The mental load still runs even when you’re not working. Every unfinished commitment occupies a bit of our mind…ten things on the list means ten small thoughts pulling at you simultaneously, which is why a packed day feels tiring before it even starts.
No slack in your day means no room for the inevitable….an urgent and new priority. What then, can we do?
When you’re always too busy, the problem usually isn’t your personal system, it’s that more is arriving than you can leave. Better organisation just makes the queue tidier. So the first move is reducing intake, not optimising output, but this may need a conversation, with your Line Manager.
Find out where the time actually goes. For one week, write down what you worked on in approximate half-hour blocks. Nearly everyone is surprised, and usually by how much goes to reactive work, meetings, and small requests that felt like they took minutes, but as a total, adds up.
Sort the list by consequence, not urgency. For each recurring commitment, ask what would genuinely happen if you did it badly, late, or not at all. A surprising amount has no real answer. The things that do matter tend to be few, and they’re usually not the noisy ones, as these are part of the bigger picture.
Chronic overload normally ends one of two ways…you choose what to leave or exhaustion chooses for you. If work is assigned to you, take the list to whoever assigns it and ask them to rank it , i.e. “I can do A and B well by Friday, or all four roughly…which do you want?” That reframes it as their prioritisation decision instead of your capacity failure, which is both more accurate and easier for them to act on. Not everything needs to be precision!
Buy back some slack…
- Default to “let me check what that displaces” instead of simply saying “yes”.
- Sort email, messages, admin, etc. into two fixed windows rather than letting it overtake the day.
- Protect one uninterrupted block a day for the work that actually matters, and treat it as immovable.
- Lower the standard expected and purposely on things where nobody can tell the difference.
- Cancel or shorten a recurring meeting and see if anyone notices.
With a real quality look, you should get the following results…
- Better quality on the work that matters, instead of restarting your thinking after every interruption.
- Honest capacity awareness…once the day is laid out, you can see that which priorities don’t fit, which makes saying no a factual matter rather than an awkward one.
- Less friction with other people, more availability means fewer cancelled meetings, and less renegotiating.
Georgia Nott
