Learn and Work Smarter

127. 5 Invisible Forces That Make You Always Feel Behind

• Katie Azevedo • Episode 127

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You know that feeling when you’re super busy, you have a million things to do … but you still feel behind and like you got nothing done at the end of the day?


It’s not your imagination. 


In this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I reveal the 5 secret (and oh so sneaky!) invisible forces that destroy productivity and keep you running on a to-do-list treadmill to nowhere.


What You'll Learn:


  • How most people approach productivity (and get it wrong)
  • The sneaky thing you do all day that takes WAY more time than you think it does
  • How your brain is lying to you about what it can do
  • How planning optimism (sure! I can do that!) is a productivity predator
  • Exactly how to tame these 5 invisible forces and take back your day


🔗 Resources Mentioned:



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You know that feeling when it seems like you've been going 100 miles an hour, you have a million projects going, a bazillion thoughts in your mind, you're really busy, you are working really hard? but for some reason, you still feel behind. That's what this episode is all about, why people with the best intentions, who work really hard and are smart still feel or fall behind all of the time. I'm Katie Azevedo, this is the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, and we are on episode 127. If you're watching on YouTube, I would love it if you subscribe to the show. If you're listening in a podcast app, be sure to follow, and you can also find me on Instagram @schoolhabits if you wanna stay connected between our Thursday episodes. Grab a pencil if you wanna take some notes, or you can always grab the transcript at learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/127. All right, let's begin. Now, I know the feeling that I described at the top of the episode likely resonates with every listener, including myself. And the thing is that when we are busy and doing a million things but we still feel like we're behind, there are usually some invisible forces that we are not thinking about that are contributing to this chaos. Now, most people reasonably think that they're feeling or falling behind because maybe they're not working efficiently or they're bad at time management, and certainly this can be the case. If you haven't learned time management skills, you're gonna be bad at time management. If you haven't learned how to work efficiently and reign in your focus and concentration, you're gonna work inefficiently. But usually what's happening, as I said, there are some invisible forces at play behind the scenes that are messing with us. And so the goal of today's episode is to shed light on those invisible forces so they can no longer lurk in the shadows, and so that we can address them. While this list of invisible forces could be quite long, I am gonna focus on the five that I see most often affecting the students and professionals that I work with in my private practice, and I have no doubt that some, if not all of these five, are probably at play in your own life too. All right, so first up on our list, reason number one you're working really hard and you are busy and you're smart, but you still feel behind is invisible overhead. I do have a full episode about this concept. It's episode number 68. It's called The Time Management Trap That No One Talks About. So if you suspect this hidden factor is really what's going on in your situation, I do wanna direct you to that episode. But here's what I mean by invisible overhead. Every single thing that we say yes to involves way more than the actual thing that we're saying yes to. Let me give you a basic example. Let's say that you're a student and you're joining the basketball team. You might think, "Okay, well, my schedule allows for two hours a day to practice. No big deal. I can make that work." But the invisible overhead is, you know, the games that run longer, the commuting to and from the games, staying later after practice to help put away the equipment, the once-a-month fundraisers you have to participate in that, like, last all weekend, the captain's practices, the additional meetings, right? And all of these are things that joining the basketball team includes well beyond the simple two hours of practice each day If you're a working professional, you might agree to join a committee that technically only meets once a month, and you look at your calendar and you're like, "Okay, I can do once a month for like a one-hour meeting. I can do that." But the invisible overhead might be all of the prep work that goes into what you need to present at that monthly meeting, the email correspondence that happens a couple times a week about the meeting, even all of the energy that you spend thinking about your role in that monthly meeting, the notes you have to process after the meeting, and all of the follow-up work. All of these things are commitments and tasks that take up time, but if we're just looking at the basketball team, the committee, whatever it is, as just the thing itself, we're actually ignoring something significant. So the strategy here is to make time visible, but realistically. So I am