What do you do when you have too much to do?
One possibility is to work harder. If there’s too much to do, then do more.
The problem I have found with that approach is that doing more often generates more to do. When you deliver more at work, people trust you more, and they ask you to do more; in other words, the reward for good work is more work. If your only strategy is to do more when you have more to do, then you will eventually get overwhelmed and burn out (or at least that’s what happened to me).
Another possibility is to update expectations. If you have too much to do, that means you have more work than your current capacity. Working harder is temporarily increasing your capacity. But it can also be helpful to look at what work you are accepting as yours to do. What if you focused your efforts on the most impactful work, and let the rest go?
I haven’t been getting to all the work that I’ve assigned myself recently, and then I start to beat myself up for not working harder. But that self-criticism doesn’t actually help me get more done; it just makes me want to give up and check out by playing a game or watching a video.
Instead, I’m learning to pick one thing and start working on that until it’s done. I can pick the most important thing, or an easy thing to get started, or the most urgent thing, but do one thing. And then once I do one thing, I start another because finishing one thing builds the confidence that I can do the next.
The myth of having too much to do is that it misses the fact that we can only do one thing at a time. We can’t do ten things at once.
How fast we can do things can fluctuate on a day to day level depending on our physical and mental healthy, our level of distraction, other priorities overriding our initial plan, etc. Recognizing those changes in capacity requires a certain level of self-acceptance, or even grace; pushing harder when we are exhausted does not often lead to good results. Sometimes we can only get one thing done even if we had planned to do ten.
When you recognize you can only do one thing at a time, then you become more thoughtful about what you will choose to do next.
What’s the one thing you want to do today that will make you feel like you had a good or productive day? Start on that first (as I did by writing this post).