New stuff arriving all the time

Your world is not static. It moves a lot. Every day. Every minute. Every second. At anytime, you are about to have a great idea, you receive some invitation or some request, you notice something is wrong with your car, you get an email reporting a problem or a business opportunity. Your world keeps being rocked by waves and waves of new inputs, new information and status updates. And part of your job is to process these new inputs, selecting which refer to any commitment within your area of responsibility. You'll be deciding if you want to pay attention or intervene, and in what way. If there are many of them fitting there, you probably also want to implement some sort of priorities, like in a hospital, so you can address them orderly.


Dynamic control

The important is: your job is NOT to keep your world perfect (otherwise you would be failing all the time). Your job is dynamic: you have to be able to cope with whatever is sent your way and deal with it, while sustaining productive and joyful mental states, moving towards desired scenarios. Feeling overwhelmed is not a good productivity clue. It's typically a counter-productive mental state, blocking your ability to select wisely, throwing you into a robot-oriented crazy-execution mode. It may kind of stress you to work your way out, but is rarely an optimal effort. Besides, feeling overwhelmed is clearly not a joyful state, so it fails completely the 'big goal' in the first place.


Overwhelm and rush hour

A good way for you not to be overwhelmed with all that can happen (sometimes apparently arriving all at the same time) is to have a notion of circuit. Like in traffic lights, cars keep arriving from all directions, and your job will be to introduce some sort of pace into that management, including having some ambulances allowed to pass before everybody else. If during the rush hour there are many many cars, it's ok, traffic lights just keep working like always, and everybody will have to take a bit more time to get on their way (even the ambulances take a bit longer to get through). And that's just the way it is! During rush hour, things just take longer, everybody knows it. It's a fact of the world. It may be not nice, but it's nobody's fault, and certainly not the traffic lights' fault! 


Always better with some pace

Now, what you really don't want to happen during rush hour, is to have the traffic lights breaking down and stop working! That would get everything even worse, and install total unproductive reactive unordered even more stressful chaos...