How to Get Things Done When You Have Too Much to Do

The fastest way to get things done when you are overwhelmed is to stop sorting and start subtracting. If you need to move in the next ten minutes, do this. Open one empty document and do a brain dump: every outstanding thing in your head, any order, no organising. Keep going until the page stops producing new items, which usually takes six to eight minutes. Then pick the one item you could physically start in the next two minutes, and say the first action out loud as a verb. Not "the Henderson contract" but "open the contract and read the termination clause". Do that one thing.

That gets you moving. It does not fix the problem, because being overwhelmed is not one problem. Three structurally different situations feel identical from the inside, and each needs a different fix. Most advice treats them as the same thing, which is why it so often fails to land.

Why you feel overwhelmed: three different problems that feel the same

Too many undecided inputs

The first is a capture problem. Your list has forty lines and twelve of them are not tasks at all. They are worries, half-decisions, things you need to ask someone, and raw information you filed in the wrong place. Nothing on the list is especially hard. You cannot start because every glance at it asks you to make twelve decisions before you reach anything actionable.

One task too large to begin

The second is a size problem. The list might only have six things on it. One of them is "redesign the onboarding flow" and it has been there for three weeks. The other five are fine. You are not overwhelmed by volume. You are stalled on one item with no identifiable first step, and the stall has spread outwards until the whole list feels contaminated. This is what people usually mean by task paralysis, and it responds to being broken down, not to being reprioritised.

A day that genuinely does not fit

The third is an arithmetic problem. Every item is a real task, every one has a clear first step, and there are nine hours of them in front of a day that has four hours of open time. No amount of prioritising changes this. Sorting a list that does not fit produces a sorted list that does not fit.

Here is how to tell them apart in about a minute. Count the lines on your list that you could start in the next two minutes without asking anyone anything. If that number is under a third of the list, you have an inputs problem. If it is high but one specific item keeps pulling your attention, you have a size problem. If the number is high, nothing is pulling at you, and you still feel behind, you have an arithmetic problem, and that is the one almost nobody writes about.

Why writing it down actually works

The ten-minute unblock at the top is not a folk ritual, and it is worth knowing why it works, because knowing makes you more likely to do it when you need it.

An unfinished intention keeps a claim on your attention, and the thing that settles it is not finishing the work, which is often impossible right now. It is deciding exactly when and where you will do it.

That effect is one of the better-evidenced findings in this area. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran's meta-analysis of implementation intentions, published in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology in 2006, pooled 94 independent tests from 63 reports and found that forming a specific when-where-how plan produced an average effect of d = 0.65 on whether people actually achieved the goal. That is a large effect for something that costs one sentence.

So the useful move is not the list. It is the sentence. "Sort out the invoices" stays noisy. "Thursday 9am, pull the three outstanding invoices and email them" goes quiet, because the decision has already been made.

This is why "just write it all down" helps more than it sounds like it should, and why writing it down and then leaving it unorganised helps much less. The capture gets the items out. The specific decision about each one is what stops them coming back.

The arithmetic nobody does

Almost every article on this subject tells you to prioritise, and then stops. Prioritising is sorting. Sorting does not change a total.

The question that matters is whether the work you have committed to today fits in the time you actually have today, and answering it takes two numbers.

The first is how much task time you have, which is not how many hours you are at your desk. Take your working hours, subtract meetings, and subtract a realistic amount for the things that are not tasks: email, messages, interruptions, the ten minutes between one thing and the next. For most people the honest figure is dramatically lower than the figure on the calendar. An eight-hour day with two hours of meetings is not six hours of task time. It is more like three and a half.

The second is how long your list will take, which requires you to put a number on each item. This is the step people skip, and it is the step that makes the rest work.

A warning about those numbers, because it changes how you should use them. In 1994 Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross published a set of studies on what they named the planning fallacy in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In the best-known experiment, 37 psychology students estimated when they would finish their honours theses. Their average best-guess estimate was 33.9 days. They took 55.5 days. Only about 30 per cent finished by the date they had predicted. The most useful part came next. The researchers also asked for a worst-case estimate. The average worst case was 48.6 days, still about a week short of what actually happened.

