Why do we take on so much work?
Who told us to do so?
Think about the last time you started a new job.
You probably got a job description, some expectations from your manager, a bunch of meetings on your calendar, projects you were supposed to contribute to, and problems that somehow belonged to your role.
And then you started working.
Trying to keep up with everything.
Doing your best in every meeting. Responding to every message. Staying on top of every project. Helping whenever someone needed you.
At some point, there was more work than you could comfortably fit into your day.
So you started looking for ways to become more productive.
But there is one question we almost never ask:
Who told us we had to do all of this in the first place?
Seriously.
Did your manager explicitly tell you that all of these things deserve your time and maximum effort?
Or did you just assume they do?
Because I think we make one huge assumption when we start a job:
If something falls within our responsibilities, we should probably do it. And do it well.
And I’m not sure anyone ever asked us to.
The invisible contract we create ourselves
The interesting part is that most jobs are far less defined than we pretend they are.
Sure, you have a job description.
Maybe your manager gives you a few goals.
You know roughly what you’re responsible for.
But nobody tells you:
This deserves 40% of your attention.
This one only needs 10%.
For this, good enough is perfectly fine.
You should delegate this one.
And honestly, nobody really cares about that last one.
There is a huge amount of ambiguity.
And we need to fill that ambiguity somehow.
Especially when we’re new.
We don’t yet know what really matters. We don’t know what our manager actually values. We don’t know which expectations are real and which ones simply exist because they’ve always been there.
But we do want to prove ourselves.
We want to be seen as reliable, capable and proactive.
So when we’re unsure whether something deserves our attention, what do we do?
We usually include it.
When we’re unsure how much effort something deserves?
We give it more.
When someone asks for our help and we’re not sure whether we should get involved?
We get involved.
Psychologically, this makes a lot of sense.
When expectations are ambiguous, doing too much feels safer than doing too little. Especially for conscientious people who care about doing a good job.
Nobody wants to hear three months into a new role:
“Why weren’t you doing this?”
So we protect ourselves by doing more.
And without realizing it, we create an invisible contract with our company.
A contract nobody actually asked us to sign:
Everything that could reasonably be considered my responsibility is something I should take care of.
And once we start operating that way, something interesting happens.
People start noticing.
The trap works… at first
And the dangerous thing is that this approach actually works.
At least in the beginning.
You respond quickly.
You show up prepared.
When someone needs help, you’re there.
When your team gets stuck, you jump in.
When a project starts slipping, you take a bit more ownership.
People quickly learn that they can rely on you.
Your manager sees someone proactive.
Your colleagues see someone helpful.
Your team sees someone who can get things moving.
And you see results.
So naturally, you conclude:
This is what being good at my job looks like.
But something else is happening at the same time.
Every time you solve a problem, you make it slightly more likely that the next similar problem will come to you.
Every time you make a decision for someone, you make it easier for them to ask you for the next one.
Every time you say yes to another responsibility, it quietly becomes part of what people expect from you.
Nobody is trying to overload you.
They’re simply adapting to the way you work.
And because you’re still managing to keep everything together, there is very little reason for anyone to question it.
Including you!
So the reward for being reliable is often...
more things that rely on you.
And this can continue for quite a while.
Until eventually, the amount of work around you starts growing faster than your ability to handle it.
But your cognitive capacity doesn’t scale with your workload
And here we hit a very simple constraint.
Your responsibilities can keep growing.
Your day can’t.
You still have roughly the same eight or nine hours.
More projects means more context to hold.
More people relying on you means more decisions.
More meetings mean less uninterrupted time to think.
More messages mean more switching between completely different problems.
So we try to compensate.
We become faster.
We answer messages during meetings.
We skim documents instead of reading them properly.
We squeeze decisions into the five minutes before the next call.
We jump from a people problem, to a technical discussion, to a budget question, to a Slack notification, and somehow expect our brain to perform equally well every time.
But it doesn’t work that way.
Switching between tasks has a cognitive cost. Part of our attention stays attached to what we were doing before, even after we’ve moved to something else.
And as the number of things competing for our attention grows, the quality of that attention naturally drops.
At first, it’s difficult to notice.
You don’t suddenly become bad at your job.
You become slightly less thoughtful.
A little more reactive.
You miss a detail you normally wouldn’t.
You give someone a quick answer instead of asking the question that would help them figure it out themselves.
