One of the biggest struggles I have seen throughout my career, is people struggling with being able to manage themselves in a calm and collective way. You very often see people stressed with meeting fatigue, struggling with multiple contexts and projects, and they seemingly over commit and under deliver. Sound like someone you know? It’s a rather human struggle and In these days where everything and everyone is vying for your bandwidth.

This struggle if not tackled has deep impact on personal and team success and can cause tension and emotions to overcome the individual and lead to greater issues such as burn-out and a mental breakdown. That is why it's so important that we ourselves are able to manage our time and tasks effectively and enable the people around us to also tackle this challenge.

There are many many different styles and approaches in how you can self Organise, but the key is that you shouldn’t rely on a specific tool, but have your own approach which can be translated across many tools. A lot of people fall into the trap and think the tool provides the framework and approach, but your mastery doesn't depend on a tool. A master crafts person can create amazing things with the cheapest tools, it’s the knowledge and expertise which enables greatness.

As a Leader, I support and enable each member of my team to be very effective agents of their own time, tasks and priority. Enabling them with being able to manage themselves affectively and learn by doing enables the whole team to benefit from very efficient working modes and to overachieve.

Simple Starting Point
One of the simplest starting points for being better control of all the topics and tasks is to do a super simple exercise to enable you to get control back of the topics and time.

1. Get some Post-It notes
2. Write on each note the various topics and tasks you are dealing with (one item per note)
3. Cluster the post-in notes by themes
4. Write a Post-It note per theme
5. Put one of the theme Post-It notes to the left of you
6. Put another of the theme Post-It notes to the right of the one aboce
7. Ask yourself "Which of these two themes, has immediate impact when completed?"
8. Take the Post-It note which doesn't have the immediate impact and replace it with another theme Post-It
9. Repeat Step 7 until all themes have been gone through
10. Take the Theme which has the most immediate impact and place it to the side, next start at Step 5 and repeat the process until you have at least 3 Themed Notes to the side

These three tasks are the ones you should put your energy into and the rest will come up later. This will help you to really focus and achieve success. The general rule I personally try to stick to is, If a task can be done in less than 2 minutes, it should just be completed and not clog up your system (this is something I learned from the GTD methodology)