I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed recently. The kind of overwhelm that sneaks up gradually, one reasonable “yes” at a time. Suddenly, I realize I haven’t had a free evening in three weeks and my project list is longer than ever. This is not how I pictured my “retirement”.
I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong, per se. Every individual commitment seemed reasonable at the time. The Capstone I run is important. The new project at UW has been an ongoing success. The kids have activities. I felt obligated to volunteer for boosters. I want to fill my time with coffee with friends.
Each yes made sense in isolation. Together, they have become too much. I bet you’ve been there too.
What I’ve learned, after years of accumulating obligations and then having to shed them, is that the solution isn’t to be more disciplined about saying no in the future. It’s to do a periodic audit of everything you’ve already said yes to and then make some harder decisions than you made the first time around.
The Thing About Yes
We say yes for a lot of reasons, and most of them are good ones. The opportunity is really interesting. We care about the person asking. Or, we’re afraid of missing out. It doesn’t seem like that much, and it’s so far into the future that there is nothing else going on.
The problem is that “yes” is cumulative. Each individual commitment adds up, like the individual straw pieces in a haystack. But your commitment to a project might actually mean a series of smaller commitments with no end dates. The things you say yes to lead to others and your load doesn’t add up linearly, sometimes it compounds. The tenth commitment doesn’t just cost the time it takes. It costs the mental overhead of tracking it, the context-switching to get back to it, the guilt of not having gotten to it yet, and the general cognitive weight of carrying it around.
Cal Newport has a useful way of framing this in Slow Productivity (a book I reviewed recently here). He describes what he calls “pseudo-productivity”: the use of visible busyness as a proxy for actual productive effort. We confuse a full calendar with meaningful work, and we keep saying yes because a packed schedule looks and feels like ambition.
It isn’t. Sometimes it’s just a packed schedule.
Find Your “Energy-Drainers” with a Calendar Audit
The most clarifying thing I know how to do when I’m feeling overwhelmed is to sit down with my actual calendar and look at it.
I like to go back a month or two and, for each item on the calendar, ask myself, “Did this thing bring me more energy or suck energy out of me?” I make two columns on a piece of paper and write down the things that were “energy-drainers” versus “energy-gainers”. (I made up that word, but it works here.)
After a while, you start to notice patterns. Some things contribute greatly to your happiness and some things are continually dragging you down. Those “energy-drainers” are the items to pay attention to first. If there is any way to jettison those from your life, you do that first.
After that, you can ask yourself a few more questions:
What recurring commitments no longer fit? Things that made sense six months ago sometimes don’t make sense now. A standing meeting that used to be useful. A commitment you took on during a lighter season that survived into a busier one. These don’t automatically leave just because your circumstances changed.
What did I say yes to out of obligation rather than genuine desire or necessity? These are the commitments worth examining most carefully. The ones where the honest answer to “why is this on my calendar?” is “because I didn’t want to disappoint someone” or “because I couldn’t think of a good reason to say no in the moment.” Often, these crop up while searching for “energy-drainers” too.
Where is the white space? A calendar with no unscheduled time is a calendar that has no room for anything to go wrong and no room for anything unexpected to go right. There’s no room for the kind of unstructured thinking that is often where the best ideas come from. A recently early-retired guest on a podcast I listened to said that they only schedule one meeting, coffee, or appointment a day. If that day already has something on it, they will not schedule another slot. This quickly became a new life goal of mine.
The audit doesn’t have to take long. A half an hour, tops. If you can get in the habit of doing these regularly, you might be able to catch the issues before they become overwhelm.
Newport’s Limits: A Framework Worth Borrowing
One of the most practically useful things in Slow Productivity is Newport’s framework for limiting commitments at three different levels. If the calendar audit is a useful tool for catching things after-the-fact, this framework is useful for not starting new things. Overwhelm almost always has roots at multiple levels simultaneously: the big strategic choices you’ve made, the mid-sized projects you’re running, and the daily granular tasks you have too. And you need to address all three.
Here’s how he structures it:
Limit your Missions. A mission is a big, professional focus. It’s something like “grow my coaching practice” or “finish my second book” or “build the CS Marketplace into a sustainable program.” Newport suggests keeping active missions to two or three at most. More than that, and your attention is spread so thin that nothing gets the sustained focus it actually requires.
