A bag of worries: tackling overwhelm with LLMs

If you’ve had periods in your leadership journey where you feel like you’re generating more to-do items than you can handle, then you’re not alone.

Every day, you might add five or ten items to your list, each representing an entire project that could take weeks or even months to complete.

For example, after a busy Monday your list might have the following items added to it:

• Review increasing infrastructure costs and propose optimizations.
• Plan team offsite for next quarter including budget and agenda.
• Look into security audit findings and create action plan.
• Prepare for upcoming performance reviews and set criteria.

Sigh.

And that’s on top of the existing huge items that you already have on your list from last week which you haven’t had the time to deal with yet.

This can lead to a feeling of being overwhelmed, like you’re carrying around a heavy mental load. Each item on your list feels like a weight, and the more you add, the heavier it gets.

Although the pragmatist may say that the solution is simply to put time aside to properly triage, prioritize, and delegate or action these items, this is easier said than done. At the end of a busy day I’m usually pretty tired,