You can lead a meeting with twelve people. Make decisions involving hundreds of thousands of dollars. Manage competing priorities, difficult personalities and deadlines that keep moving. You can solve problems nobody else seems able to solve.
Then September arrives.
Someone can’t find their gym shoes. The school sends another form. Practice has moved from 5:30 to 4:45. Or better yet, from Monday to Wednesday—and Wednesday is already booked with something else.
You remember tomorrow is picture day while you’re halfway through a meeting. Your teenager is clearly upset about something but insists it’s “nothing.” Dinner, rather inconveniently, has still not figured out how to make itself. 🤷🏼♀️
And suddenly you’re standing in your kitchen wondering how a person who can manage enormous complexity all day long can feel completely defeated by a Tuesday evening.
I find this fascinating.
Because the obvious explanation is that September is simply busy. School starts. Activities restart. Work picks up after summer. Calendars get fuller. Everyone is adjusting.
Of course we feel overwhelmed.
Except I don’t think that explains all of it.
Because if the problem were simply complexity, many high-achieving people should be exceptionally good at this. Complexity is what they do all day.
So why does this kind of complexity feel so different?
Work gives complexity somewhere to live
Think about your workday.
Even when it’s demanding, there is usually some kind of structure around the chaos. Calendars. Roles. Priorities. Processes. Meetings. Deadlines. People responsible for different things.
And, perhaps most importantly, there are moments when you can say: This is what I’m focusing on right now.
Family life doesn’t respect that kind of structure. Your child’s anxiety doesn’t check your Outlook calendar before appearing. Neither does the forgotten permission slip. Or the call from school. Or the sibling argument—yes, they spent the whole summer together, so perhaps they need a little more time apart now. Or the realization that somebody needs to be on the other side of the city in seventeen minutes.
None of these things is necessarily difficult on its own. That’s what makes it so easy to underestimate what’s happening.
The issue may not be the difficulty of the individual task. It may be what your brain has to do every time another one arrives.
One minute you are thinking about a client. Then you are a parent, a driver, an emotional regulator, a planner, a partner and a household manager. And then you’re supposed to jump straight back into the work problem you were trying to solve before somebody yelled from upstairs that they can’t find their water bottle. 😄 Again.
Research on attention and task switching has shown for years that switching between goals carries a cognitive cost. Your brain has to disengage from one task, orient itself toward another and later reconstruct where it left off.
Which makes me wonder whether September is really exposing your inability to handle complexity.
Or whether it’s exposing something much more subtle:
How fragmented your complexity has become.
And there’s another piece of this that is even easier to miss.
The work you do before anything actually happens
Who remembers that the permission form exists? Who realizes the running shoes are getting too small? Who checks when registration opens? Who notices that the kid who usually loves school suddenly doesn’t want to go? Who books the appointment, remembers the birthday and figures out how four people are supposed to get to three different places on Tuesday night?
This is where family workload becomes interesting.
Because we tend to notice visible tasks: driving to practice, making dinner, doing laundry, taking someone to the dentist.
But before almost every visible task, somebody had to notice, anticipate, remember, plan and make sure it happened.
Psychologists increasingly refer to this as cognitive household labour. And it turns out that invisible part of family life may matter more than we realize.
In one recent study, mothers reported doing more household labour than their partners on 28 of 30 household tasks. The difference was particularly pronounced in the cognitive work behind those tasks—the anticipating, planning and monitoring that happens before anything actually gets done.
Higher levels of that cognitive load were also associated with more stress and burnout, poorer mental health and poorer relationship functioning.
That distinction matters.
Because sometimes the exhausting part isn’t taking the child to practice. It’s knowing when registration opens, remembering which equipment they need, realizing the uniform no longer fits, coordinating the ride, watching the weather, moving the dentist appointment because the tournament schedule changed and remembering that there’s also a school project due the next morning.
And then being asked:
“What time do we have to leave?”
That’s not one task.
That’s ownership.
And ownership sits differently in your brain.
Two people can live in the same house and experience completely different workloads
This gets even more interesting when we look at how mothers and fathers perceive family responsibility.
Canadian data from Statistics Canada has found that mothers averaged about 7.5 hours a day caring for children compared with 4.9 hours for fathers.
But perception tells another story.
Sixty-four percent of fathers said childcare responsibilities were shared at least equally. Only 46 percent of mothers agreed.
Recent U.S. data on families where both parents work full time points in a similar direction. Fifty-two percent say the mother handles more of the day-to-day parenting. Only 10 percent say the father does more. And fathers are considerably more likely than mothers to say responsibilities are shared equally.
That doesn’t mean fathers don’t care. It doesn’t mean fathers aren’t overwhelmed either. Almost half of full-time working fathers report that balancing work and family is difficult.
But it does reveal something we don’t talk about enough.
Two smart, loving, well-intentioned people can live in exactly the same household and have completely different experiences of what it takes to keep that household running.
One person may genuinely be thinking, We share this pretty evenly.
While the other is thinking, Yes, but I’m still the one making sure everything actually happens.
And those are not the same thing.
