Tips for getting overwhelmed

Okay so, I love these kinds of colony sims, and it took me a while to get the how the whole thing works in Anno 1800 but I get it now and I have 182 hours into it. All that being said, I still get incredibly overwhelmed by the time I make it to the investor stage. Once all the regions start getting unlocked, and then the race to get all the islands before the NPCs....then having all these empty islands....I get super overwhelmed and just freeze. So I start a new game and then the same thing happens again.

Can I get some tips that might help with that overwhelming feeling when the game starts feeling too big?