Managing Deadlines Without Overwhelm: Stress Relief for Highly Sensitive People

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover some practical strategies to try when you’re under the gun.

Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People, a podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I’m your host Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie, a way to question and reduce stressful thoughts. And you guessed it, I’m a highly sensitive person myself.

In this episode, you’ll discover why deadlines are so stress provoking for HSPs, 10 strategies for reducing stress when working on a deadline, and how to begin enjoying your work instead of being hypnotized by your deadline. This is an edition of Strategy Fridays where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person.

Do you ever find yourself avoiding deadlines? Trying to do things that don’t have any deadlines associated? Do you find yourself caught when you’re dealing with a deadline and locked into a kind of stressful situation? Deadlines are often stressful for everyone, but even more so for highly sensitive people.

We tend to be more tuned in to this experience of pressure that can often come from a deadline. Even the name deadline doesn’t sound very inspiring. Dead. Line. Oh, gosh, it’s not something that I look forward to getting into. So if you’re a highly sensitive person, why would a deadline be even more stressful for you in general?

One of the reasons is that we process things deeply. We tend to be slower, more thorough, because we like to do a good job. We like to do things well, and it takes time to do that. And we also like to consider many things, sometimes above and beyond what is actually the bare minimum of what could be considered to be the project.

In order to do that, we need more time, we need to have it come like it has to be something that is coming from inside. We have to stay connected to ourselves, and you can’t push that, you can’t rush that. For all these reasons, we tend to not like deadlines and we also are aware of the pressures that other people put on us, the expectations that people have, the We don’t want to let people down.

We don’t want people to be disappointed with us. We want to be responsible. We’re conscientious. All these things make that deadline seem like it’s bigger than life, makes it seem worse than it is, and can bring a lot of extra stress to a situation. So today, I’d like to look at practical strategies that we can use to help reduce stress when working on a deadline.

Obviously, mindset is a huge part of it, and I do a lot with the work of Byron Katie, so You know that you can question your thoughts about deadlines, and that can be super helpful. That’s probably the most important thing that I would offer. But today I want to look at some more practical things that you can actually do when you’re working with a deadline.

One of them is called chunking. Chunking means breaking down large projects. into smaller actionable steps. And this reduces that feeling of overwhelm because it provides a larger road map of the whole project. And it allows you to just focus on this. And it also creates a little mini deadline just for that action step.

And so when you have a bunch of smaller deadlines and you can’t go infinitely on each small deadline, then it keeps you on track. It’s like saying there’s a limit to how well you can do each piece of the job. And so if I have, if I have five weeks to do a project. And I have I don’t know, ten different pieces that I need to do.

Then I can work on each of those, and each one will have only a few days of my time. And within there, I may even have smaller deadlines, smaller chunks. The small chunks give you a sense of accomplishment. Because you just finished that one, okay, I want to get to the next one. Oh yeah, I want to get to the next one.

And it gets you on a kind of rhythm. Whereas the project as a whole seems like this huge thing that you’re never going to be able to do. And now the deadline’s getting closer and you just get paralyzed with that. So chunking is a huge advantage when you’re working with deadline. And as I already mentioned, setting micro deadlines with those chunks is going to make it much more manageable.

And I think. In my experience, it actually gets me moving rather than stuck. Another area where, another thing you can use is prioritization. And this is so important when you can’t do everything or you can’t do everything well. There are some things that are really important to do and some things that are less important to do.

And some things you can put more time into, and some you can actually let go of if necessary. So this is the same basic process of looking at the big picture, breaking it down into small chunks, setting some small deadlines, and identifying which of those things are going to get your time. If you can do this in advance, it will allow you to relax on the large scale and just focus on the small little steps that you have to take.

Another thing that’s really tough to do, but important to do. is to set realistic timelines. We humans tend to be overly optimistic about time. We think we can just do so much in, in a certain amount of time. And actually we tend to be wrong on that most of the time, especially as HSPs because we tend to take longer to do things than non HSPs.

So be realistic. What can you actually accomplish and think about it in terms of maybe this is version one of the project and you may not be able to do the perfect, the perfected version of this project in this go round. What’s realistic? What can I actually do? If the deadline is really hard, I may have to do a less perfect version of the outcome than I would like to, but let’s be realistic.

Be realistic. Or is the timeline absolutely rigid? Maybe I have a little more time and I could go longer with the project if necessary. Whatever it is, it has to be realistic. Otherwise, you end up really stressing yourself trying to fit something that doesn’t fit. is taking time into a very small amount of time.

Another way to support yourself with stress of deadlines is this whole idea of working backwards. Start with the final deadline and then plan milestones backward to ensure that you’re working at a steady pace towards that. I’ve mentioned this before. It’s like cooking. Everything has to come out at a certain time.

And so you have to start certain things ahead of time, knowing that it will all finish on time. Takes a little planning. If you can take the time to do this at the beginning, it can help you a lot to overcome any stress while you’re working with a time blocking is another thing. Where if you’re just focusing on one task, then you’re not having to manage several different things.

And for me, I turn off notifications on my computer when I’m working there. I don’t have any email pop ups or text pop ups or Any kind of things, notifications saying do this. I just turn all that off. In fact, I turn it off and leave it off. I haven’t had those on for years. Time blocking means that you’re only focused on one thing for that time.

