What do you do when there’s so much to do, and the time is out?

Over the past couple of months, the striking parallels between our personal lives, obligations and wellbeing, and the state of the planet, humanity and the systems we’ve built around us - they keep popping up at me from everyone.

The microcosm and the macrocosm. The infinity mirror images.

Excuse this impromptu and slightly, or perhaps highly, personal post.

(Very off brand ;) Hence it here, and not on the arkH3 blog.)

I am yet to fully process my recent “AHA” moments. I might one day channel them into more coherent content.

Everybody around me is “overshot”. Me, my family members, my closest friends, my collaborators. Those deeply aware of the polycrisis, its root causes and the nature of our predicament. As well as those who still debate in themselves whether climate change is real and are deeply entrenched in the dominant worldview, the dominant to-do.

What do I mean by “overshot”?

I mean, we continue to “overshoot” their own “carrying capacity” - how much they can handle while retaining their wellbeing, their ability to keep going, their sanity, longevity. We’re perpetually teetering on the brink of a “collapse”.?

Although we tend to call our own overshoot “being crazy busy”, or “chronic stress” (and glamourise it!).

And we call collapse “burnout”. All too familiar, isn’t it?

Whether we’re striving to transform entire industries, the global economy, the dominant paradigm… or whether we’re just trying to get by, to make ends meet, to be happy within the bounds for happiness that the capitalism provides… everybody around me seems to struggle, to be overshot, be fighting off or delaying burnout.?

No matter where you are on that spectrum, there is likely what seems an impossible amount of to-do, a mission-impossible ask, and there is so little time, so little capacity, so little we can manage to do.

The parallel with the macro world is glaring at me:?

The planetary overshoot. The means through which we prop up a make-believe carrying capacity - perpetuating the illusion that more can be sustained and withstood, more can be afforded, defended, done… than what we can actually keep doing long-term.?

The extreme urgency and unfathomable scale of the action necessary to turn things around.

The microcosm, and the macrocosm.

WHAT DO WE DO?

I don’t know about you, but many of us have the tendency to think “we’ll muddle through”. The more overshot we are, the more cognitively impaired due to exhaustion and stress, the more swamped with the nitty-gritty,… The more we think we just have to keep doing what’s right in front of us. That eventually things must somehow ease.

I tend to do that.

But I also know that a much more savvy and effective, rational as well as healthy approach is to muster the presence of mind, the self-control to pause, take a step back, look at the big picture and radically PRIORITISE.?

If we have no time, no capacity, and an impossible task ahead of us, taking on the actions that will generate the greatest result with the least effort is the best available strategy. Business folk may call it the Pareto Principle. Systems thinkers may call it identifying the strongest levers and pulling on those.

DO NOT DO MORE, DO MORE RELEVANT.

I believe most of us cannot do more. Just as we cannot magically inflate the planet’s carrying capacity, we cannot magically increase ours. How much we can do is limited. Needles to say, we won’t be any useful when perpetually overshot, impaired, burnt out.

In the planetary context, how little time we have left to secure the continued possibility of future liveable conditions on the planet is frankly frightening. The number of people who do not enjoy liveable conditions today should be no less alarming.?

THIS is the time to zoom out, see the big picture, reassess,…

Define new what to let go off, what not to waste time on

Define new “where can I best invest my gifts, my superpowers, my privilege, to make the biggest difference”.

I preach this, but I do not always do this.

I get consumed with keeping the lights on. With the endless to-do.

I begin muddling through.

It’s refreshing and… priceless… to work with people who, right now, live by these principles. Who are not muddling through when I am. Who see the big picture when I forget it. Who spontaneously point at the strongest levers they see - and in doing so remind me that I must always keep looking for mine.

LET’S LET GO OF DOING MORE.

LET’S CHOOSE TO DO MORE RELEVANT.