Too much and not enough

ONE OF THE LESSONS I take from many years of product management is that no matter how big your team is, there are always more ideas for developing the product than resources available to do it. This is, by and large, a useful forcing mechanism: because the potential work always and forever exceeds your team’s capacity, you have no choice but to make tradeoffs. By definition, more ideas and possible features must get shunted into the backlog than can make it onto the roadmap. There’s a basic math here that every good product manager (as well as good engineers and designers and project managers and etc.) know in their bones. (Executives are another matter.)

Somehow, that same knowing doesn’t often translate to our own stacks of work, and our own limited resources. But the math is the same: no matter how capable or how organized or how brilliant or efficient or skilled you are, the amount of work you could do will never match the amount of work that is coming at you from all directions.

There are a number of reasons for this: first, caretaking work is in and of itself unceasing. Whether you are caring for children or elders or neighbors or friends or—indeed—yourself, there is no point at which that care is complete. There is no definition of done when it comes to caretaking. And because we live in cultures that are acutely impoverished with respect to care, we are operating from a deep deficit of care that most days seems legitimately impossible to fill.

On top of that is the basic functioning of our economies, in which the work that most needs doing and the work we are tasked to do are often terrifically disparate. We work to make money so that we can care for each other, but the work often stands at odds with the care, or else leaves a lot of very critical work undone. This is a long-running mismatch: there’s a New American Movement poster from the 70s that I think about often; it reads, in part: “Just look around: a housing shortage, crime, pollution; we need better schools and parks. Whatever our needs, they all require work. And as long as we have unsatisfied needs, there’s work to be done.”

And then there is just basic human desire: there are things we want to do or experience or learn, more of them than can be achieved in one lifetime. So that many of us spend years or decades or whole lives believing we haven’t done enough, because the list of things we’d like to do remains ever longer.

I am wont to hedge on absolutes, because they are great ways to eventually be wrong (and I do so dislike being wrong), but on this point I feel very confident: the amount of work your work and life wants of you will always and forever exceed the amount you can do.

You cannot fight this.

It is also a gift.

Once you accept (or re-accept) that there is too much, it becomes easier to turn some things away. You may still feel grief or loss at the things you cannot do. You may feel guilt, especially if an institution or person benefits from you feeling that way. But accepting that you must leave some things undone shifts the problem from one of being not enough to one of being in a position to make choices. And even when those choices are coupled to difficult or prickly constraints, they are still choices.

This does not make them easy, mind you. I have no magic wand to resolve how difficult this is. I am writing about it, in part, because it is a lesson I seem perennially in need of relearning. But I do have some threads to pull on, some paths to explore, some stones to upturn and so on.

The first is to acknowledge that a great many people and systems benefit from you feeling like you need to—or should—do more. Your boss, probably. Capitalism certainly. Likewise, there are people who bear the costs: you, your kin, neighbors, communities. Ask yourself, what are the benefits of there being too much work, and to whom do they accrue? What are the consequences, and who bears them?

The second stone is to recognize that whether you like it or not, you are already making choices about what to get done and what to leave on the floor. You may be making those choices intuitively or unconsciously or haphazardly, but you are making them nonetheless. It can be useful to step back and look at what those choices are: what do they tell you about the person making them? Are they the choices you want to be making? Or is there a change you are coveting? Is there a direction to the choices that you want to bend or loop or turn around?

The third, and in some ways the most radical, path is to consider who else lives within your choices, and whose choices you live inside of. Because, dear friends, none of us is making these choices alone. We all exist in the penumbra of other people’s choices about how to make good with their lives. And the most intractable choices, the ones that seem to come up against the hardest constraints and the most impassable obstacles, the ones where not doing something requires us to cleave ourselves in two, into one person who can leave something on the floor and someone else who stays behind to grieve—those choices look different when you make them with others, when it isn’t all up to you and you alone.

And that right there is an opening: when you uncover something you deeply desire or desperately need but cannot accomplish on your own, ask yourself, who might I share this with? Who might aid me, and in doing so be aided themselves? Turn the desperate fear of there’s too much work and I am not enough into what work shall we do together?