I know a number of people who are regularly “overwhelmed” by their workload and/or the number of responsibilities that they feel are piled up on them like so many bricks.
My advice to folks who come to me claiming overwhelm is twofold. First, and most basically, make a list. The feeling of overwhelm is that your list of tasks is functionally infinite, and that no human (or at least no human who faces your particular limitations) could possibly cope with this much work. The mind can only hold so many things in consciousness at once — a surprisingly short list of things, as it turns out — so when you’re trying to keep everything in mind, by the time you get to item number seven or eight, you’ve forgotten about the earlier items and entered a recursive loop, which makes the inventory of tasks before you seem infinite. Make a list, prioritize it, and begin to execute the tasks in order of priority. Problem solved.
But that’s basic self-management. To be frank, if the overwhelmed person were capable of doing this, they wouldn’t be claiming overwhelm in the first place. The second consideration is deeper, and in my experience more likely to offend. It is, quite simply, that being “overwhelmed” is a defense and a crutch. It’s not unlike writer’s block. If you’re overwhelmed, it means you’re the hero, battling against outrageous odds, and no matter what the outcome of your work is, it edges on the miraculous that you got anything done at all. And of course, if you fail, well — is it any wonder? You were overwhelmed.
It is possible to have more work than it’s possible to complete in a limited period of time. Management can fail, and too much work relative to time constraints can end up on one person’s desk. The litmus test is this: if you offer the person who complains of being overwhelmed some help or resources to fix the situation, does she accept? I’ve noticed that among those who are regularly in self-described overwhelm most do not. It’s an almost perfect correspondence. Busy people are happy for some help; overwhelmed people either reject assistance outright or don’t make use of what’s on offer.
Why would an overwhelmed person refuse support? I doubt many are conscious of the benefits that telling the story of overwhelm provides, the shield against criticism, the accentuation of accomplishment; that would be too cynical for most people to stomach. But there’s also an ego stake involved. Yes, I’m overwhelmed and faced with an impossible variety of complex tasks — but only I can do this work.
This can take a variety of forms, but they all boil down to the idea that no one else can do what you can do, or that teaching someone to do it would merely add to your endless workload and any potential efficiency created would be washed away by the time wasted to achieve it. This is silly and can be disproved easily by experimentation. It’s rare that the individual contributor can’t be replicated unless he’s writing a novel or the like. (And you don’t typically hear a painter gripe that he’s simply overwhelmed by all the painting he has to do.)
So, it boils down to arrogance, which is counsel no one wants to hear. I’m not sure that it’s possible to intervene in this complex of ego, self-defense, and martyrdom — at least not effectively, or for long. The only effective intervention is internal. The overwhelm-ee needs to find a point of view from which she can observe just a sliver of the reality of this and ask “What if it’s not so?”