How to deal with the endless work of managing a life?

Don't let the tedium of work and life get you down. Here's a simple way to get through it all without getting drained and depleted.

As a new parent, I’ve experienced both the incredible joy and seemingly endless tedium that’s unavoidable when you’re working and raising a family simultaneously. 

All parents know the feeling of getting bogged down in the day-to-day tasks that are necessary for keeping the ship afloat. And honestly, it can really suck. But of course, it’s not just parents who experience this. We all go through times when work gets demanding, life “stuff” piles up, and we start to feel overextended and overwhelmed. 

I have been known to say yes to too many things and find myself in the position of being overextended. (Don’t we all?) I will think about the amount of things I have to do and feel heavy; and weighed down. This unpleasant feeling is how I know I’ve crossed the threshold from “busy” to “overextended.” 

It’s easy to let the thought of all the things we need to do—not just now but tomorrow, next week, or next year—pile up and become a burden that zaps our energy, joy, focus, and vitality. Perhaps you’re a CEO or a new parent and you’re feeling the weight of having to follow through on all your commitments for the next 25+ years! It’s simply too much for the brain to hold at any given time. 

I recently went to my mentor and coach Gay Hendricks to seek his guidance on how to approach the pileup of mundane work that’s unavoidable when you’re managing a business, raising a family, and trying to maintain some level of order in your household. His simple answer completely changed the game for me. 

Just do one thing at a time in a zen-like manner.

Yes, I know it’s simple—deceptively simple. But I can assure you this wisdom is profound. And for most of us, it’s the hack we desperately need. 

Let me explain.

If you imagine an hourglass, it has thousands of little pieces of sand, but the sand passes through the hourglass one piece at a time. I want you to become an hourglass. Yes, you may have dozens (or hundreds) of things to do, and you are going to do your best to be present and do one thing at a time, in the most natural, optimal order.

There is no need or utility to worry about how much is on your plate in the upcoming days. Tomorrow you will wake up and do a day’s worth of work. The day after that you will also wake up and do a day’s worth of work. And you will likely repeat that for most days for the rest of your career.

We also know that multitasking is terrible for us. The constant toggling and diffuse focus drain our brain power and keep us from accomplishing anything meaningful. We think it saves us time to do multiple things at once, but in reality, we end up losing energy and focus, making more mistakes, and compromising the quality and depth of our work. Not to mention feeling exhausted at the end of the day despite having accomplished little of meaning. 

Task-switching isn’t a whole lot better. Research has shown that we waste anywhere from 20-80% of our productive time each day switching back and forth between different tasks. Simply put: Trying to do multiple things at once or going back and forth kills our productivity. 

This way of working isn’t really working. And yet, it’s how most people spend their days and have trained themselves to try to get things done. 

With this in mind, doing just one thing at a time feels pretty radical. It forces you to stop wasting your energy thinking about all the things you have to do, not just today but in the future, and come back to what’s right here, needing to be done, in this very moment. 

So let’s try taking this as our constraint—we’re going to commit to only doing one thing at a time. We are going to play full-out with this constraint in mind. No matter how much you might have on your plate, the rule is that you wake up tomorrow and take it one thing at a time.

As I was recently reflecting on this, I realized that doing the dishes is not on my to-do list, yet it’s something that I do pretty much every day in my house. Now, I don’t look at the dishes and consider how many dishes I will wash between now and my death and get incredibly overwhelmed. I just take it one day, one sinkload, at a time. 

Zen and the Art of Dish-Washing

I try to be present, I try to do the dishes in the most Zen-like fashion possible. As they say in the Zen tradition, “chop wood, carry water.” This is the work of a life.

I like what Vietnamese Zen master Thich Naht Hahn says in his book The Miracle of Mindfulness: 

While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes.

… The fact that I am standing there and washing these bowls is a wondrous reality. I’m being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. There’s no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves.

For most people, doing the dishes is a daily focused task that we complete without trying to do a bunch of other things at the same time. We do the dishes knowing that they will pile up again tomorrow, and the next day, without getting overwhelmed by this fact. Can you look at your work and everything else on your plate—the emails to send, the appointments to schedule, the daily tasks to complete—as you look at the dishes? You just show up and do it every day and not worry about the total volume.

Being present means pulling yourself back to the present moment when you get stuck in a story about the future that will overwhelm you. It’s the simple act of coming back to presence, time and time again when you notice a pull to worry about the future.

A friend of mine who has a full work schedule and two kids will often look at his calendar on a busy day and say “Ah, looks like I get to be present for the whole day.” How might the quality of our day change if we really looked at it this way? 

In the immortal words of Jesus: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” 

Let’s do our best to not worry about tomorrow, tomorrow will occur tomorrow. Let’s be where we are, let’s be in this present moment, doing only what we’re doing. Let’s make the next right move.

Just take it one thing at a time, starting with doing the dishes each night.