Ask any multi-unit manager to describe a bad day, and you’ll hear some version of the same story.
The plan you walked in with rarely survives past 9:15. By lunch, you’ve fielded forty questions marked ‘urgent’, sat through two calls you had no time to prepare for, and made decisions on the fly that deserved more thought. Every minute has been accounted for. Yet the one thing that actually moves the needle, holding your team properly accountable for their performance, never made it onto the day at all.
You clock off exhausted, probably irritated, and no closer to what mattered. That’s what overwhelm looks like.
What overwhelm actually is
Overwhelm is the gap between what’s being demanded of you and your current capacity to meet it – cognitively, emotionally and physically. For leaders managing teams, that gap is rarely caused by one big thing. It’s the accumulation: competing priorities, being pulled between the urgent needs of your team, and the demands from above, often while trying to lead people remotely.
Dr Beat Bühlmann, General Manager EMEA at Evernote and Graham Allcott at Think Productive describe this as the “triple overload” – three forces that compound each other. The first is data overload: research suggests the average knowledge worker spends around 2.5 hours per day just searching for information. The second is communication overload: knowledge workers spend roughly 80% of their working time in emails, meetings, chat and messaging – leaving almost no space for the focused, high-value thinking that leadership requires. The third is cognitive overload: interruptions happen every three to five minutes on average, making it nearly impossible to ever reach a state of genuine focus.
Together, and over time, these are more than productivity problems; they’re the path to burnout.
The stress cycle – and why you need to finish it
Emily and Amelia Nagoski, co-authors of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, make a distinction that changes how you think about recovery. “Dealing with your stress, is a separate process from dealing with the things that cause your stress. To deal with your stress, you have to complete the cycle.”
This matters because most of us try to manage overwhelm by tackling the source – clearing the inbox, finishing the project, getting through the week. But the stress response itself, the biological state your body enters when under pressure, doesn’t automatically resolve just because the trigger has passed. If you don’t close the loop physiologically, the stress accumulates. They are also clear that: “Completing the cycle isn’t an intellectual decision; it’s a physiological shift.”
So, what actually works? The most direct route is physical movement – even something brief. Deep, slow breathing helps too (a five-count inhale, hold for five, ten-count exhale is a practical starting point). A short walk or some yoga. Social connection matters: a genuine 20-second hug with someone you trust, or even a brief, warm exchange with a colleague, signals to your nervous system that you’re safe. Creative expression and, for some people, a sense of meaning or purpose can also help close the loop.
None of these require much time.
The thinking problem underneath it all
One of the less-discussed costs of constant overwhelm is what it does to the quality of your thinking. William Chaumeton, Head of Concept Development at reMarkable, puts it well:
“The real question isn’t how fast we can think – it’s how well we can think. In a world increasingly optimising for acceleration, our greatest challenge (and opportunity) is to prioritise better thinking over faster output.”
This is the paradox multi-site managers often miss. The busier you are, the more you feel you can’t afford to slow down – but that’s precisely when slower, more deliberate thinking matters most. As Chaumeton remarks, Daniel Kahneman’s work on system 1 and system 2 thinking supports this: the fast, reactive mode we default to under pressure is useful for routine decisions, but it’s the slower, more reflective mode where better judgement, creativity and genuine problem-solving live.
Overwhelmed leaders tend to make more reactive decisions, delegate less effectively and struggle to develop the people around them – which feeds the cycle further.
Practical ways to push back
Here are four things that are worth prioritising, with some insights from Bühlmann and Allcott, and Nagoski, and some advice about how to do this in practice from the Full Focus Productivity programme I teach:
1. Give your attention some boundaries: your capacity to think well isn’t consistent across the day. Most people have two to three hours of genuinely sharp attention – and it’s often first thing. Guard that time by closing your inbox or turning off your phone notifications. If your environment makes this difficult, being briefly unavailable is a reasonable trade-off for doing your best work.
How to apply this in practice: this is where the Big Three comes in. It’s where you identify your Quarterly Big Three priorities, and then you break that down into your Weekly Big Three and then Daily Big Three, which identifies exactly what you’re going to do. This matters because it bridges the gap between (what might feel like) massive 90-day objectives and your immediate to-do list. It ensures you never end a week without progressing; by scheduling time to work through your goals and tackling the hardest thing first where you can.
