Do you ever feel you cant do it all, so you dont do anything?

[Indiaplain]

Hard to explain the thread title, but do you ever get so overwhelmed with the mountain of tasks that you just feel paralysed and mumsnet (or whatever) instead?

I'm working from home today. DC are at my parents house. My house is absolute tip. Piles of washing to do/put away, kitchen to clean etc etc

Work is full on. I NEED to prioritise that. But I have had a few days annual leave and my inbox is just relentless. Plus the actual work I have to do once through my emails.

I just cant do it. I'm pacing my house, or just staring at my screen. I dont know where to start. Probably starting threads on mn is not a great idea.

For the emails, can you just ask colleagues if theres anything they need you to look at? And search for client names etc where you expect you will have received something you need to act on?

I went back to work yesterday after 10 days out sick and started going through mails one by one before abandoning that idea and doing what I said above. I still have 400 emails unopened but pretty sure I have caught everything I need to act on. Im cc'd in so many mails that I dont need to act on and it would take hours to go through them all.

frequently , thats the only answer i have lol

Yep, task paralysis is what I spend the majority of my day doing, or not doing as it were.

Mine is ALWAYS worse in a cluttered house. I rented a storage container last week and it's the best decision I've ever made. Its so much harder to start a task when there are a thousand mini tasks to complete just to get to it.

Yes!! I cycle through feeling like this too. It's as though there are so many competing priorities, doing any one of them almost feels futile

My go to 'frozen' activity is virtual house hunting, it's like an obsessive distraction!

HeronLanyon - my list making is a displacement activity. (And my downfall) I need to blitz the house so I spend an hour listing EVERYTHING that needs doing so 'I'll be all organised and sail through'
NOPE - I then see my list and see how much needs doing and then weep.
If DH is home things go so much better because I'll make the list, have a weep at 'How much there is to do and I'll never get it done and I don't know where to staaaaart' and then he'll look at my list and say 'Right - let's clear the sides in the kitchen first' and off we go.

My not doing my nice things is because I'm a serial starter of projects and I rarely get them finished so I currently have about a million (some exaggeration there) projects and I don't know which one to dooooo.

Basically my brain leaps about all over the place and mostly I worry that I might 'do it wrong' and that I'm not adulting right so basically unless there is an emergency (my mother coming to stay) my adulting skills are non existent.

This is me. I am on Level 4372 of Toy Blast on my iPhone which is not even funny, it represents aeons of wasted time, but I also get brain freeze.

Am a single mum with 2 teenagers, going through a difficult divorce and with a manic full-on job and large rambling tip of a house with a garden that probably has wildebeest living in it, but when I have too much to do at once (or a really scary unpleasant task like my Form E ) I just freeze with anxiety and do nothing. Oddly enough, I appear capable and proactive to people who don't really know me but secretly I'm useless!

Also very good at lists though! Even charts sometimes!

Yup. Even more at the moment. I feel paralysed by the amount of work I have to do. I normally go make a cuppa then start on something small to tick off so I feel like I’ve progressed.

Yeah ,I relate to all this .And (poor me alert) now I'm retired ,I can always put it off until tomorrow .

I used to be such a productive and organised person but due to exhausting overwhelm and paralysis over the last few years, I feel like I’m a completely different person (a failure really) and I’m now incapable of getting anything done but the bare minimum.

I know it has something to do with being a perfectionist and that because my environment isn’t perfect, I therefore can’t do anything other task and so everything falls like dominoes, triggering panic. But I also feel incapable of getting myself out of this hole because it’s become such a psychological wall.

When I write out all my tasks in an attempt to get back some control, I become obsessed with the order and time that they are completed, how neat the list looks (it has to be clean and clear or I can’t work from it) and I end up re-writing it a million times rather than actually completing the tasks. I’m my own personal nightmare!

I have found my people My work has been relentless since everything opened back up in July. I have deadlines to meet, and I find the more deadlines set, the more I go into myself and walk away. Somehow...it gets done, and I meet those deadlines. However....to meet those deadlines...I end up having to work through the night, which is obviously not a good idea. Especially when I've spent ALLLLLLL day going down the Internet rabbit hole

ADD/ADHD def account for some of us. Depression and isolation can also account for some.