It’s easy enough to say “handle one thing at a time” when you feel overwhelmed. But life is funny. Sometimes, the things you need to handle don’t arrive in such a way that affords you that luxury.
On a long enough timeline, it’s inevitable that sometimes four time-sensitive things are going to get hurled you way at once, and you simply won’t be able to order them. You either handle them all at once, or you don’t handle at least some of them at all.
When that happens, I’m reminded of some great advice I once heard: If you find yourself juggling too many balls, some are going to fall. Your job isn’t to find a way to break yourself to catch them all – that’s impossible, and you’ll just end up dropping all of them. Instead, you need to decide which of the balls are made of rubber, and which are made of glass.
Some of those balls will break if you drop them. Not only will you lose that ball, but you’ll have glass to clean up, too. But some of those balls are made of rubber! If you drop them, they’ll bounce. They’ll roll away, maybe even under the couch. But they won’t break, and you can put them back up in the air tomorrow.
Catch the glass ones. Keep juggling.
The Opportunity Machine 