“Efficient is being able to get things done. Effective is doing the right things in the right order, and making sure you address everything that is urgent, vital and important, in every part of your life.” Lee Cockerell, Time Management Magic: How To Get More Done Every Day And Move From Surviving To Thriving
I’m a big believer in scheduling meetings with yourself. It’s one of the things people respond positively to on the Full Focus Productivity programme. When you block time for your own priorities, you treat it with the same respect you’d give a meeting with someone else. Just make sure you don’t cancel it just because no one else is in the room! This landed well with cafe-bar and restaurant chain, Loungers, where over 90 operations managers have implemented the Big Three concept. Scheduling time as if it were a meeting with another person has been the central thread.
2. Make your to-do list specific: a lot of cognitive load comes from vague, unresolved items sitting in the background. The practice of asking “what is the next physical action here?” – something concrete like “call,” “write,” or “send” – clears the mental clutter that ambiguity creates. If something has no action attached, file it or delete it.
How to apply this in practice: This is where the concept of Big Rocks comes in, developed by Stephen Covey in First Things First. The Daily Big Three go in the diary first, and then you’re realistic, even ruthless, about what the ‘gravel’ looks like around them.
From experience, the real problem isn’t that managers have long lists, it’s that they try to cram a long list into a single day. I’ve seen that across very different client groups, whether that’s the operations managers at Loungers or managers and individuals at Noble Foods. These are two very different organisations, but they share the same challenge of leading managers and teams remotely and trying to stay on top of everything without the day swallowing them whole.
The smart use of technology can also help with this – AI can augment work by removing low-value tasks and rapidly producing authentic drafts from speech, saving you lots of time.
A good practice is to protect your diary time for travel and visits and lock out a handful of slots to check email. Lean on technology; whether that’s do-not-disturb mode on your phone or turning off notifications altogether, so you’re not tempted to react to the beeps and buzzes!
3. Set team expectations explicitly: much of the anxiety around communication comes from unspoken assumptions about response times, availability and what “urgent” means. A short team charter that makes these things explicit – when messages need a same-day reply, when it’s acceptable not to respond in the evening, how meetings are called – removes the low-grade stress of everyone second-guessing the rules.
How to apply this in practice: Alongside the team charter, I also highly recommend using your out-of-office alert for more than just holidays. If it’s something significant, taking more than three or four hours, an out-of-office message manages expectations quietly. It tells people when you’re back and usually heads off the dreaded ‘as per my last email’ chase! I describe it as advertising your opening hours. The same logic applies to a Teams or Slack status, or even a shared WhatsApp group with your direct reports. It’s about letting the people around you know when you are and aren’t available. [pull quote] Setting expectations becomes even more important when you’re working across geographies and time zones. I
I’ve seen this recently working with Ladurée Paris, where people are managing across different markets and countries. The assumptions made about availability can cause a real amount of unnecessary stress. It’s something I feel strongly about, from my own experience, too. When I was Learning and Development Director at SSP Group, I’d often send emails at strange hours because I was in a different part of the world. I made it an explicit expectation with my team that they should never feel the need to respond to anything I sent outside of working hours. If something was genuinely urgent, I’d call or message them directly. But email was something they could pick up in their own time, and being clear about that distinction made a real difference to how the team felt about their boundaries.
4. Build in recovery, not just rest: Nagoski is direct about this: “Wellness is not a state of being, but a state of action.” Rest isn’t passive recovery – it’s an active part of sustaining performance. Block time in your week for thinking, reviewing, and genuinely stepping back. Not as a luxury, but as a requirement.
How to apply this in practice: When we run the Full Focus Productivity programme, the feedback we hear most often is that they feel we’ve given them permission to schedule the things that matter. Whether that’s getting home in time for bath time with the kids, going for a run, or a hobby they enjoy. One of the Loungers operations managers, Joe, described the first module as “transforming his life”. Sounds grand, but it was a genuinely heartfelt comment, and it was as much about the personal side as the professional one. For Joe, it came back to exactly my point on putting the things that mattered to him in the diary and treating them with the same commitment he’d give a work meeting, even when it involved only himself.
This blog is an excerpt from a LinkedIn article by Lee Sheldon. If you’d like to read it in full and find out how to create a different measure of a good day, you can read it here: When busy stops working: understanding and recovering from overwhelm