hoping at this point, if you've been around the block with me for a minute, you are understanding the value of making time visible with a calendar. Whether you're a student or a professional, my argument is that anybody at least starting in grade nine should be using a calendar, digital, paper, literally tool agnostic, doesn't matter. Most people think digital is easier. Maybe you wanna start with that. I do have a tutorial on my SchoolHabits website in my blog that walks you through the basics of setting up a Google Calendar for school. If you're a student, um, or if you have a student and you want a basic roadmap for how to do that, I'll leave the link in the description box. But when we're adding events to our calendar, let's say basketball practice, we're adding in buffer time around that event that accounts for getting ready for practice, getting to practice, and getting home from practice. We don't just block out on our calendar that we have our econ class from one thirty to three. Okay, well we have to account for the fact that it might take us thirty minutes to get across campus and thirty minutes back. So in that case, the calendar block should realistically say one to three thirty 'cause that's the time that you're physically spending on the task. Nearly every single thing that we have on our calendar comes with invisible overhead that we need to account for, and when we don't, we often feel like we are overwhelmed, and we have so much to do, and we don't have enough time, and we're always behind when in reality, we're getting swamped by things that we're not even i-identifying as tasks, but they are. So my challenge to you is to think about what's on your plate. What are you doing over the course of a typical week? And where is the invisible overhead? Inside SchoolHabits University in the very first module, I have an exercise that I have students go through. It's called an activity inventory, and it is a framework where they, they do exactly this. They identify all of the things that they're doing that are obvious, and then they account for all of the invisible overhead tasks that are associated with those things. And if there is an imbalance of time, then that's something that you have to confront. So that was number one, invisible overhead. All right, so the second invisible reason why it feels like you're always behind is unrealistic planning. So unrealistic planning is an invisible factor that affects even people who are really locked into calendars and are, I'm air quoting here, "good" at time management and have a good sense of time, or so they think. But in my experience working with thousands of students and professionals, those with the best intentions often have the most unrealistic plans. Let me explain. If someone says, "Okay, this afternoon I'm gonna write that report, I'm gonna create that presentation, I'm gonna go to that spin class, I'm gonna go grocery shopping, I'm gonna send those 10 emails, I am gonna process my inbox, I am gonna clean and organize my, you know, my digital file system," that sounds like someone with a lot of good intentions and no strategy and an unrealistic sense of time. I have a whole episode about time estimation. That's episode 95. That's a skill too. It's something that affects everybody, but particularly those with ADHD. But good planning involves good time estimation. What is that? That means having the ability to accurately predict how much time a task is going to take you, and accurately assess how much time you actually have, and then to see if those two connect in a way that makes sense. So that hypothetical example of someone who wants to do those 27 things in an afternoon, well, if they actually sat down and quantified how long each task would realistically take, all of those tasks would probably take, I don't know, a week of uninterrupted time to get through, let alone, you know, definitely not one afternoon. And so what happens at the end of the day when someone doesn't get through all those tasks, they feel behind. But in reality, that was too many tasks on their plate to begin with. If we're constantly underestimating how much time we have and overestimating how much we can do in a day, we're gonna perpetually feel like we're behind. So the solution is to start with getting better at time estimation. Again, I suggest, uh, listening to episode 95 to develop time estimation skills. And then this may not sound realistic for everybody, but I still think, I still think it is. But I like to teach the concept just as a place to start of picking your three most important tasks and then a list of would be nice kind of tasks. So that's your day. What are the three most significant things that you need to work on? And then what's the list of the other things that if there's time or if you have, you know, a minute between things, you can kind of like plug away at those. And I know that some of you listening are thinking like, "Three? I have like 59 things to do." Okay. But even if you have 59 things to do in a day, are you ever really completing 59 things in a day? Not likely. So why keep holding yourself to that standard when it's impossible to meet? Why not be more realistic about what you can complete in a day? Okay, maybe you can't narrow it down to three, maybe five. What are the five things that