I break it down step by step. For sure, it makes it easier for your brain to know what it needs to do and to break it all down for you. But when it really comes down to it, it's all about execution. 

And that is what this new group, Ambitious and Balanced, is going to focus on. Executing on your priorities. Creating for yourself a priority first life where you decide your priorities first and then orient all of your working habits and behaviors toward those priorities. So they actually happen. 

Now, here's the thing about executing on your priorities. The things that get in the way of you executing on your priorities and your priority list, and the plan that you have put in place to execute on that list. 

The 2 types of distractions.

The only thing that ever gets in the way is a distraction. There are two types of distractions. Let me break them down for you. There are external distractions, like notifications on your phone, somebody walking into your office, the little ding of some sort of message coming in, hearing your kid cry in the other room, maybe even a messy office. These are all things outside of you that in the moment, pull your attention and get you off track. 

The second type of distraction, which is really the heart of all of it, is internal distractions. These are things like the urge to check your email or messages, the pull to check a bunch of easy things off of your to do list before tackling the hard one, which of course just steals a bunch of time. 

The thought, I don't have enough time to get this done, the need for comfort like a snack or coffee, the thought I'm not sure where to start. Internal distractions are your thoughts and emotions that get in the way of you executing on your planned priorities.

And learning how to overcome those thoughts and those feelings in the moment so you actually follow through with your commitments and your priorities in the ways that you've decided, and learning how to lessen the urge that pulls you away so that those urges come up less and you have less conflict with your priorities, both of those things - that is what we are practicing in this new group coaching program, Ambitious and Balanced. 

So, over the last six weeks, I've been breaking down for you my process around clarity, confidence and control, and explaining the foundational principles of work life balance. 

I shared with you a whole bunch of tools that we've talked about here on the podcast that I teach my clients and that I'm going to teach you in this program. 

I talked about the pivot moment protocol. That's how you overcome the emotion of the moment when you feel that urge to do something else, or you feel that pull, that really, really strong pull to do and behave in a way that you don't want to? That's the pivot moment protocol. 

I talked about an amazing, dynamite morning, daily practice that's going to help get your head in the right place as you start your day. I talked about the work to home transition that's going to help you shut down your work brain so that you're being present with your family is infinitely easier. 

I shared so many of the tools that I'm going to teach you on how to become someone that follows through with your priorities. 

And over the course of our 3 months together, you are going to get better and better and better at executing all of those tools and strategies. 

So there's 3 major components to the ambitious and balanced group process. I talked about them all last week in the podcast episode. So I highly recommend going back and listening to me break it down piece by piece, because I really want to make sure that if you opt into this program, if you decide to invest, it is exactly what you need, right. 

So I've been trying to break it down as clearly as possible so, you know, like, this is for you, right? So I broke it all down for you in that last podcast. 

Clarity Week

But in brief, the group kicks off with a week of daily calls. I call this clarity week. It's five days of 90 minutes calls where by the end of it, you will have made four essential decisions about your priorities. And those four decisions are the key to you creating an ambitious and balanced life. 

Pivot Map

And you're going to make all of those decisions right up front, and then you're going to create for yourself a plan, what I call your unique pivot map for exactly how you are going to follow through with those four decided priorities. 

Your personal plan for balance

This is your personalized plan for mitigating all of the internal and external distractions that get in the way of you following through you're going to know exactly what those distractions are and then you're going to have a menu of tools to choose from on how to start overcoming all of those distractions. 

Implementing what you learnt

And then the third part of the process is implementing and evaluating. Essentially, you're just going to start doing it right after that first week. We're going to get in a rhythm of weekly group coaching calls. 

You're going to learn a couple of daily practices. That's going to help you hold to those priorities and stick to the times that you said you were going to stick to to in those priorities. 

We're going to evaluate what's working, what's not working. Every single week you're going to come to the coaching call, ask for support, ask for help in where things aren't really aligning for you. 

And by the end of these three months, this is where it gets really exciting. In just three months, you will have the skills of prioritization and you will have created for yourself a priority first schedule that you actually keep to. 

You'll start waking up not thinking about work all the time. 

You won't have those Sunday scaries so much, right? You won't look forward to Fridays or the weekends. 

Often you'll get full night's sleep where you're not anxiously thinking about all the things that you didn't get done. The time with your kids. You're going to feel more connected it's going to feel more purposeful. It's going to be more fun. 

You are actually going to have a lot more fun. You're going to take time for yourself, do things that bring you joy. You're going to get more efficient with your time so you're more productive and it won't take you endless amounts of time to get things done. 

You're going to learn the art of containing your time so you feel really in control of your schedule. 

You're going to show up each day with more confidence, feeling more valuable, less guilt. 

You're going to speak up with more ideas.

Your schedule will feel less crowded with meetings and other people's priorities. 

Oh my gosh, I just get so excited thinking about all of the results that are going to come from this group. 

Ambitious and balanced working mom community, I created this program for you. 

I took all of the pieces of what I coach on and the process and the things that I speak about right here in the podcast and I streamlined it into a simple and efficient 3 month process where I know that you're going to get exactly what you came for. Or, I'm going to give you your money back. 

You need to get in this first cohort. I can't wait to meet you, to talk to you, to support you. 

It all starts with booking a 30 minutes consultation call with me to make sure that you are a good fit for this program, for me to answer any questions that you have, and for us to get started right away. 

Working moms, you deserve this. You are amazing. 

Go to www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/ambitiousandbalanced to learn more and book that free call. Until next week, let's get to it.

Rebecca Olson