You can delegate a task and still own the responsibility. You can ask someone to pick up the child and still be the person who noticed the pickup needed arranging. You can ask someone to buy new shoes and still be the person who realized the shoes were too small.
You can divide the labour and still carry the mental load.
Which means this may not simply be a delegation problem.
It may be an ownership problem.
And this is where I think successful people sometimes make things even harder for themselves.
Competence has a hidden price
Think about the qualities that helped you become successful.
You’re responsible. You think ahead. You notice problems early. You don’t like dropping balls. You anticipate what people will need. You follow through. People trust you because when you’re involved, things usually get done.
These are excellent qualities.
Until they quietly become: I’ll remember it. I’ll take care of it. I’ll make sure it happens. It’s faster if I just do it myself.
And somewhere along the way, competence starts creating responsibility.
The more capable you are, the more people rely on you. The more people rely on you, the more you carry. And because you can carry it, nobody—including you—stops to ask whether you should.
That equation works for a surprisingly long time.
Until it doesn’t.
And this is one of those places where I think high achievers get trapped.
We confuse capacity with obligation.
I can handle it slowly becomes therefore I should handle it.
Those are very different statements.
Your ability to carry something does not automatically make it yours.
And then there is another layer underneath the September overwhelm that no productivity system can solve.
Sometimes the problem is not logistics. It’s Competing Truths.
You love your children AND you care deeply about your career. You want to be present AND you sometimes desperately want space. You want your children to have opportunities AND you don’t want your family living out of a vehicle seven nights a week.
You want to be reliable professionally AND you don’t want to miss your child’s life. You want a meaningful career AND you want a meaningful family life.
Nothing is wrong with any of those desires.
That’s exactly why they are so difficult.
I call these Competing Truths.
Two things can both be deeply true at exactly the same time. And yet they cannot always be fully satisfied together.
This is where overwhelm becomes more than a calendar problem.
Because somewhere underneath all the scheduling, driving, organizing and remembering is often an attempt to create a life where nothing important ever has to lose.
No opportunity gets missed. No child gets disappointed. No work commitment suffers. No relationship gets neglected. No one feels let down.
And somehow, while making the entire machine run, you’re also supposed to remain healthy, calm, connected and well-rested.
That sounds wonderful.
It’s also not a deal adulthood offers us.
Every yes creates a no somewhere. Every priority has an admission price. Every season asks something of us.
And perhaps September isn’t actually asking you to become better at fitting everything in.
Maybe it is asking you to decide again what deserves to fit.
Before you create another system…
This is usually the point where capable people do what capable people do.
They optimize.
A new calendar. Better colour coding. Meal prep. A shared app. A new morning routine. Family command centre. Sunday planning session. 🗓️
And there is nothing wrong with any of those things. Systems absolutely help.
But a better system cannot solve a problem created by carrying too much.
So before you organize the load more efficiently, there may be a more useful set of questions.
What am I actually responsible for?
What am I carrying because it genuinely matters to me? What am I carrying because nobody else has taken ownership? What am I carrying because I don’t trust somebody else to do it properly?
What am I carrying because I have decided that this is what a good parent, partner or professional does? What am I carrying because it once made sense? And what am I carrying simply because I’ve always carried it?
Those questions are harder than making another checklist.
Because checklists let us keep everything.
These questions might require us to disappoint someone. Change an expectation. Hand something over. Let somebody do something differently than we would. Say no to an opportunity.
Or admit that the life we built in one season may no longer fit the season we’re in now.
But that might also be where the relief is.
Because sometimes the answer isn’t becoming more efficient at carrying everything. Sometimes the answer is realizing that you were never supposed to carry all of it in the first place.
Maybe that’s the real invitation September gives us.
Not to become better at surviving the load, but to look at the life we have built—the work, the family, the commitments, the expectations and all the invisible responsibilities in between—and ask a much more interesting question:
Does everything I’m carrying still belong to me—and why?
And perhaps that question opens another one.
If I stopped organizing my life around everything I believe I should carry, what would I actually want it to look like?
That’s where this conversation becomes much bigger than September.
Because overwhelm is often the symptom we notice first. Underneath it may be expectations we’ve never questioned, responsibilities we’ve automatically claimed, priorities that belonged to an earlier version of us, or choices we keep making without ever stopping to ask whether they still take us where we want to go.
And this is the work I love doing with people.
Not handing you another formula for fitting more into your already full life. But slowing the whole picture down long enough to ask the questions we rarely make space for: What matters now? What is actually mine? What am I protecting? What am I afraid will happen if I let something go? And what kind of life am I trying to create from here?
Because the right question can change what you see.
And once you see the real problem, you can make very different choices.
If you’ve been feeling like you should be able to handle everything you’re carrying, but some part of you knows that handling it is no longer the life you want, let’s have a conversation.
We can look at what’s creating the overwhelm, what may no longer belong on your shoulders and, most importantly, what questions will help you begin creating a life that actually feels like yours.
You don’t necessarily need to become better at managing your life.
You may need to give yourself permission to reconsider what you want your life to require of you.