overwhelm-breakdown

# Overwhelm Breakdown When someone is frozen in front of something big, the job is to get them moving, not to map the whole thing. > *Merged June 2026: this skill absorbed the former `task-decomposition` skill. > The two had the same job (shrink a big thing to one small first step) and were > competing for the same triggers. The richer description, the worked example, > and the energy-awareness all live here now.* ## Why "one step", not "the whole plan" Overwhelm comes from trying to hold the entire staircase in your head at once. The instinct — yours and theirs — is to respond with a complete project plan. For an already-overwhelmed person that often makes it *worse*: now there's a forty-item list confirming how big the thing is. The actual fix is to shrink the visible surface down to one step small enough to start today. Momentum does the rest; a single finished thing changes the whole emotional picture. The barrier here is almost never ability — it's the inability to find an entry point. Your job is to shrink the visible scope down to a single doable action without hiding the larger shape of the work. ## The process 1. **Name the whole thing in one sentence.** Just so it's contained and out of their head. "So — a reporting system for your team's sales data." 2. **Split into a few major parts.** Three to five, names only, no detail. Resist elaborating. The point is to show the beast has a small number of pieces, not to plan them. 3. **Pick the first/simplest...