you're gonna prioritize today that you're gonna look at your calendar and say, "Here are five different times in the day that I can dedicate to working on these five things"? The math has to math. But if you take your list of 59 things and you only have five slots in your day, that math is not mathing, and it's gonna lead to you feeling like you've made no progress at all. But if you would limit yourself to a realistic three to five tasks for a day, and you actually completed those three to five tasks, well then heck, that is pretty awesome, and then you would rinse and repeat. all right, and the third invisible factor that makes us feel like we're always behind is context switching. I did not make up that expression. I believe that the first time I heard it was on Cal Newport's podcast, but it's a great way that he describes, if it is him that I'm attributing it to. I didn't make it up. It's a great way to describe what happens when we go back and forth between two different tasks that are in different contexts. So for example, we're writing an essay as a student, and then mid-paragraph we quickly go check our phone because we saw it light up with a notification. And then even though that, you know, quick tap on the phone only took twen- uh, ten seconds and we return to our essay, now we've lost the momentum of the work on the essay. We don't think we did because our fingers are still on the keyboard. Our brain is like, "Whoa, wait a minute, I kinda have to start over with my thinking context." Or if you're a working professional, and you're, I don't know, you're writing a report, but you wanna quickly go check your email for a second and then return to your report, like, you know, 40 seconds later, now you've switched contexts, and you've lost the momentum. And what happens is mostly professionals, but students as well, we do this all day long without having any idea that we're doing it. So we're like a ping pong ball doing this, doing that, doing this, doing that, back and forth, back and forth, and at the end of the day, we haven't actually accomplished anything significant on any one project because we're barely moving ahead on way too many projects, and then we feel like we're behind. And in many cases, we actually are. Now, some of these distractions are beyond our control, like we're working and our phone rings, and it's our boss, so we can't ignore it, but the majority of these interruptions are self-imposed. I have this episode called How to Create an Admin Block and Why You Need One. That's ca- uh, episode three. And in that, I teach a great strategy to use as many times a week as you need to make sure that you're intentionally putting aside time in your day to handle these obnoxious administration tasks that, you know, we often pop over to when they're-- we're in the middle of doing something like a little bit hard, a little bit uncomfortable, but it's important, and we're like,"Oh, let me just go check my email. Let me just do the..." Right? An admin block can remove those distractions. Attention is also a factor here. If we haven't figured out what our attention limitations are and made deliberate efforts to improve our attention, then we're gonna be stuck in this, "Oh, I can only focus, you know, on something hard for five minutes," purgatory forever, and that means it's gonna be really hard to break out of the feeling that you're drowning in incomplete tasks. The solution? Use the admin block strategy. Improve your attention with attention training. Yes, this is possible. And then get real about removing distractions from your work and study space. Okay, the fourth invisible factor that makes us feel like we're always behind, this one is probably the most common, and I would say the most significant of them all, is cognitive overload. Said differently, trying to hold everything in our head and having no external systems to hold that information outside of our head, which is where it belongs. So what do I mean? It's not having a task management system and trying to remember what all of the things are. It's trying to remember you have to go to a graduation party this weekend, but you also have an essay due on Monday, and you're supposed to reply to that email from the coach, and then that other person is waiting for a reply, but you can't remember if it was a text message or an email, or maybe you spoke to them in person. It's trying to remember what time the meeting is at and what time you have to leave the house. It's not having any clue if you're gonna have time to work on your report on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday because you have no calendar system that makes time visible. It's not externalizing knowledge in the form of notes and trying to hold it all in your head, so sitting in a meeting without writing any notes or sitting in a lecture class without writing any notes, under the delusion that, "I'll remember that." And then you walk out of the meeting and you walk out of the class, and you've already forgotten it all because, of course, we don't remember that. And so you feel overwhelmed with tasks and time and tidbits of knowledge, and you're trying to juggle it all, and you know you're forgetting something, or most things. And you're stressed, and that lack of clarity means that you're not actually working on the