If you’re like most professionals these days, your to-do list is longer than your actual day. When the volume of work exceeds your available time and energy, it’s easy to spiral into frustration or guilt.

But here’s the truth: an overwhelming workload isn’t necessarily a personal shortcoming. Often, it’s simply a logistical mismatch that requires deliberate recalibration.

Having trained professionals across industries for more than 15 years, I’ve discovered that there are only three real options when you’re overwhelmed. Everything else is a distraction or a delay.

Option 1: Reduce the Workload

This is the most obvious (and usually the most resisted) option. You can reduce your workload, but it requires conversations that most people want to avoid. You might need to renegotiate deadlines, reallocate responsibilities, delegate more intentionally, or leverage technology more effectively.

Resistance usually comes from a well-meaning place. You want to be seen as a reliable, capable, team player. But being overwhelmed doesn’t serve your team, your goals, or your personal wellbeing. You are a human being, with normal, natural human limitations of time and energy.

If your plate is overfull, ask: Who else can contribute here? What are more reasonable expectations I can advocate for? What tools or systems could help reduce my manual busy work?

Option 2: Increase Efficiency

Sometimes the workload is just unchangeable, at least in the short term. When that’s the case, the next step is to get smarter about how you tackle it. Instead of working longer hours, work more intentionally.

Start with prioritization. Not everything on your list holds equal weight. Then look for where you can streamline: Are there recurring tasks that can be batched? Meetings that can be emails? Emails that can ignored or automatically filed? Reports that can be templatized? Processes that can be improved?

Audit your time honestly and figure out where you’re wasting time and do everything in your power to reduce it. Efficiency is a skill you can build but (like all learning) it first requires self-awareness.

Option 3: Shift Your Mindset

The third, often overlooked, option is to change your relationship with the work itself. Sometimes what overwhelms us isn’t the work itself, but the expectations we’ve layered onto it.

You’re not the only one feeling the pressures of “too much to do and not enough time.” This is the state of the modern workplace.

Accept that you’re not going to get everything done TODAY. That’s not defeatism; that’s reality. And more importantly, it’s not the point. The goal is not to finish everything right now; it’s to understand what matters most in this moment and focus your energy there.

I’ll share a useful metaphor I first heard from Joan Burge of Office Dynamics. Picture yourself juggling. Some of the balls are rubber, some are glass. The rubber ones will bounce if dropped. The glass ones won’t. The work you are juggling is the same.

The skill lies in knowing the difference between the tasks that are made of glass and can’t be dropped, versus the ones made of rubber that will be just fine if you set them aside for a while.

That mindset shift doesn’t lower the volume of work, but it can dramatically change how you experience it. It supports self-compassion and a renewed sense of agency. You are not a victim. You are an active participant in defining when and how work gets done.

And here’s the best news of all: You don’t have to figure all this out on your own. If you want support applying any (or all) of these strategies in a way that fits your role, goals, and work style, consider joining the Time Management Mastery Learning Lab. You’ll learn a proven 4-part framework for managing high-volume workloads with greater control and clarity.

Let this be the moment you stop managing the chaos and start reshaping it.