Already Battered

Five weeks into the new year and I'm done. The small break I had over Christmas has completely evaporated, replaced by a wall of work that feels deliberately designed to stop me from getting anywhere. I thought the pace might ease off a bit after the holidays. If anything, it has increased.

I'm holding two ideas in my head right now that are pulling in opposite directions, and I can't resolve them. The first is something I picked up from Oliver Burkeman and have written about before: there will always be more work. The task list never ends. The treadmill keeps moving. Accept it, do what you can, and stop pretending you'll reach some mythical clear point where everything is finished. I believe this. I've internalised it. It genuinely helped me for a long time.

The second is the reality of my actual situation right now, which is that so many projects are relying on me specifically that I can't just shrug and say "it'll get done when it gets done." People are waiting. Deadlines are real. The work isn't abstract, it's tied to outcomes that matter to people other than me, and that changes the equation completely.

Burkeman's philosophy works beautifully when you have some control over your list. When you can look at it, accept its infinite nature, and choose what to focus on. It falls apart when the list isn't yours to manage. When things are piled on externally and every single one of them is someone else's priority, the zen acceptance of "there will always be more" just becomes a posh way of saying "you're screwed."

This is the part that the productivity books never talk about. I've ranted about this before and nothing has changed. Most of them are written by people who set their own schedules, who can put their phone on do not disturb until lunchtime and meditate their way through the morning. My life doesn't work like that. I have a team, I have commitments, I have things that break at inconvenient times, and I have a brain that won't let me rest even when I do get a spare moment.

The pace right now feels personal. I know it isn't, rationally. No one is sitting in a room somewhere plotting my failure, that I know of, but when every completed task spawns three more and the breaks between sprints keep getting shorter, it starts to feel like the system is rigged against anyone who actually wants to do good work. You can't think properly when you're constantly reacting. You can't plan when every hour is already accounted for. You just keep your head down and hope that at some point things slow down long enough to breathe.

I'm burnt out five weeks in. That's not a great position to be in with the rest of the year stretching ahead. The answer, I think, is the same boring one it always is. Do the next thing. Then the next one. Stop looking at the full list. Stop pretending there's a system or a book or a framework that will fix the fundamental problem of having too much to do and not enough hours.

There will always be more work. I just wish there was a bit less of it right now.