right things, and so by the end of the day, you're like, "Crap, like, what did I even do?" And then yet again, you fall further behind. Creating systems to externalize things that should not live inside our brains is a critical step to not only being more productive, but also to creating inner calm and equanimity. Task management, time management, and knowledge management, I would argue, are the three key systems that students and professionals need to create urgently because that kind of information was not meant to be stored in our brains. And the story that I'm different from everybody else and I can remember that is hogwash. And the fact that it's hogwash is evidenced by the fact that people who believe that delusion are the ones who are the most overwhelmed. All right, the fifth and final factor that makes us feel, well, that was a lot of alliteration. The fifth and final factor that makes us feel like we're always behind is not leaving enough margin or recovery in our day. Students and professionals both tend to be go, go, go, at least the ones that I work with, especially if you're, you know, high performing or you have perfectionistic tendencies or you just, you know, have many interests. Take, for example, a typical high school student. They go back to back from class to class to class to class for like seven hours straight. And then they often stay at school for a practice or a rehearsal or maybe for a school activity. And then they come home and it's, you know, shower and eat and now do some homework. And nowhere in any of that nine hour schedule was there a moment for the kid to be like, whoa, let me just process what just happened in that class. Let me think about that and make sense of what I just learned. Working professionals, if you work for 90 minutes on some intense project you're working on, then you go directly to, I don't know, three back-to-back meetings and you run into your manager in the hallway, which results in an impromptu 30 minute conversation. And then you get back to your desk and you're trying to write up some notes, you know, about what just happened in the hallway, but then the phone rings and then suddenly it's time to leave the office and you're making some phone calls on the car ride home and you get home and then you have to make dinner and drive this kid to that place or whatever. There's a million different things that you just did all day long back to back. But where was the margin? Where was the recovery? Where is the five minutes in between the things to process the things? That is essential. and I'm not necessarily saying that these pockets of time don't exist. College students, for example, have giant spaces of time in between their classes. Professionals might have four hours in between meetings. So many times there is time for margin or recovery, but people are not making use of that time for margin and recovery. minutes in between class, it might be a good idea to take five minutes of that 20 to process your notes. You just left a meeting and you have to get to another one in half an hour. OK, well, take five minutes to process what just happened in that meeting to go through your notes, maybe extract any action items and add them to your task management system and then get to your next meeting. But what I often see is people using that time to just zone out on their phone or do something like quickly check their email or some kind of task that's unrelated to the thing that they should be processing. And then what happens is you get to the end of the day and we think, what just happened? I don't remember a darn thing about a darn thing. And then when we don't remember a darn thing about a darn thing, it's hard to do a darn thing. And in those cases, not only do we feel behind, but we are. Okay, my friends, that was the list. But let's do a quick recap before we go. The five invisible forces that are making you feel behind even when you're working your face off are number one, invisible overhead. Every single yes comes with more than we think. Number two, unrealistic planning. The math has to math. Number three, context switching. Stop being a ping pong ball. Number four, cognitive overload. We have to get stuff out of our head because that's not where it belongs. And number five, not leaving margin. We cannot run a nine-hour race at a dead sprint and expect anything good to happen. Maybe you saw yourself in all five of these. Maybe only one of them resonated with you. Maybe some are factors that you never even thought about. And at first you're like, no, that's not me. But then later on sometime this afternoon, you think about it and you're like, oh, dang, that is me. If that's the case, then this episode has served its purpose. So pick just one, just one from the list and start there. That is it. That's your whole assignment. If you're watching on YouTube, remember, please subscribe. It genuinely helps more people find this show. And if you're listening in a podcast app, hit follow, leave a review if you're inclined. Find me on Instagram at SchoolHabits. And thank you so much for your time. Keep showing up. Keep doing the hard work. Keep asking the hard questions and never stop learning.

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Katie Azevedo

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