There is always more to do
Let's begin at the end: you are going to die with an unfinished 'to do' list. As Amanda Palmer sings in In My Mind:
When they put me in the ground, I'll start
Pounding the lid
Saying I haven't finished yet
I still have a tattoo to get
That says I'm living in the moment
There are just always more things that we could do, that we'd like to do, perhaps even that we need to do, than we will ever have time for.
This is kind of the point about mortality: it makes our choices meaningful. If you are an Olympian god, then you can do something for eternity, and still have an eternity of further eternities available to do something else, your choices are of little consequences. For human beings... it's another matter. Economics is sometimes defined as the study of decision making under conditions of scarcity1 - and we are all limited by our time and energy.
The fact that there is always more to do can create a mirage of the "the life that we would be living, once we get things more under control". It's a mirage because things are never going to be under control. This experience - messy, confusing, busy - is all there is.
How do we cope with this? We could easily feel overwhelmed, and start working at an unsustainable pace to try and clear the decks - but more work always comes in to fill the gaps. So instead we must learn to throttle our pace, accept that there are only so many things that we can do, and become slightly more ruthless in our prioritisation.
If we do (and finish) the most important thing, and then the next most important things, and keep repeating, always doing the thing that is now most important... even though we will have left a potentially infinite number of things undone, we will still have had the greatest impact we could with the resources that we had available.
These lessons definitely apply to leaders and managers, who have to master the art of prioritisation.
But these are also things that leaders and mangers need to instil in their teams and organisations.
Rather than only ever spending time executing in responsive mode to the work coming in, it's important to make time regularly to stop and re-prioritise on the basis of new information. These are worthwhile conversations and reflections to engage in at least once a month.
It's also good to regularly do some "belt tightening" in the sense of: being ruthless about what is "good enough". Allow less important things to be done in a more rough and ready way - experimenting to find out which bits that we think are totally indispensable really are (IE which bits contribute most value).
If we learn to prioritise, and to get good at identifying what is "good enough", then we will be becoming as effective as we can be, each day we are working.
“Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” - Lionel Robbins writing in 1935