Whelmed
I spent a day in bed and on the couch this week. It wasn’t how I planned my week to go, but then again, none of us ever plan on getting sick.
Luckily, I felt better after the day of rest. It’s a lesson that I always seem to relearn - if I keep pushing through that feeling of sickness, that feeling lasts longer than if I simply accept that I am human and get sick sometimes.
But what if instead of waiting for the sickness to appear, as does tend to happen when I push myself too hard and let the overwhelm take hold, I didn’t?
What if I started listening to my body before it broke down? What if I made more intentional decisions about how I live each day, not letting the overwhelm take over?
What if I just stayed whelmed?
“In the film comedy Ten Things I Hate About You (1999), the character Chastity Church asks, “I know you can be underwhelmed and you can be overwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?” The answer, Chastity, is yes. Contemporary writers sometimes use whelm to denote a middle state between underwhelm and overwhelm.”
I love the idea of being whelmed. It delights me this week.
The topic of overwhelm came up in a conversation with a dear friend, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Of course, the state of overwhelm is pretty common.
We’ve all been there.
I was there earlier this week, especially after feeling sick one day. I felt just bad enough that I didn’t want to put on clothes or be far from my bed. I rescheduled meetings and hangouts and warned others that I might have to cancel or postpone activities planned if I didn’t feel better.
My to-do list kept growing, though. Deadlines that I can’t change were fast approaching - like filing our business tax returns. Other meetings and conversations were added to my list. I ignored phone calls, text messages, and emails, meaning they would be waiting for me when I remerged, whenever that would be.
It could have gotten overwhelming. In years past, it would have.
I would feel guilty for doing what my body, brain, and heart needed - I would feel guilty for resting. That guilt would only add to my feeling of overwhelm. Usually, when I felt overwhelmed, I felt like I couldn’t stop. If I did, then I would feel worse. To me, it was better to keep going and try to tackle the overwhelm head-on.
That feeling is a symptom of toxic productivity. And it’s really hard to cure.
Part of it, at least for me, was that when I’m overwhelmed, I think it feels good to do. I think I’m being productive. But, what if I was just procrastinating inside my productivity?
“It sounds crazy that we would make ourselves more overwhelmed when we’re feeling overwhelmed in the first place, right? But according to Dr. Ashley Whillans, an author and a professor at Harvard Business School who studies the relationship between happiness and how we use our time, it’s incredibly common. As she writes in her book Time Smart:
"When we feel time-poor, we take on small, easy-to-complete tasks because they help us feel more control over our time. We think, There! I made a protein shake and finished that errand. I’m getting stuff done! In this case, it’s a false sense of control that doesn’t alleviate the root cause of our busyness."
Instead of finding ways to pare down our calendars, commitments, and to-do lists, we hide out from the hard work of making the lifestyle changes that would reduce our to-do lists—focusing instead on the often meaningless things we can check off as “small wins.” This is a false sense of control that keeps us procrastinating inside our so-called productivity.”
Those small wins always felt so good. They still feel good most of the time. I mean, who of us doesn’t LOVE crossing off ten things on our to-do lists at one time? Isn’t that why we write our to-do lists in the first place?
But, what if you’re drowning in those to-dos?
That really long to-do list of mine? It’s always going to keep growing. So is yours.
You and I will never get everything done.
Why?
Because you and I only have about four thousand weeks in this life.
Sidebar: I didn’t know I was going to bring up Oliver Burkeman again so soon, but here I am. It was inevitable with the topic of overwhelm and because the article I quoted above also references Burkeman. And seriously, if you’re truly ready for shifting into a do less, better mindset - buy his book.
As I’ve mentioned before, one of the best things about Burkeman’s book is that he provides concrete tactics for embracing the finitude of our short existence.
His first tactic: have two to-do lists.
Don’t panic about this first one, which is an “open” list of everything that you have to do and “will doubtless be nightmarishly long.”4 It’s the list that we all have running in our heads, constantly. It’s long, it’s overwhelming, it’s impossible to ever complete.
And that’s okay.
Because you’re going to make a second list, which is your “closed” list.
This list, which Burkeman recommends to be no more than 10 items long, is the list of things you will actually work on. You can’t add more to this list. Once you finish something on your closed list, then you go back to your open list and add something.
The goal of this system is to help you prioritize, keeping you focused on the things that you’ve deemed to be most important to you.
Speaking from experience, I can say that I love this system and it’s not always easy to follow. I have my closed list on my Cascadin dashboard, and I look at it every day.
Some days, that’s all I do with it - look at it.
On other days, like today, I really prioritize what is on my closed list and work only on those things.
On those days, I stay whelmed, completely ensconced in healthy productivity.
I feel good focusing on the things I’ve prioritized. I feel connected to my purpose. I feel rooted in the work that I’m doing.
And it feels amazing when I mark one of my priorities as done.
Better than completing those 10 things that didn’t matter nearly as much.
There will always be things that pull you away from your priorities and your purpose. There will always be things that you add to your to-do list. It’s never-ending, remember?
Other people will come along and try to add to your list too. Some of them may succeed.
What you get to do is decide if those to-dos belong on your open or closed list. You decide what you prioritize.
You decide how whelmed you will be.