Your overwhelm isn't a time problem – it's a fear problem

I remember a colleague, let’s call her Sarah, who was checking her phone every minute during our 30-minute meeting, apologizing for being distracted, mentioning her endless to-do list. She was drowning, and she didn’t even know it.

Sounds familiar?

Here’s what I learned: overwhelm is not a time management problem. It’s a fear problem.

People like Sarah try to “fix” their overwhelm problem through better time-management and other “hacks” or techniques. But this is entirely missing the point. They’re just getting better at creating more overwhelm, faster.

The underlying problem is not about productivity or getting more things done in a shorter amount of time. The reality is about fear.

Fear of saying no. Fear of missing out. Fear of not being needed.

“Overwhelm” is a mask we wear. A signal to others that we are “important”, “needed”, or “victims of our own success”.

Overwhelm is just a symptom. The real problem is unclear priorities.

All of these to-dos, requests, and “lists of 27 priorities for the year” (a contradiction in itself) are just distractions. You’re human, not a computer. You can’t actually multitask – science has proven this repeatedly.

And that’s liberating.

It took me years to learn this, but once I realized that at any given point in time I can only do one thing, and one thing only, I felt massive relief!

Suddenly, life becomes much more simple. Ask a simple question:

What is the one thing I can do now that, if I did it well, would make everything else easier or better?

Not 27 “priorities”, not your to-do list, not the myriad of random requests others want you to do. Those can wait.

Just one thing.

The “one thing” concept isn’t new – Warren Buffett famously advised focusing on your top 5 goals and ignoring everything else, Gary Keller and Jay Papasan built an entire framework around it in The ONE Thing, and Cal Newport regularly writes about similar ideas. However, it’s the fear-versus-time-management reframe that changed everything for me.

Tomorrow morning, try this: before checking mail, or looking at your to-do list, ask yourself:

What is the one thing I can do now that, if I did it well, would make everything else easier or better?

Then do it first.