Adm. McRaven explains at a University of Texas, Austin commencement speech:
If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another.
By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.
I know it sounds silly, making the bed is one way I ward off feeling overwhelmed by all the many thing to be done from season to season, day to day. Mom always taught us to make the bed and there was no option...we had to make it.
Then when I got out on my own, I continued the practice...I found that, even if I had let my room get pretty messy, a neatly made bed in the middle of all that chaos still gave the room a gloss of respectability. It automatically made the room look cleaner.
Over the years I grew to LOVE sliding into smooth, cool sheets at the end of a hard day, so that little pleasure was something I prepared for each morning.
Nowadays I hurt a lot, so getting anything done in a day is wunderbar to me and some days the made bed is all I seem to accomplish...but that's at least one thing. If I didn't get one other thing done all day, I got that one thing done and could reap the rewards of it at the end of the day.
Like the quote above, I've found getting that one thing done first thing in the morning, most often leads to other one things until the day has several one things piled up that got done. On the really good days, I get the chance to mark big things off my list...and that's another way I keep from feeling overwhelmed~lists.
Daily and seasonal lists can help you stay focused. I'm a hopper...my attention span is that of a gnat, so lists help me regain focus when I've got several projects started and none of them getting finished. I still seem to have many irons in the fire at once around here, but the lists do tend to keep us focused on specific goals so that we actually DO get things done...eventually.
Sometimes, I even finish one! 
