Overcommitment
Different from multitasking, you may feel pressured without even doing anything when you have taken up too many responsibilities and you know you are falling behind on them.
What to do about it?
1. Prioritize your tasks.
Similarly to circumvent multi-tasking created stress - prioritize tasks that are the most important and do them one by one.
2. Delegate
It may seem like you are failing at your work if you are delegating but you must prioritize tasks that have the highest Return of Investment (ROI) and no one else can do it as well as you can.
Tasks with the lowest ROI should be removed if possible.
You should delegate the tasks that have a high ROI but someone else can do it just as well as you or better.
One of my clients quickly rose to a tech-lead position because they strived to know everything and solved ALL problems within the projects they worked on. That also meant picking up more than they could realistically handle - leading to burnout and loss of hope.
So we started by them prioritizing what was the work that they absolutely had to do, and what was outside of their scope.
Within a couple of weeks of ruthless prioritization, they started feeling energized and felt the effects of burnout subsiding.
Up to this day, they are mindful not to pick up too many tasks, which helps them avoid getting into the situation that led them to burn out.