And if you can look at it as, oh my gosh, I have one hour. And what can I do? I have to do these three things in this one hour. Then, suddenly, your mind will start creating the focus to get task 1 done in the first 20 minutes, task 2 done in the next 20 minutes, and then task 3 done in the last 20 minutes.

And it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you’re really focused on that time. Another piece that is important for dealing with deadlines is starting early. If you can begin projects as soon as they’re assigned, it can reduce the pressure of last minute work. We all know that from school, and of course, many of us put that off until the last minute.

But if you can begin early and begin with planning, then you may find that you get into the project earlier and get in really get into it enjoying the project because you’re starting to make project sorry, starting to make I can’t think right now. Starting to make progress with the project.

What else? Notice when you work best. What are the peak energy times for you? For me, I like the morning time. That’s when I tend to be freshest. Or the sometimes early afternoon time tends to be a focus time for me. Find out when your time When your energy is at its best and block your time there.

The problem with many of us is we come into work, for example, and start with email. Email is everyone else’s to do list. It’s not our own. And so we end up then getting pulled into things that we should do for other people. And we run right over the times that we could be working on the project. So I like to do it the reverse.

Come in and work on the project right away. Then check email later in the day or on the, just before lunch or later. in, in the afternoon and deal with those kind of low like shallow work type type activities at a different time. And this brings to us to another area, which is multitasking.

If you’re trying to do more than one thing at a time, your brain is going to work like a million times harder, and it’s just really hard to make any progress. This is even more important for highly sensitive people. Because we like to go deep into one direction. And if we’re going into multiple directions at once, we are splitting ourselves, and it just makes us frustrated, and it’s not very effective.

One more idea is that you can reframe deadlines, as I mentioned earlier, they’re actually a way of structuring your time. They’re a tool, in a way. There’s something that says, Hey, I’d like to accomplish something, and I’d like to have it accomplished by this time. Maybe it’s a random time, or maybe it’s something that’s essential to get done, but no matter what, it’s something that focuses my attention.

And as long as I don’t over focus, get over stressed by it, it actually can be a very helpful tool in being productive. And then finally, I would say one of the most important things to reduce stress on a practical level. With deadlines is to see if you can find someone to work with. Maybe it’s an accountability partner.

Maybe it’s someone who’s also doing the project with you. Someone that you’re checking in with on a maybe daily basis, if possible. I know when I started working with my assistant a few years ago, we started meeting every day for about a half hour. And not only did we chat and catch up a little bit and become friends, But we also we’re constantly looking at, okay, what did you accomplish today?

What did you accomplish? And then questions and little back and forth. That little bit of accountability, that little bit of sharing, that little bit of social has great benefit when it comes to staying on track and making progress with anything that has a deadline. So those are just a few practical ideas on how you can reduce stress when working on a deadline.

And I like to think of the doing a job as being something that I actually enjoy doing, because why else am I doing? Maybe I do it because I need to make money, or maybe I do it because it’s something I’m passionate about. But no matter what it is, it’s something that I want to do. Even if it’s doing, working for someone else and I just want to make a living or something like that, I do want to make a living.

So yeah. Where is the focus? Where am I focused on? Am I focused on the deadline or on the job itself? If I’m focused on a deadline, it’s literally hypnotizing, and it takes my attention away from taking the next step of what I would like to do in that particular job. If I can imagine that the deadline, even though it’s there, It’s just not so important or just not the focus of it.

It’s like the outside wall of the building. There’s a hard wall there, but my focus isn’t on the wall all the time. My focus is on what I’m doing inside the building. And that starts to bring me joy. So if you can focus on what you enjoy doing in the project, why you’re doing it, why you like it, then.

This brings your attention into a warm area where you can go deep with it and enjoy the process rather than focusing on, Oh my God, I’ve got to get it done by such and such a time. In this episode, we looked at why deadlines are so stress provoking for HSPs. And we see it has a lot to do with our deep processing ability as well as interest, which makes us a little slower sometimes or more thorough.

And we can also be more aware of what others are thinking or what they may fear what they’re thinking if we don’t make the deadline. So all these factors come to increase the stress load for us when dealing with deadlines. Of course, many of these things are stressful thoughts that can be questioned.

But we also looked at some practical strategies to help reduce stress or deal with deadline situations. One is chunking your time, breaking down large projects into smaller ones, setting micro deadlines identifying priorities, setting realistic timelines, working backwards using time blocking just to dedicate yourself to one thing, starting early on a project instead of waiting till later, And noticing when are the best times of day when your energy is the highest to work on it, avoiding multitasking and reframing deadlines so that they’re seen more as a way of structuring your time rather than a threat or an obstacle, and maybe one of the most important, leveraging accountability partners or working collaborating with someone So that it becomes more of a fun thing or a collaborative thing that keeps you on track.

And you’re not just faced with a month of time with no structure there. And then finally we looked at how to begin enjoying your work instead of being hypnotized by your deadline. And that’s really it. depends on where your focus is. If your focus is on the deadline, you will be probably petrified at least a lot of the time.

If your focus is on what you actually enjoy about the work or your reason for being there and doing that work, it feels like alignment on the inside and that can keep you moving rather than being stuck. So thanks for listening. It’s always a pleasure to think about these things to you with you, and I look forward to Our next session, and in the meantime, have a wonderful rest of your day.