Assess, Delegate, Cut

Amanda Stout Author

Posted On Sep 12, 2023 |

Do you walk through your days in a daze of overwhelm and stress?

Do you feel like you are constantly fighting an uphill battle trying to balance everything on your plate?

When someone asks how you are doing does your answer consistently include the words “busy” and/or “tired”?

If so, it’s possible that your time is overcommitted. Between driving kids to their various activities, volunteering, maintaining a reasonably clean home, engaging in family relationships and social obligations, as well as work and/or hobbies, the calendar seems to magically fill up all on its own without any input from you, leaving you with little to no time to just breathe or take a break.

If this sounds like your life, I get you. That’s what my life used to look like too, until I hit burnout. At that point, I discovered that the world wasn’t going to end if I reduced what was on my plate. So I got really radical in applying the Assess, Delegate, Cut strategy:

1. Assess your commitments

• List everything you are committed to right now and assess into categories (there may be crossover between them, that’s ok. put things in whatever categories they fit in):
• Essential/Important:the things you MUST do (e.g. make sure people have food, work, etc) What things are actually essential? Are the things you just marked essential ACTUALLY essential? Do you really have to do everything you are doing?
• Enjoyable: The things that fill your cup
• Dislike: things that suck the energy and life from you. What do you dread doing?
• Everything else

2. Delegate: Look at your lists of essential/important commitments and see if there is anything you can delegate. For example, Can you hire someone to clean your house once a month? Can you coordinate a carpool rotation with some other moms in the same activities? Delegate anything and everything you possible can.

3. Cut: Stop doing everything that is not essential/important and that made it to the dislike category. Realize that this doesn’t have to be forever, it can just be a season. Maybe right now is not the time to be volunteering in your kid’s classroom three times a week - can you cut it down to one or maybe just not at all for a season? Same goes for church, extracurriculars for your kids, and extra work.

If the idea of saying no to something or quitting something you previously said yes to makes your butt clench and gives you a pit in your stomach, then you are dealing with more than a full calendar - you’re dealing with an inability to say no and set healthy boundaries around your time.

This can be caused by a couple things:

• People pleasing (wanting people to like you so much that you sacrifice your own well being to make them happy)
• A lack of clarity around what is important to you
• A subconscious desire to avoid something (often intimacy)

If any of this resonates with you and you want to break OUT of the busy cycle, I can help! My Busy-Buster process will help you get clarity around what matters to you, WHY you’ve been struggling to prioritize it, and how to stop being busy and instead embrace restful productivity. 

Next week on 9/18 I will be going more in depth on this topic in my Busy-Buster Masterclass. It will be hosted for free in my Facebook community here 

If you want that life of restful productivity and want more personalized support, you can also email me at coachamanda@amandakstout.com to get started.

Categories: Home Management, Life, Overcoming, Productivity, Time Management