Never enough time

15/09/2025

Never enough time

Which of these 5 daily challenges are you feeling the most right now?

  • Not enough time
  • No clear priorities
  • Tough conversations
  • Struggling to fire up the team
  • Not enough energy?

I asked this question of 12 leaders after a workshop last week. Without exception, they gave one answer...

Too much to do; not enough time.

It's a universal challenge. One that smart people have been researching for decades. (Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index is worth a look, while Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Berkman is a delightful book on the topic.)

What the research has found is pretty consistent: most of us can split our days into three buckets:

  1. Focused work: the primary task we're here for.
  2. Meetings and emails: the collaborative stuff that enables us to do our primary task.
  3. Everything else: all the admin, breaks and interruptions that naturally come with working together.

Now, I’m not suggesting we torch all meetings, emails and breaks. (Though you might be tempted to trial it for a week…)

And I’m no productivity guru, despite having tried all the productivity hacks out there. The 5am habit. Pomodoro timers. AI-task allocation. Mindfulness meditation. Virtual co-working sessions. (Please don't click all those links!)

But here’s the frustratingly obvious truth that finally seems to have lodged itself in my psyche after burning out earlier this year:

Your tasks will always exceed your time.

Always. Always!

I told you it was obvious.

And yet, we forget this constantly. We keep chanting "do more with less" (with little question for whether we need "more") and it's chewing us up. The last time I checked, 1 in 4 of us are at a high risk of burning out.

So, how do most of us respond to this reality? We instinctively add more hours to the time bucket, like so:

But what difference does that make? You get another task done. And you're left with an infinite number of additional tasks.

(Also, tasks breed tasks. It's infuriating! You finish one... and doing so creates another. They're like rabbits - especially if you're known as somebody who gets things done.)

What can we do then?

Here’s what I understand in theory and am still learning to do in reality:

Productivity ain't about doing more stuff. (Any old chump with AI can do that.) It’s about doing more of the right stuff - and joyfully forgetting the rest.

Today a client call ended with my client Rangi saying: "Paul, this is the only call I've had this year where somebody has taken work off my plate. That was amazing!"

I did that simply by asking curious questions that challenged Rangi's perception of what really needed to be done.

What's the one thing that would make everything else better for you today? Start with that - and forget about the rest.

Paul