Limit your Projects. A project is any work-related initiative that can’t be completed in a single session (i.e., it requires multiple steps over multiple days). Newport’s suggestion is to decide on a maximum number of concurrent projects and enforce it. When a new project wants to come in, something else has to move to a “holding tank” list before it can be picked up. Only a small number of projects (he suggests three) belong in your active list at any given time.
Limit your Daily Goals. Work on at most one project per day. Not one task, one project. This is more radical than it sounds, and it runs directly against the modern instinct to pack a daily to-do list with twelve things and feel virtuous about the ambition. Newport’s argument, and I find it persuasive, is that single-project days produce better work than multi-project days.
The specific numbers matter less than the principle: explicit limits, enforced in advance, prevent the gradual accumulation that turns a manageable workload into an overwhelming one. The limits are decided when you’re calm, not negotiated when you’re already drowning.
How to Say No to Things You Kind of Want to Do
This is the one I am so, so bad at. Saying no to things you clearly don’t want is easier (not easy, but easier). Saying no to things that are interesting, to people you really like, about opportunities you might actually enjoy, that’s where most people struggle. For example, UW-Madison would love for me to come work for them full-time. I could put together a co-op program and run an industry council. These are things I’d love to do, but they will crowd out all of the other amazing and important things I’d like to do with my life instead.
A few things that have helped me:
If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no. I’ve written about this before in my ruthless prioritization post. If something isn’t a clear, enthusiastic yes, it’s a no. Not a “maybe later,” not a “let me think about it.” It’s a no. The good opportunities crowd out the great ones that would be a “hell yes” if you had time. Make that time.
Buy time before you answer. “Let me check my calendar and get back to you” is not a stall, it’s a necessary pause to evaluate the real cost of the commitment when you’re not in the social pressure of the moment. Most requests look different after 24 hours than they did when they were first made.
Separate the opportunity from the timing. A lot of things that are good ideas are not good ideas right now. “I love this and I can’t take it on this semester” is a complete answer. It’s honest. It’s specific. And it often lands better than a vague decline because it respects the thing being offered even as you decline it.
Have a decision-making policy. One of the most useful suggestions in Slow Productivity and in one of my favorite books, Greg McKeown’s Essentialism, is to make your no decisions in advance rather than case by case. “I don’t take on new speaking engagements during the fall semester” is easier to honor than trying to evaluate each individual request on its merits when you’re already busy. The policy is the answer. You don’t have to relitigate it every time.
Remember what the yes actually costs. The real cost of any commitment is not just the time it takes. It’s everything else you won’t be able to do as well while you’re doing it. When I’m evaluating a new commitment, I should ask: what will I do less well, or not at all, if I say yes to this? (I wish I could say I’m really good at asking myself this question, but I’m not. My husband will back me up on this.) If you do ask yourself that, sometimes the answer is fine. Often it isn’t. So, that’s your answer.
The Permission to Shed
It is okay to un-commit to things. Do I feel bad about quitting my AI start-up four months into it? Actually, no, it was taking up way too much of my life and ruining my sleeping patterns. Good riddance. I do miss working with the people there, but often, once you’ve made the tough decision, you are so very happy you did. I’m so glad I’m not living the tech start-up life any more.
You don’t need to quit things recklessly. You should honor the obligations you’ve already made. But there is a version of “I took this on during a different season and it no longer fits” that is honest, respectful, and completely valid. Most people, when approached with candor, understand it. The ones who don’t probably had unreasonable expectations to begin with and aren’t the folks you want to spend your precious time with anyway.
The calendar audit is useful precisely because it surfaces commitments that are still on the books not because they’re still right for you, but because you never explicitly decided to end them. Sometimes ending them is the best thing you can do for yourself and for the commitment itself, which deserves someone who can give it their full attention.
Shedding is not failure. It’s recalibration. It’s how you make room for the things that actually belong in this particular season of your life.
Seasons change. What belonged in last year’s calendar may not belong in this one. The audit helps you notice the difference before the drift becomes a crisis.
If you want to go deeper on any of these ideas, my reviews of Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity and Greg McKeown’s Essentialism are good starting points. And if you’re feeling stuck in the overwhelm and want a thought partner for figuring out what belongs in your life and what doesn’t, coaching might be worth a conversation.
