If you're overwhelmed, you're normal!

Many of us dislike not having time to explore all our ideas. For as long as each of us can remember, we’ve wanted to figure out how things work and whether we can make them work better. 
 
So here’s the problem: there are an infinite number of things to figure out but only 24 hours in a day. Having more ideas than we can follow is normal! Why then do so many of us feel bad about ideas we don't get around to? Think how awful the opposite would be: to finish our ‘to do’ list and have no ideas for anything else!

​We’re not just overwhelmed with ideas of course. It’s also emails, administration, peer reviewing, requests for favours, information, and even keeping up with the scientific literature. Many of us would like less of some of these to leave more time for research but that perfect world doesn't exist. For each of these areas of work, the same principle applies: 
 
Infinite demands meets finite capacity. So why does it feel so awful if we can't do it all?

​We’re not trained to handle infinity
Part of the problem is our formative years train us to meet finite demand. Indeed, we are judged on our ability to do it. School homework may have seemed a lot, but ultimately our workload was managed. At university our world opens up more but there are still a finite number of lectures and a specific set of exams. The end goal is clear and we know when we’ve reached it. 
 
When we enter the world of research this changes but it takes time for reality to dawn on us. In fact, if we work exceptionally hard and efficiently, as we’ve been trained to do, we put off that moment of reckoning. 
 
Frustration may be an appropriate emotion for not managing everything, but the guilt many of us feel is not. No-one has infinite capacity!
 
Wake-up moments
A key moment for me was the time I worked all weekend to clear an out-of-control email inbox following both a grant deadline and a conference. I surfaced only for meals, loo breaks and a little sleep. By 9am Monday I had cleared my inbox (it was a big backlog!). By lunchtime my inbox was bursting again with more replies than I could possibly read. 

​A midlife crisis can really drive the message home. As leadership expert Conor Neill puts it: “Until this point, we know that life is finite but we don’t believe it”. But somewhere between the ages of 35 and 55 for most of us, something makes it undeniable. It may be a parent’s death, kids leaving home, career difficulties, a serious illness or any combination.  
 
At this point, we have an important choice to make that Neill explains wonderfully in his YouTube video. Even for those lucky enough to be younger, it could spare some pain to make it earlier. 
 
What works for me
Businessman Michael Hyatt faced one of those health moments that led to his simple, but amazingly powerful book Free to Focus. “Achieve more by doing less”, it promises. This claim immediately aroused both my suspicion and my curiosity. Many people claim to have solutions that don’t work, but this is, after all, a world faced with an inexplicable ‘productivity paradox’, where the opposite seems to happen. We do need solutions. 
 
Its central message has undeniable logic: “It’s not about getting more things done; it’s about getting the right things done”. 
 
And what are the ‘right’ things? The bad news is I can’t tell you! Only you can decide this and it’s a classic Catch 22 problem: you will never figure it out while you feel overwhelmed. It has to be a calm moment, when you are thinking rationally, not emotionally. 
 
Options
That’s probably not what you want to hear! Another post in this series on ‘defining success’ may help. But however impossible we think it is to escape overwhelm and find a calm moment to think, it will happen one way or the other. We can choose to tell colleagues we need a break and use that space to find the mindset we need to identify our real priorities. Or we can wait until burnout or illness forces us to stop, depression makes us rest, and we re-organise our thoughts to start again. 
 
The reason the overwhelm trap is so hard to escape once we’re in it is that we struggle, in that emotional state, to figure out which delays are truly catastrophic and which just feel that way. For example, missing a grant deadline could have serious consequences, especially in early career when insecurity is a constant issue. Concern about disappointing a colleague may be less well founded but we struggle to see it. They may be more understanding and resourceful than we think, they may acquire new skills if we leave them to it, and there are other ways to strengthen working relationships than endless favours, but our emotions won’t let us see this.
 
Why does overwhelm feel so bad?
For many of us, overwhelm is one of the worst feelings in research life. But why, if it’s so normal?
 
We can usually trace it back to raising our game to meet what appears to be a short-term need. This is a normal, healthy and helpful response that brings us the energy to achieve things we usually would not imagine possible. This short-term stress response evolved long ago, probably helping our ancestors summon the energy to catch prey, nurse a sick child or build a dwelling. Today it helps us work late to finish an experiment, deliver a talk in a conference or write a thesis or grant. It undoubtedly enriches our research.
 
But there is a catch. When we power through, we don’t create more energy; we borrow it from tomorrow, or next week. Like spiralling credit card debt, it has to stop, whether we choose to control it or the bank makes us. As Steve Peters explains in A path through the jungle, our emotions are often helpful messages. This particular one warns us that we are living beyond our capacity and we must slow down to avoid the health consequences. It needs to feel bad. Speeding up, in the delusion that we can achieve infinity, is exactly the wrong thing to do!

Prevention is better than cure
Like credit card debt, it is much better to avoid overwhelm than to find a way out. Today, I schedule a day off after grant deadlines or conferences, where once, already tired, I would immediately switch attention to my overflowing ‘to do’ list. Knowing I will do this forces me to look well ahead in my calendar to avoid leaving crucial, time-sensitive tasks to a time when I need to rest.
 
I find Michael Hyatt’s ‘weekly preview’ system extremely helpful. Constantly looking at a long ‘to do’ list is depressing – it impairs us from thinking rationally and effectively. So before each week kicks off, I ask myself what three things would I choose from this long list if that was all I could do this week? These go on a separate list, along with seven reserve tasks, to be done if and when those three are finished. The master list then goes away until the following week. I know it has tasks I badly want to do, but I also know I selected these ten for good reason, and I could only do others at their expense. At the end of the week, any unfinished tasks go back into the master list to be reassessed, because priorities do change over time.
 
This method works for me. It, or some variation of it, may work for you or maybe not. But the key point is to choose your actions in a calm and rational moment, not under midweek pressure.
 
Accepting infinity and living with it
Stress is a normal, and useful biological response. It helps us in many ways but it did not evolve to tackle an impossible ‘to do’ list for weeks, months and years. 
 
Unless we are devoid of ideas and can say 'no' without conscience, we will never finish our to-do list. But by accepting that, we can at least make sure it does not finish us.