So your estimates will be low, and asking yourself to be pessimistic does not fix it. That does not make estimating useless. It means an estimate is a comparison tool rather than a prophecy. A task you guessed at 30 minutes and one you guessed at three hours are genuinely different sizes, and that difference is what you need. The absolute totals will drift, and the ordering will not.

A worked example

Here is a real-shaped Tuesday. Nine hours at a desk, three hours of meetings, so six hours nominally free. Subtract email, messages and the gaps between things, and call it 3 hours and 10 minutes of actual task time. That number is the whole point: everything below is measured against it.

The list, with an honest guess beside each item:

That is 510 minutes against 190 available. The list is two and a half times too big, and no ordering of those nine items changes that.

Now subtract, and notice that the rule is not "do the most important first". It is "decide what is not happening today, deliberately, instead of discovering it at 6pm".

The onboarding redesign comes off immediately. At four hours it could not fit today even if nothing else existed. It is also the second kind of overwhelm wearing a task's clothing: a project, not a task. Its real first action is something like "spend 30 minutes listing what the current flow does". That 30-minute slice can be a task. The four-hour version never can.

The competitor analysis comes off because nothing depends on it this week. The expenses come off because the deadline is the end of the month.

What is left: the client reply (15), the Q4 draft (90), the pull requests (40), the signup link (20), the venue (25). That is 190 minutes against 190 available, which is exactly full, which means it is actually slightly over, because the estimates are low. So the venue booking goes too, and the day is 165 minutes of planned work against 190 available.

Five things, with 25 minutes of slack. That is a day you can finish. The previous version was nine things and a feeling.

Two details in that subtraction are worth pulling out. The signup link stayed despite being small and unglamorous. A broken signup link costs money every hour it stays broken. Urgency should come from what happens if you delay, not from who asked most recently, which is the honest answer to how to prioritize when everything is urgent. And the pull requests stayed above the Q4 summary in sequence, because two other people cannot move until they are reviewed. A boring 40-minute task that unblocks two people beats an important 90-minute task that unblocks nobody, and almost no prioritisation framework will tell you that, because unblocking others fits in none of their quadrants.

Doing this without the spreadsheet

The arithmetic above is the method, and you can run it on paper. Todonado exists because doing it by hand every morning is the kind of admin that gets abandoned in week two, usually on the day you need it most.

So the sum is the product. Every task can carry an effort estimate in minutes. The Today view adds those minutes up, compares the total against the capacity you set, and tells you that you are over before the day starts rather than after it has failed. Meetings imported from your calendar come out of the same total, so a day with three hours of meetings simply shows three fewer hours of task capacity.

Unfinished work is handled rather than silently repeated. Yesterday's leftovers come back as a decision, not as a quiet reappearance. That matters, because the usual way a list becomes unmanageable is that it accumulates while nobody ever chooses.

Two honest limits. Todonado will not estimate for you. It can tell you that 510 minutes do not fit into 190, which is the part people get wrong, but somebody still has to put a number on each task. That number will be optimistic, for the reasons above.

And a capacity meter is a mirror, not a brake. It will tell you the day does not fit. It will not stop you committing to it anyway, and plenty of people do.

If you only remember one thing

Being overwhelmed at work usually gets treated as a feeling to be managed. Most of the time it is a measurement nobody has taken.

Write everything down. Put a number on each item. Add the numbers up and compare them against the hours you actually have. Then decide what is not happening today, while you still have the whole day left to spend.

The sorting advice you have read elsewhere is not wrong, it is just incomplete: it arranges the list without ever checking the total.

Three places to go from here, depending on which of the three overwhelms you found. If it was too many undecided inputs, turning a brain dump into an action plan is the sort that the ten-minute version at the top only starts. If the list itself has grown past the point of usefulness, organizing a huge to-do list is a timed triage that keeps your commitments instead of archiving them. And if the arithmetic was the problem, planning a realistic day is the same subtraction done every morning rather than only on the bad days.