MBA1505 Q&A Wednesdays: How do I balance quantity vs. quality and not get overwhelmed?

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I always feel like I have a lot of things to learn and then I get overwhelmed and feel like I focus on quantity and not quality. Any tips on how not to get overwhelmed? Totally. Mehrabin. I got your back. This is quite common. Many of us when we feel like we got a lot to learn, a lot to do, we feel like the best thing to do is do as much as I can. But often that burns us out, that overwhelms us and what tends to happen is that not much gets done because of the overwhelm. We kind of freeze because we don't know what to work on and we just feel like it's never ending. We feel this burden on our shoulders. I want to share with you today a few tips that's going to help you deal with overwhelm when you got a lot to do or learn. In your case, these tips have saved me. Especially when it's a busy time of year in the business. There's a lot of things I have to do on my agenda or even in my personal life. There's a lot of things I want to get done. And you can apply these techniques in your business, in your learning, or even when you're planning a vacation. I'll explain and get into all the details. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. In today's Q and A Wednesday's question, Mehraban asks, how does he prevent overwhelm when he's got so much to do, so much to learn? He tends to focus on trying to get too much done, quantity over quality. And I want to start with a piece of advice from a book I reviewed yesterday, our must read episode, the Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham. And one of the pieces of advice in that book is start fewer things, but finish them all. Like finish the things that you start. Too many of us start or try to attempt to do too many things and we never see them to completion. And that could be things in your business that can be in your life. You don't want to be a dabbler in life. You want to be a completionist, someone that completes things they set out to do. So you need boundaries. You need to restrict yourself from doing more and more things without finishing the things you started. There's a mathematical learning concept in Japan called Kumon Maths. And basically the concept is on the idea that you don't move on to the next level of math unless you've mastered. You get a hundred percent on the first level you're on or the level you're currently in. Until you have mastery, you don't go to the next level. Basically, it means you got a complete and actually see something through before you put something else on your plate or move on to the next stage. So what I want you to do, whether you're learning something new or you're doing things for your business, you need to restrict yourself on what you actually complete. So let's say for example, you have a to do list for your day. Okay, my list Today, there's about 12 items on them. Now, not all 12 have equal value or have equal urgency. So what I like to do is I like to Highlight or underline or are the most important things. And I go with three or four, maximum four. Everything else is nice to have. It'd be good if we could do it, but if not, I'm still winning the day, I'm still successful, and I can always move on to the next day because they're not urged, I can move those things to the next day's to do. Now, the reason why I do this is because a lot of us feel overwhelmed when we have a list of things to do and we feel like we have to do them all. No, that's just not feasible. You actually need to narrow things down and say, these are three or four things I gotta get done today. I gotta see them through from start to end. Okay? Now this is even more important if you're dealing with things that take a while, right? Like learning a new programming language, like learning a new technique in dance or something like that, right? Anything that you pick up, you want to make sure that you give yourself the time to, to actually complete the task, to complete the goal. Why? Because four things completed is better than zero things completed or one thing completed. Because you felt overwhelmed by the list, you felt you had to do everything. This even applies if you're on vacation. Many people, they plan to do like 18 things every day on vacation. They, they just overwhelm themselves. They take the travel guide and they basically say, I'm going to do everything there is to do in Venice, right? Or in Italy, for example, instead. And what I recommend, what we do, which makes it a more enjoyable trip, is to say, I want to cover one or two things every day. Just one or two things. If I do anything else, great, I explore, I discover, I find new things. I stumble upon a cute restaurant, whatever it is, that's a great surprise. But really, I just want to do two of these things today. If I cover these two things, I'll be happy. And this allows me to have a more enjoyable trip because I'm actually seeing things through and I don't have this sense of disappointment if I don't complete everything. And I always love the advice when it comes to travel that Rick Steves says is that always travel with the intention of coming back, right? This is not the last time you're going to come to this country. Always have the intention of coming back, and that'll make you feel like, hey, I can save that for next time. And the same thing goes with work or learning. You are coming back, right? You're gonna have another day tomorrow, hopefully, right? Everything's Gonna be fine. So you have another crack at it. Now. This is not for you to procrastinate, but it's there for you to understand. Hey, you just can't do everything in one day. It's better for you to have a few things completed, right, Rather than feel overwhelmed and never get anything completed. There are so many people that have the same to do list they've had all month long, right? For weeks. Because they just feel overwhelmed and they never actually get started because they feel