Work has been a lot of work lately. Lately as in, like the last year and a half.

While we are finally getting our act together in a lot of systematic ways (#startuplife), sometimes it seems that help will never come. My last painstaking hire was whisked away from me, like Wilson the volleyball floating away in the current of agency politics.

The real upside of all the insanity on my to do list is getting way better at prioritizing, voicing red flags and learning to accept my limits. And how I do all of these things involves lists, lots of lists.

Last week, I just couldn’t take any more “urgent, top priority” items. Randomly, I decided to order my to do list by stress level instead. I mean, if I’m not going to get everything done anyway, might as well be freaking out slightly less about the things left over?

It turned out to be loverly.

To keep the list from getting too overwhelming, I broke my list into groups of three. Then I refused to even look at the next three until I had finished the first group. Apparently this a real deal productivity tip I stumbled into? I’ll take it. This also had the unintended effect of keeping me more focused and present during the work day.

There’s definitely a correlation between deadlines and stress level, so I didn’t completely throw those out the window, but I also found this helped weed out the “pop-up” tasks from the high impact ones. By the end of the week, I felt lighter, as well as proud of my productivity.

I highly recommend it!