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Many of us have intense periods in our lives when we’re pursuing a big goal or large project.
What we’re doing requires several months to a year of focus.
Feats like studying for a professional licensing exam, writing college applications, training for a triathlon, running a political campaign, opening a business, a DIY construction project, or a hobby that requires a license (like pilot training).
When undertaking these types of endeavors, it’s common to experience feeling overwhelmed. Strategies can help us manage this and not quit, be more successful, and, importantly, enjoy our experience of the process.
Some feelings of overwhelm are a natural consequence of doing hard things, but rather than just gritting your teeth and bearing any level of it, you can smartly navigate it.
These four strategies incorporate specific tactics, not just generic principles you’ve heard before.
1. Pacing and Periodization
When you’re pursuing a goal for months, it’s impossible to always maintain intense, unrelenting focus. Consider periodizing your plans.
For example, construct blocks of focus with some rest between them. Or, set up your plan so it builds to a peak of intense work, but then you have a lighter week to drop accumulated fatigue before building again to a new level of peak intensity. You can think of this as a series of building waves.
On the simplest level, your plan might be to take one full day off a week, but then have a longer break for a few consecutive days every four weeks.
Endurance sports give us many models for how to periodize work. For example, a marathon runner might have two marathon training blocks a year, but a third block that builds toward a 5K race for some variety. Or they might include a half-marathon race as part of a marathon training block, with reduced workload (tapering) before the half-marathon, and recovery afterward. Within their marathon block, they’re not building intensity linearly throughout the whole block.
Take models of periodization from other domains and apply them to your project.
2. Create More Milestones
You can maintain focus in two ways. First, through habits and grit. Second, through the naturally reinforcing properties of success.
Your goal may have one big endpoint, like running a marathon or passing an exam. Perhaps your project has several official checkpoints you need to hit along the way. For example, the major checkpoints of private pilot training are a multiple-choice exam, your first solo flight, and your final one-on-one test with an examiner. However, a student and their instructor can create many more checkpoints along the way to keep a sense of accomplishment rolling.
Creating milestones is a skill in itself. You can get very creative with it. Most people think of creating milestones only as breaking a bigger achievement into parts. You can also create milestones in many other ways, like gradually reducing error tolerances. For example, if your final exam requires you to stay within a benchmark of a certain percentage, you might first celebrate when you can consistently be no more than 20 percent, then 15 percent off from the benchmark.
It’s key that you actually celebrate the milestones you achieve. I don’t mean you have to bake yourself a cake, but you might have a poster you put big check marks on, or you reward yourself with a night off or a small treat.
3. Find Data
Data can help you manage overwhelming feelings in all sorts of ways. It can help you set realistic expectations. For example, you might look at data showing how long it typically takes people in different age groups to reach your goal. Or you might look at data on who quits or fails, when, and the factors involved. Then you could systematically target each of those weak points.
If a certain percentage of people quit between checkpoints A and B, what objective steps can you take to avoid that? Many people will default to fear and hope, not objective targets. For example, if there are certain hotspots in a process that people quit at, then you might build in extra, specific supports at exactly those times.
Or, if 25 percent of people fail a test, there might be five main buckets of reasons for that. Keep it simple and imagine 5 percent of people fail for each reason. How can you logically reduce your chances of being in each of those buckets, not through mindset, but through specific actions you do differently than those folks?
4. Social Support and Role Models
Role models and social support are extremely important. A little can go a long way. Many people are dismissive of social support as an objective way to improve outcomes.
When I did my clinical psychology training, near the final exam, the expectation was that we would ask senior psychologists to conduct mock oral exams with us. This served as important practice but also community building.
Like creating milestones, treat resourcefully accessing role models and social support as a specific skill. Be creative in exploring avenues others don’t.
Bridge the Moments When Success Feels Hardest or Farthest
Each time you pursue a big project, aim to approach it a little more smartly than how you’ve scaled tall mountains before. You probably don’t need generic advice like “celebrate small wins,” but you may not be doing the more strategic work of identifying the points in your journey where people are typically most vulnerable. As we talked about, once you do that, you can reinforce those potential cracks by adding your own milestones that help maintain your sense of progress. Or, when success feels the least attainable, consider how social support could help bridge that gap.
Use the strategies provided so that, to the greatest extent possible, you can enjoy whatever feat of endurance you’re undertaking. Minimize overwhelm that’s miserable or threatens your success, while acknowledging when the sustained effort required of your goal is part of what makes your project meaningful.
