It gets to be a lot to manage when your professional and personal duties clash and cause you to feel swamped by everything.
In my case, that definitely happens more often than not — keeping tabs on my work as a journalist, navigating my way around everything concerning my loved ones on/off the clock, tending to my physical & mental well-being, etc., comes together to create a major weight on my back.
As I get older, I find myself looking for any method possible that will help me stay as productive as possible while fending off the energy-draining feeling that prevents me from executing what’s required of me.
ChatGPT’s suggestions
There were two techniques ChatGPT made me aware of that perfectly blended into my professional duties and relieved some of the stress I had before.
The first one mentioned creating “themed” work blocks that combine similar tasks. Since switching between different projects back-to-back created a sense of mental exhaustion for me at times, I tapped into this work block procedure and it worked like a charm.
I went on to jot down and complete the tasks attached to the following themed work blocks:
- An email/admin block
- A research block
- A writing block
- A social media block
- An errands block
The second process ChatGPT recommended to me revolved around building a sense of recovery into my schedule before the feeling of burnout creeps in. Treating my moments of recovery as continued maintenance and not a reward for handling what’s required of me daily put me in a much better place physically and mentally. Scheduling my walking/jogging sessions, workouts, hobbies, quiet time, social time and moments of sleep for different days of the week/weekend helped me out a ton.
Gemini’s suggestions
Gemini made me chuckle when it compared my feeling overwhelmed to “juggling flaming chainsaws while riding a unicycle.” It focused on giving me the type of advice with the intent of tackling a central goal: “the goal isn’t just to ‘do more,’ but to lower the cognitive load on your brain.”
These are the two routines I adopted from Google’s chatbot that helped lessen the feeling of being swamped:
- The 2-minute rule: Small tasks often pile up until they look like a mountain. If a task takes less than 2 minutes (answering a text, hanging up a coat, filing a document), do it immediately. You prevent the “death by a thousand cuts” feeling of having 50 tiny chores looming over you.
- Practice ‘monotasking’: Multitasking is a myth; it’s actually just “context switching,” which drains your mental battery. Close the 20 browser tabs, put your phone in another room and focus on one thing for 25 minutes. You’ll finish faster and feel less frazzled because your brain isn’t constantly recalibrating.
Claude’s suggestions
Claude’s main proposal to remedy my feeling overwhelmed was a sensible one that most people suggest, but it’s one that I was too scared of sticking to beforehand.
Simply learning to say no and mean it kept me from tending to the types of things my closest friends and family members asked me to do (that I obviously didn’t want to do). I’m glad none of them took it personally when I passed on hitting a bunch of dive bars for the third weekend in a row and declined a quick edit job on a younger family member’s college scholarship essay.
While I sometimes felt like a jerk in the moment after saying no, I always remembered Claude’s explanation of why saying no can be so beneficial: “Feeling overwhelmed often comes from overcommitment. Practice declining requests that don’t align with your priorities — politely but firmly. Every ‘yes’ to the wrong thing is a ‘no’ to what matters.”
Final thoughts
Creating themed work blocks, setting up focused moments of recovery, sticking by the 2-minute rule, adopting the practice of “Monotasking” and learning when to say no all came together to build a winning process that made that dark cloud of feeling inundated hanging over my head disappear.
Combining all of those methods with my batch of weekday morning/afternoon productivity routines ended up creating the best system for me that kept me focused on what matters most from a professional and personal perspective.
Hopefully, these AI-generated practices help you out as much as they did for me.
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