Hello and welcome to best laid plans. This is your host, Sarah Hart Unger, and this is the podcast where we talk to all things planning and planning adjacent.

I have a bit more of an upbeat episode for you today. I came to you last week, not in the world's

best place, but today I am here with Q&A, but also just a little bit of positive follow-up.

All right. So where we left off last week, I was talking about feeling very overwhelmed,

very in the weeds, and kind of suggesting some

ways that I was hoping to dig myself out. And I am here to tell you, just one week later,

sitting here to record the episode actually less than one week later, because I'm recording

this on a Monday, which is the day I should be recording it, because those are the days I have

free. I'm not in the clinic and

it's during the daytime. So already kind of winning. But anyway, I'm here now in a much better

place. And there are two things of all the ideas that I shared in last week's episode that

have been helpful. So I figured I might as well share the things that helped me the most.

The first is that I caught up

on all my inboxes. And I know this is like, okay, yeah, if you have extra time to clear out your

inboxes, it's not a surprise. You feel better. But I feel like, honestly, the loose ends have kind of

taken an outsized role in my stress, meaning the amount of stuff in there

wasn't that bad, but I kept thinking and ruminating and circling kind of because my brain

sensed all of the open loops that were in there. And I felt like there were enough in there

that I just didn't have a clear sense as to whether I would miss

something truly important. And that became really stressful. So being able to carve out time to

clear these out has been not just great because I've been able to get current, but I've sort of

lost that meta rumination and stress around feeling like I didn't know what's going on. And I just

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