The Only Solution to “Too Much to Do and Not Enough Time”

Have you ever met anyone who thought they had “enough” money? As in, they didn't think they needed to go in search of more? I haven't. Doesn't matter if you make $75,000 a year or $75 million, no matter how much you have, you figure you could always use more.

Same is true for our time. I don't know about you, but I've never met anyone who said, “You know, I think I have plenty of time for all the things I want to do in life. I'm content. This is enough.”

Time scarcity weighs even heavier on us than financial scarcity since, unlike money, we literally can't make any more of it. And we don't even know exactly how much of it we have—double the scarcity. We could live five more minutes, five more years, or decades more. No one can be sure, and we can't plan with any real certainty about the number of days we'll be given.

This is all made worse by the reality that our “eyes are bigger than our stomachs,” as my grandfather used to tell me, meaning that we have far more that we want to do—or feel we need to do—than hours in the day or years left in our lives.

The Seductive Belief

Many of us have the equivalent of at least two full-time jobs between work and home, not to mention our dreams or side hustles. I'm convinced this will always be true, more or less. Our ambitions and responsibilities will always outstrip our resources.

This is the great existential question we wrestle with as humans: our lives and our bodies are finite but our imaginations are not. “He has,” as the writer of Ecclesiastes says, “set eternity in the human heart.”

Deep down, we know we are made for so much more than we'll ever have time, energy, or financial resources to realize, not this side of eternity anyway. And, yet, conventional wisdom for the “I have too much to do and not enough time” problem is to find some way to fit it all in by working smarter or faster.

We think that if we are disciplined or clever enough, we can make it all fit. So we get the books, the apps, the tools thinking that the get-it-all-done breakthrough is right around the corner.

This belief is particularly seductive because, if it's true, we don't have to reckon with our finitude or make the hard decisions about what to cut in light of the real constraints of our humanity—like the 24-hour day or our body's need for rest. We can continue under the illusion that “getting it all done” is possible.

But if we're honest with ourselves, we know that's not true.

Accepting Our Limitations

Just think for a second about how often you've left the office or closed your laptop for the day and thought, “Wow! I did it! I finally got it all done.” Speaking for myself, the answer would be “almost never.” I am forced to leave things undone every single day, often important things. You?

So, if it's true that the demands of our lives will always overflow the banks of available time and energy, what are we to do?

First, I think we must say out loud to ourselves that getting it all done is not on the table. No human on the planet is going to squeeze more time out of time. We get what we get and we must submit to the very real, human, often-biological constraints of our lives. We only have so much capacity, and fighting that reality will hurt our bodies, our most treasured relationships, and the actual potential we have for meaning and contribution in our lives.

Anything else is a fool's errand, and we have lived too long to be fools.

My guess is, like most people, you've already written a lot of “checks” in your life for being overcapacity with your own exhaustion, health issues, stress levels, and relationship strain, not to mention, paradoxically, knowing you probably could have accomplished more, or at least more that mattered, if you were more narrowly focused.

What we need is a life that feels sustainable, and that is a life that exists comfortably within reasonable human constraints rather than exceeding them all the time.

So, Step 1 is to accept our limitations. Next, though, we must commit to finding a better way to address the problem of time scarcity than the old productivity solutions of “more discipline and more efficiency.”

Choosing Wisely

You can't white-knuckle your way out of this problem and you can't outrun it. You have to deal head-on with “too much,” just like the hoarder can't solve a hoarding problem by buying another shelving unit.

This is, after all, a volume problem masquerading as a productivity problem. So, how will we deal with the volume? Well, not to be too blunt, the only solution to “too much” is “less.”

Now, this of course, introduces a whole other problem. How on earth are you supposed to choose what goes into that too-small container for all the stuff of your life? This is where the journey gets interesting.

There's no escaping reality. But the next step is less obvious—or at least less clear how to execute—especially because at the mere mention of “less” fear pops up and says, “if I do less, it won't be enough!” In our minds, all equals enough. We can't imagine a world where that equation isn't the only way.

But the logical fallacy in that argument is assuming all units of activity are the same. They're not.

Step 2 is to choose wisely what goes into your “container.”

Sure, you say, “but how can I do that when none of it feels optional and all of it feels mission-critical.” I know! I get it. I often feel the same way myself. But, remember, you've already reconciled yourself to accepting your limitations because it's not only futile to do anything else, but trying will bury you, sometimes literally, so we have to find a way here.

We have to answer the question poet Mary Oliver asked: “What will you do with your one precious life?”

Investing Time

The fear is that doing less means dropping balls or earning less, both of which are untenable to most people—especially since dropping balls usually leads to earning less!

So when I say choose wisely, I mean, we have to choose what to fill our days with such that those things simultaneously are few enough to fit within the limitations of a reasonable workday and are “enough.” Enough means they produce the results that we are accountable for and enough to enable us to realize our earning potential so we can fund our lives.

Enough. Not all. The math works on doing less because the less we choose produces more. The mental breakthrough here is to start thinking about spending your time like you think about investing your money.

Not all investments have the same return. This is true with money and it is just as true with your time.

The key is to think about our time like we think about our money. From this perspective, our to-do lists and our schedules are really a list of possible investments that we either make or don't make. We put time into something, we get a certain kind of result out. And that result depends on the kind of investment we made.

Building a Sustainable Life

Our job is to trade our time for the best possible outcomes, both at work and at home. If we do that thoughtfully and with intention it becomes possible to get “enough” in fewer hours, because those hours are delivering a big result. That's how we build a sustainable life where we can actually win at work and flourish in life. Trying to get it all done will never get you there.

As I say all the time to our team, it's not magic math; it's just smart math.

Next week, I'm going to share with you the thinking tool I use to determine what constitutes a smart investment with my time. It's a simple, three-question model that makes it incredibly straightforward to know—with all this in mind—what should make it on your to-do list and what shouldn't.

What is it currently costing you to try to get it all done?

AI Disclosure: This newsletter was written by a human—me—for a human—you! I sometimes use AI for research, to critique my writing, or to proofread before I publish. But the words I choose, the sentences I write, and the ideas I share come from my brain and out through my fingertips onto the keyboard before they find their way to your inbox. If that ever changes, I'll tell you. Thanks for reading, and thanks for being a human.