like, wow, I got too much to do. So some people, they take their to do list, they take their list of things they have to do and they break them down into smaller lists, lists of three, and they might serve them up each day of the week. I do this even with household chores, right? I don't like to have a whole list of things. It makes me feel overwhelmed. Feels like, wow, I got so much to do, my whole weekend's gonna be shot. So instead I just break it out or break it down throughout the week or even throughout the month. One day I'll cut the lawn, the other day I'll make sure, you know, the car is serviced properly. I need to make sure that all that's done. Another day I'll do the vacuuming, or maybe in one day I'll do the vacuuming and I'll hang the laundry, whatever. The point here is that it's better for me to break them down into smaller chunks, get things done rather than try to do everything in one day and feel overwhelmed and disappointed. And this is not just theory, this is actual science. Our brains can't handle several ideas at one time. It causes a sense of stress in our brain when we have to kind of absorb a lot of ideas at once or a lot of tasks at once. So take things one by one and break them down into smaller milestones. Mehrabin, this is something I'm sure you know about because you're a full stack developer and I learned this through Webinar Ninja, our software company, that milestones are important. You know, when you're building out a software, even just building out one small feature in a software, there are different milestones to get to the point of completion. And these milestones allow us to make sure we're on the path, we're on track, and we have progress. So we can see it through whether it's documenting the product or documenting the feature, you know, designing it, the ux, the ui, and then doing the front end and then doing the back end and then, you know, testing on the dev server and then from there we do QA testing and then we create the help docs. You know all the steps involved in releasing one feature, but we break them down into milestones so we feel like there is progress and we document these milestones so next time around we know exactly what we have to do. Documentation or standard operating procedures are a lifesaver in business, especially when you do things over and over regardless of the frequency. Like developing new features is something more frequent than maybe hiring for a certain position in your company. You might not be hiring for a position every day, but maybe twice a year. And the great thing is that when you about to do that task, you can go back to the documentation and say, okay, this is how I do this task. Step by step. You don't have to use your brain too much. You can just follow the instructions that you wrote for yourself or somebody wrote for you on your team when you did it the first time. I got more on today's Q and A Wednesday, but before that, let me give love to today's sponsor.

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To wrap up today's Q and a Wednesday, Today's question from Robin, who sometimes gets overwhelmed and focuses on quantity and not quality. When I think of quality, I think of completion. You got to complete something, you actually got to get it done and you need to allow yourself to do it with a sense of quality like you mentioned. And it's just hard to prioritize quality when you're rushing to finish more and more things. So make sure you keep your lists short. You keep yourself focused and one of the best ways to do this is don't try to move on to something else until one thing is finished, until that first task you're working on is done and is done to satisfaction. Right now, perfection is very hard to attain. It's impossible to attain. So really you're looking for competency and something that you're proud of. And as long as you're getting better and better over time, that's the goal. You often hear the quote, imperfect action is better than no action at all. So this is really important. Make sure you understand it's not going to be perfect, but your job is to try to get better and better over time. And completion sometimes is just the goal here because you can always iterate and you always improve, but you can't improve upon something that's not completed. I hope that helps everybody listening and helps Mehrabin, who asked today's Q and A Wednesday's Question if you have a question you want to ask, you want me to answer it right here on the show, just email me over at omar00mba and I'll make sure to answer it right here on Q and A Wednesdays. Don't forget to hit subscribe. By hitting subscribe, you get access to over 1500 business lessons in our archives. It's the only way you can get access to all those great business lessons. So whatever you're using to listen to podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Radio, Overcast, Himalaya, whatever app you use, hit that subscribe button and get access to our archives and get updates on every episode that gets released. Thank you so much for listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. It's better for you to be great at a few things than mediocre at everything. People want specialists. People want people that are fantastic at something. When you're in need as a business owner of expertise, you want the best person in that area of expertise, not somebody that can kind of do that. And a few other things, too. Think about it. If you had to hire somebody right now for any position in your company, you'd want an expert in that area, not somebody who's a jack of all trades. That means quality matters. Okay? It doesn't matter how many things you know, it's how well you know the things you do know. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. We heard you. Nine years of Bring back the Snack Wrap and you've won. But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the Hot Honey Snack Wrap. Now you've really won. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can.