You make a decent decision instead of taking the time to make a great one.
And that’s the irony.
We take on more work because we want to be better at our job.
But eventually, the amount of work we carry starts making us worse at it.
Maybe the solution was never to figure out how to handle more.
Maybe we should have asked a different question much earlier.
The question we should have asked at the beginning
Instead of asking:
“How can I fit all of this into my day?”
Maybe we should ask:
“Why is all of this in my day in the first place?”
Not every responsibility deserves the same amount of you.
There are probably a few areas where your involvement makes a huge difference.
A decision only you can make.
A person who needs your coaching.
A problem where your experience can save the team weeks of going in the wrong direction.
A strategic topic where one hour of thinking might be worth more than ten hours of execution somewhere else.
And then there are things you do simply because you can.
Meetings where your presence is useful, but not necessary.
Decisions someone else could make.
Projects you keep following because you’ve always followed them.
Problems you could help someone solve, but perhaps shouldn’t.
What if, instead of accepting all of these things as your work, you actually allocated yourself?
Maybe one area deserves 40% of your attention.
Another deserves 30%.
A few things deserve 10%.
And some deserve none.
The exact percentages don’t matter.
The decision does.
Because your time and attention are limited resources.
And once you start looking at your work this way, delegation becomes something different too.
It’s not just a way to get tasks off your plate when you’re overwhelmed.
It’s a deliberate decision about where you should and shouldn’t be needed.
Some things can be delegated today.
For others, you might need to coach someone for the next three months until they can own them.
And some things should probably stay with you.
But at least now that’s a choice.
Not an assumption.
Doing less isn’t laziness. It’s leadership.
This is where I think we often get leadership wrong.
We still measure our contribution by how much we personally do.
How many problems we solve.
How many decisions we make.
How many projects we are involved in.
How busy our calendar looks.
But as a leader, your job isn’t to maximize your own output.
It’s to maximize the impact of the team and the system around you.
And those are very different things.
Sometimes the highest-impact thing you can do is get deeply involved.
Sometimes it’s making the difficult decision nobody else can make.
Sometimes it’s spending three hours thinking about a problem instead of producing anything visible.
And sometimes it’s deliberately staying out of something you could easily solve yourself.
That last one is particularly difficult.
Because doing something yourself often feels productive immediately.
Coaching someone else to own it can feel slower.
Not joining a discussion can feel like you’re not contributing.
Having an empty hour in your calendar can even feel wrong when everyone around you looks busy.
But perhaps that’s exactly the point.
The goal isn’t to fill your capacity.
The goal is to use it where it creates the most value.
A good leader shouldn’t only ask:
“What should I do?”
They should constantly ask:
“What should stop depending on me?”
Because every responsibility you successfully move away from yourself creates capacity for something more important.
And sometimes, the best evidence that you’re doing your job well isn’t that you’re doing more.
It’s that fewer things need you in order to work.
Maybe nobody is asking this much from you
So maybe the pressure we feel at work isn’t always coming from our manager, our company, or the role itself.
Maybe some of it comes from a contract we wrote ourselves.
We assumed that more responsibility means more value.
That being busy means being needed.
That being needed means we’re doing a good job.
And then we spent years trying to become more productive so we could keep that contract alive.
But maybe nobody is asking you to carry all of this.
Maybe your manager doesn’t expect you to attend every meeting.
Maybe your team doesn’t need you in every decision.
Maybe some things can be done at 70%.
Maybe some can be owned by someone else.
And maybe some don’t need to be done at all.
The point isn’t to work less for the sake of working less.
It’s to stop treating your capacity as something that should always be full.
Because if you choose carefully where you’re actually needed, you might create more impact while carrying much less.
And yes, you might even have twenty minutes for a game of foosball with a colleague.
Or lunch with your family when you’re working remotely.
Without feeling guilty about it.
Because perhaps the goal was never to do as much work as you possibly could.
It was to make sure the work that actually needs you gets the best of you.
And if you’re reading this thinking, “Yeah, but I’ve already made myself responsible for too many things. How do I actually get out of them now?”… that’s a different problem.
And honestly, it’s much harder than simply deciding to do less.
That’s exactly what I work on with founders and engineering leaders in my coaching. So if you’re somewhere in that situation, just reply and tell me what’s going on.
We can take it from there.