Everything is the Enemy

Ever find yourself in a situation where you’re in the weeds? You’re overwhelmed by having too much to do, so you feel a sense of despair at not being able to catch up. You live in the uncomfortable chaos instead.

For the first half of my life, most of this chaos took place in restaurants, where I got a sense of what it felt like to succumb to this feeling of having way too many targets, and nowhere near enough bullets.

In addition to the injuries, there’s the tendency to drop breakable things onto the floor, or to overcook food while you’re focusing on other food. Naturally, this makes life much harder for the kitchen manager and for your coworkers, whose emotional energy is palpable. You can feel the loathing and resentment directed at you for not being up for the job.

If you want to dig yourself out of the weeds, the knee-jerk instinct is to move faster and start doing more things. This makes a lot of sense: there’s a finite amount of time in which you’re expected to complete lots of little tasks, so spending less time on each task would make the math work.

Unfortunately, that’s not going to help. In fact, going in the wrong order just in the interest of being faster can make the weeds much worse. You can end up needing to remake an entire order if something from one station sits up there for too long, so you have to think about timing. Maybe you even end up cutting or burning yourself.

If you’re having restaurant-induced PTSD right now, I’m really sorry for sharing my trauma with you, but at least we now share that bond. Let’s change the subject.

Let’s talk about when you’re overwhelmed by abundance.

Bruce Springsteen made this relatable with his single 57 Channels (And Nothin’ On), released in 1992. It’s not the Boss’s best, but it does encapsulate this idea of the Paradox of Choice quite well:

Woe to our ancient ancestors, with a mere two score and seventeen channels to choose from! Today, this is so much more overwhelming, and 57 channels seems somewhat quaint by comparison.

Is more always better, though? It isn’t if you try to experience everything. If you spend more time scrolling through Netflix than watching shows or movies, you might be overwhelmed by choice. This is analysis paralysis.

At some point, you have to decide how to invest your time. If you have ten hours of viewing time this month, would you prefer to watch thirty different shows, or maybe binge one or two seasons of a show that doesn’t suck?

This is the necessary sorting component that represents the key to escaping overwhelm. If you want to find something good to watch on TV, you might want to do some research first about a category of shows to watch. Then, you might consider only highly rated or critically acclaimed shows, or you might pick a particular cast or director. Finally, you scroll through a much smaller selection.

Similarly, on the battlefront of being in the weeds, you need to sort through the tickets and decide which problem is the most urgent, while at the same time focusing on the important problems. You don’t have an infinite amount of time to sort, and the precious time you spend sorting probably seems like you’re wasting it—you could be cooking something right now instead of organizing tickets, you briefly think—but you know better.

You know that a few sweet seconds allocated to intelligent sorting will yield many minutes of time for you, particularly once you get the most urgent items out of the way so you can then focus on batch operations.

Trying to fix everything that’s wrong all at once will surely mean that nothing much gets fixed. Trying to enjoy everything good in your life means you probably won’t get to enjoy all that much.