Why are you feeling constantly busy?

Are you feeling constantly busy, as if you’re always one step behind and can’t for the life of you get ahead of your work, while also wondering why that is but never quite having the space to stop and think about it properly?

It’s Friday. Give yourself five minutes. It may save you a whole lot of time.

Junction 1 – are you overworked?

Be honest. Compare yourself to others doing a similar role, or to yourself in a different organisation. Is the workload genuinely too heavy and unmanageable? If it is, that’s not sustainable or fair. Your line manager may not fully see it, or it may be temporary, but either way it’s a conversation worth having. A decent employer will want to know before burnout kicks in and you start falling behind because you’ve lost your mojo rather than because of genuine workload pressures.

Junction 2 – if it’s not workload, is it concentration?

How often do you check your phone during the working day, and how often does that checking turn into watching a reel of a cat drinking wine? Are your app notifications buzzing constantly? Working from home brings kids and Amazon deliveries, offices bring noise, super-chatty colleagues and people needing support, and Teams banter can derail you just as you get going. Once you identify the real distractions, most of them are easily fixable. If you do, be drastic.

Junction 3 – if it’s not distraction, it may be how the work is set up.

Prioritisation is an obvious culprit, whether that’s you gravitating to the tasks you enjoy, everything being labelled urgent and important by your line manager at the same time, or simply not knowing what should come first because direction isn’t clear, leaving you shooting in all directions. Add legacy tasks nobody needs anymore, you sticking with outdated ways of working when you should have moved on, or spending too much time on each task, unspoken capability gaps, new tools nobody trained you on, the drag of bureaucracy, red tape or slow approvals, and the time lost doing other people’s jobs - whether because they do them badly and rope you in or because you’re simply too helpful for your own good - and it’s easy to feel behind even when you’re working hard. Harder to fix, but far from impossible.

Junction 4 – burnout.

If you’ve ruled everything else out (including your personal life weighing in), this is where you don’t want to be, because it’s the hardest to turn around and affects way more than just your work. Try to fix the earlier junctions before you get here.

There is, however, one other explanation: you’re not actually behind at all, you just like saying you are, otherwise known as the White Rabbit persona. If so… have fun.

Hope this helps.