John Assaraf records a short YouTube clip from the banks of the San Miguel River in Telluride, Colorado, demonstrating a simple, repeatable method to reduce feelings of overwhelm. He advises writing down everything you want to do across life categories (health, relationships, spiritual growth, business, finances, experiences, etc.), then moving from generalizing to organizing, prioritizing (choose one or two items per category for the next ~30 days), and finally putting those items into your calendar to make them actionable (mnemonic: generalize → organize → prioritize → actionalize). He also recommends breaking tasks into half-hour to hour chunks.
Questions this video answers
On the banks of the San Miguel River in Telluride, Colorado.
Generalize, organize, prioritize, actionalize.
Pick one or two items per category to focus on.
About the next 30 days.
Chapters
Hey, I hope you're having an amazing day. I'm sitting here on the banks of the San Miguel river in Telluride, Colorado, and I wanted to teach you a little trick that I learned to help get my mind clear of all the things that there are to do every single day. It's a simple technique to get rid of the feeling of overwhelm, but also to put some order into your life. Before I show you that, let me show you a little bit of the views here, of what I'm looking at here. Let's see if you can see those beautiful mounds in the river. The river is really low right now, but anyway, I thought you'd enjoy that. So let me share with you one of the tricks that I use.
It's a little windy right now, so I've got to hold my tripod.
Whenever I'm feeling overwhelmed, like there's so much to do, I take a few sheets of paper and I start writing down everything that I want to do in the area of health, everything I want to do in the area of my relationships, everything I want to do.
In the area of my spiritual growth.
Anything that I want to do in.
Business growth, anything I want to do.
Financially, any trips I want to take, any experiences I want to have, I just write everything down on a sheet of paper, and you could do it on a computer as well. And that just gets everything out of your head and allows you to look at it. And then I go from having everything spread out on sheets of paper, and then I start to go from, you know, a general view of everything in their categories. Health, wealth, relationships, career, business, fun, experiences, charities, et cetera. Then I start to prioritize which are the most important in each category. So all of the things that I want to do for my health, which one or two are the most important for the next, let's say, 30 days?
So I pick one or two for each category. And so I go from generalizing to organizing. And then I prioritize. And then I take those one or two, and then I put it into my calendar, which is the actualizing part of it. And so it's generalize, organize, prioritize, actionalize. And then that takes that feeling of overwhelm from me where I've got so many different things to do, and it makes it manageable. And once it's manageable, then I break it down into little chunks so that I could really just take care of it, you know, in half an hour or hour chunks.
All right, there is a little bit of a tip for you.
I hope you enjoyed the little view from Telluride, Colorado.
