You open your to-do list. Thirty-five tasks look back at you.
Before you begin, the feeling of overwhelm arrives, right on cue. Panic sets in, and the thoughts start racing. This is too much. How am I ever going to get through all this? This is impossible. I’m doomed. I need a mental health day (my third one this week).
The day already feels lost, and nothing has started.
Sometimes, nothing does. Not the big task. Not the small ones either. Overwhelm doesn’t slow you down on one item. It can stop you on all of them. It is a most efficient paralytic.
Sometimes, you do manage to grab some tasks to perform, usually small, inconsequential ones, just to feel competent and productive. So you can think Yes, I am moving ahead. But those tasks do not move the needle on the big, important projects you really want to accomplish. The day turns into busywork, leaving you drained and unsatisfied at its end. But at least you got your dry-cleaning picked up.
That feeling of overwhelm is how resistance shows up. Resistance is the internal “no” you bring to a task. Overwhelm is that “no” said to the whole list at once.
The morning ritual
I know that morning well, with thirty-five tasks and all. For years I met it, often before my tea.
And I had the setup. Color-coded calendar. Time blocks. Notion dashboard. They did their job, too. They organized that list beautifully. What they couldn’t reach was what happened in me when I looked at it.
So I’d reorganize. Rewrite. Re-plan. Anything but start. Some days I got almost nothing done because I was busy worrying about getting nothing done.
The irony wasn’t lost on me.
What the list actually was
Here is what I finally saw. The list wasn’t stopping me. The list was thirty-five tasks. That’s all it ever was.
What stopped me was what I laid on top of it. I can’t handle this many things. I’ll never get it all done. Each thought took a neutral fact and turned it into a verdict on me. The list never said “too many.” I did.
That’s how resistance gets attached. Not by the task. By us, through a thought, a feeling, a belief, or an opinion about the task.
Which makes overwhelm a relationship problem. Our relationship with the list has turned into a fight, and the list isn’t even a combatant. It’s the civilian casualty. It isn’t too long. It isn’t unfair. It just is. We keep the whole fight going, and the fight is what wears us out by ten in the morning with nothing crossed off.
Ending the fight
Overwhelmed, the move is to neutralize the resistance. Not overpower it. Not manage it. Make it irrelevant. In my book Work Without Working, that rests on three pillars, Acceptance, Alignment, and Action, and neutralizing lives in the first one.
The most common productivity advice to fix overwhelm doesn’t do this. A better system reorganizes the list. It can’t end the fight, because the fight was never with the list. Pushing through the feeling doesn’t end it either. Neither does soothing ourselves until we feel ready. These fixes keep us working on the resistance, every day.
Acceptance isn’t liking the list, or agreeing that thirty-five tasks is reasonable. It’s ending the fight with the fact that they exist.
What healthy looks like
When the fight ended, the list didn’t shrink. Thirty-five tasks were still thirty-five tasks. The difference was that there was no longer any reason not to start the first, most important one.
So I did. Then the next. I finished more in one afternoon than I had in the whole week before, spinning.
The tasks hadn’t changed. My relationship to them had.
That’s what a healthy relationship with a full list looks like. Not an empty list. Not a calm we had to manufacture first. Just nothing standing between us and the next task.
If overwhelm has been stopping you, nothing is wrong with you. You haven’t failed at productivity. You’ve been in a one-sided fight you just didn’t know could end.
Waving bye-bye to overwhelm,
Alessandra