Having Too Much to Do Is Not a Problem of Scheduling

Introduction: The Better You Get at Organising, the More Flows In

First thing in the morning you rebuild the day’s plan. You set priorities. You swap the tools. You log how the hours go and trim the waste. And still the list does not shrink. If anything, the better you get at organising, the faster new work flows into the space you cleared.

Methods for organising a heavy workload and setting priorities are already well documented. What this article takes up sits one step earlier. When the tasks do not go down, is that a problem of your scheduling — or the working of something else, driving you from the inside?

Here is the conclusion first. It is not scheduling. When the outside boss disappeared at independence, the boss’s role did not vanish; it was relocated inside you. And this inner boss never clocks off.

“Being Your Own Boss” Is Not the Disappearance of the Boss

The stock line for speaking about the freedom of independence is “you become your own boss.” Nobody gives you orders any more. You decide how you work. The phrase sounds like a powerful statement of the autonomy independence brings.

But pause and take it apart. “Being your own boss” does not describe a state in which the boss is gone. It describes a state in which you take on that boss’s role yourself. The boss who gave orders is gone. But the function of giving orders did not disappear; it was relocated inside you. Supervision, evaluation, driving — what the outside boss used to do, you now do to yourself.

Here lies the sweetness of the story. What is actually happening is not the disappearance of the boss but the internalisation of the boss. And the situation becomes harder to escape. With an outside boss you could steal a rest out of sight. From the inner boss there is no hiding. You are supervising yourself, so there is no watchful eye to slip past.

Demands That Lose Their Limits Ratchet Up Without End

Why does a person become their own harshest boss?

An outside boss’s demands had limits. There were employment rules, a ceiling on hours, a need to consider the reaction of subordinates, and the boss had a boss too. The demands stayed within a certain frame, held there by numerous constraints. The inner boss has not one of these. No employment rules, no ceiling, no other party to consider. So the inner boss’s demands ratchet up without end. You should be able to do more. It is still not enough — and there is no outside force anywhere to stop it.

Something else removes the escape route. With an outside boss, when a demand felt unreasonable you could doubt them inwardly and take some distance. That margin of reservation protected you. Once the boss is yourself, that margin disappears. The one demanding and the one complying are the same person, so there is nobody left to doubt.

The contemporary thinker Byung-Chul Han analyses this phenomenon under the term “self-exploitation” [Han, 2015]: where people were once squeezed by others through outside force, now they squeeze themselves, willingly. Because the squeezer and the squeezed live inside the same single person, there is nowhere to escape to.

When the Word “Freedom” Is Stuck onto Permanent Work

Go independent and the boundary separating labour from life disappears. No start time, no finish time, no weekdays and weekends; work flows into every gap in life. This disappearance of the boundary is often spoken of approvingly — work and life have become one, the ideal way of working.

But what actually happens when the boundary goes is not two domains melting together as equals. It is the labour side encroaching, one-sidedly, on the side of life. Work bleeds into hours of rest; rest almost never bleeds into hours of work.

Here is where language rearranges reality. The same reality of working until midnight becomes unfree if it is named “being forced,” and free if it is named “freely chosen.” Reality itself has not changed by one second, and a single word stuck onto it reverses the meaning.

And once the word “freedom” has been stuck on, no occasion to review that way of working arises from within. People try to change a state only when they feel unfree in it. As long as permanent work is called freedom, it is held not as something to be changed but as a value to be protected and deepened.

▸ Where that voice saying “push yourself harder” comes from is taken up in what are you handing over when you seek a role model?.

Doing What You Love Does Not Necessarily Mean Being Free

Here comes an obvious objection. “Yes, I work long hours. But it is something I love. I am doing what I love — surely that is freedom?”

That felt sense is genuine. There is no intention of doubting it. But are “loving it” and “being free” the same thing?

One of the things research in self-determination theory made clear is that “pleasant or not” and “autonomous or not” sit on different axes [Deci & Ryan, 1985]. Autonomy here means that the activity is coherent with your own deeper goals. Pleasantness is the agreeableness of the activity itself; autonomy is the connection between the activity and your core. In principle they are different things.

The work in front of you is enjoyable. Yet you keep taking it on without rest, chased by the market’s demand — and at that point, however pleasant the activity, the way of working does not issue from your own goals. Pleasantness is not evidence of autonomy. If anything, loving an activity often works to make subordination to it comfortably acceptable. Because you love it, you take on endlessly. Because you love it, resting feels like a waste.

Conclusion: Move the Question from Volume to Coherence

Let me be clear here. Wanting to raise your level, wanting to do good work — these are not, in the slightest, a problem. What is cut is not the action but the structure in which demands that have lost their outside constraints ratchet up without end, and the language that renames it “freedom.” A healthy will to improve and a state of driving yourself without limit look very similar from outside. The difference is whether any margin is left for treating yourself with care.

That the tasks do not go down is not because you are bad at organising. So the exit does not lie past a better organising method.

What is needed is to swap the question. Not “how do I get through more?” but “is this way of working coherent with my own deeper goals?” And sustaining that coherence requires reworking not only your frame of mind but the structure of the work itself. The whole picture is gathered in why starting a business does not free you from masters.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press
• Han, B.-C. The Burnout Society (2015) Stanford University Press (original Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, 2010)