Life Hack Mindmapped— How to Stop Feeling Overwhelmed and Accomplish Your Goals?

As a full-time working parent, managing home, my child’s virtual educational needs, and pursuing my own part-time education can feel extremely overwhelming. The lovely labor day long weekend is about to end. The new school year starts tomorrow. My car’s lease is ending this month. I have pending bills to pay off, large projects at work to manage and I want to make sure they are executed in time and create the expected impact. My six-year old’s virtual school starts tomorrow, and it is expected that this little child who does not have an attention span of more than 5 minutes would get through all of his classes, just as he would at school. To top it off, my part-time online school coursework at Harvard Extension School will require me to do a lot of readings, assignments, and papers this semester. Phew! It already sounds overwhelming, doesn’t it?

I am a BIG fan of reading online articles on productivity hacks, but rarely do I remember anything afterward. Can you relate?

The WWW is flooded with information on various blogs and websites that is largely consumed but only to be forgotten and rarely applied. I read an article over the weekend on lifehack.org about how to stop feeling overwhelmed and accomplishing your goals. This time I decided, I will not let my three minutes of reading time go to trash. I’d rather spend another 15 minutes to chart it out, so that going forwards if I end up feeling like I have 100 million things to do but procrastinate because I do not know where to start, I can actually go back to this visualization and remember what I read and apply it to my life on a recurring basis.

Have you heard about mind-mapping? No? Let me summarize it in one sentence for you. Mind-mapping is a technique to capture thinking that goes on inside your head into a visual diagrammatic format. You can use it to think, collect knowledge, create, organize, and most importantly to recollect and remember ideas and concepts. There are plenty of ways to sketch your ideas, either using a notebook and pen or a mind-mapping tool such as FreeMind.

The following visual is a roughly sketched mind-map representing my learnings from this lifehack article using my very own Rocketbook that I love to use on a daily basis:

Here is a digital and a more concise version of the above mind-map I created using free software called FreeMind:

I hope you all enjoyed this visual read and are able to apply this cool productivity hack to your benefit, and take pleasure in accomplishing all of your goals this year during these hard trying COVID times.