The Space Between Breaths
The rabbit hole I found realizing I was a workaholic
There is a moment at the end of exhalation when your breathing is in balance. The outward pull of the chest wall is balanced with the inward recoil of the lungs. This point is called functional residual capacity, and at the end of a quiet exhale roughly 40% of your total lung volume remains. The body can give more with effort, but it is perfectly designed to hold back a little, both at the end of inhalation and exhalation, drawing from that reserve when it is truly needed. Build in excess capacity for when it is required. I have started to wonder whether that is a principle we ever apply to our lives.
It has been a while since I wrote on Platypus and Fox. The simple reason is that I have been coming to terms with a simple fact: I am a workaholic. I do not always enjoy it. I have missed important moments with my children and my wife, slept after night shifts while they were doing something fun, worked through holidays because the work was there and I believed it needed me. But beyond the obligations of the job, there is a part of me that at rest still reaches for more. Saying yes to this project, that favor, this committee, that request. I say yes because I am capable of doing the job well, and somewhere along the way I confused capability with obligation. I am driven by my competence and blind to my capacity.
Those are not the same thing. Competence is what you bring to a task under ideal conditions: your skill, your knowledge, your trained judgment. Capacity is what is required to actually complete a task within the context of a real life. The time available, the energy remaining, the tools at hand, the cognitive overhead of everything else already in motion, and the randomness that life introduces whether you planned for it or not. You can be highly competent and have almost no capacity. Most of us live there more often than we admit.
After years of believing the next productivity system would lead to some kind of nirvana, the right app, the right framework, the perfect calendar, I have come to think the relationship between competence and capacity can be described more honestly as an equation. You are able to successfully complete your current set of tasks only when:
∑ Tasks(t) ≤ [C × η(t) + Resources(t)] − CognitiveLoad(t) − ε(t)
On the left is the sum of everything you have committed to at this moment in time. On the right is your latent competence (C), your ceiling under ideal conditions, multiplied by η(t), an attenuation factor between zero and one that reflects your actual state right now: fatigue, stress, distraction, emotional bandwidth, bureaucratic drag. Add to that Resources(t), the time, money, tools, and support the environment provides. Then subtract CognitiveLoad(t), the overhead that grows with each additional commitment and quietly degrades your ability to execute anything well. And subtract ε(t): noise. Randomness. The sick child, the flat tire, the unexpected thing that arrives on a Tuesday.
The trap is that when we take on too much we do not simply add to the left side of the equation. We also shrink the right. Cognitive load does not grow linearly. Past a certain threshold it compounds, stealing bandwidth from every other task in the queue. For a short time this is survivable, because nature tends to provide residual capacity. Do it long enough and you develop burnout, and a reputation for promising a great deal and delivering less.
Understanding the equation does not solve the problem. The right side is genuinely difficult to calculate. It changes by the hour, includes forces outside your control, and at best is an educated guess. What it offers is a frame: the goal is not to maximize the left side up to the boundary. The goal is to keep enough margin on the right that the unexpected has somewhere to land. Call it productivity residual capacity. The hard part is recognizing, in the moment, when the sum of what you have already committed to in life, your work, your family, your obligations, your ambitions, has already consumed that margin.
So why is it so hard to manage, even when we understand it? The answer is different for each of us, but I suspect many people who fall into the overcommitment trap share something in common: a part of themselves that finds comfort in saying yes. This part finds the full plate reassuring. It mistakes busyness for worth and capability for identity. It does not do math. It does emotions.
Internal Family Systems therapy offers a useful language for this. IFS understands the mind as made up of distinct parts, each with its own perspective and its own protective logic, organized around a core Self. Some parts carry old fears or old wounds, and other parts form to protect the system from having to feel those things. For many of us, the part that keeps saying yes is a protector. It volunteers before the ask arrives. It says yes because somewhere in its logic, staying useful feels safer than being still. What it is protecting against, whether that is irrelevance, disappointment, or the discomfort of an open afternoon, is what therapy works to untangle. What we can do in the meantime is simply notice it.
Our tools do not help. Task lists and productivity systems can hold a near-infinite number of commitments. There is no constraint built in, no jar with visible walls. They can reduce cognitive load, but only when they are part of a genuine daily habit and connected to a calendar that tells you something honest about your actual workload. The idea of putting the big rocks in first is sound. The problem is that it requires you to first know the size of the jar.
Which brings me back to what I know about the body. Functional residual capacity is not simply leftover air. It keeps small airways open, prevents alveolar collapse, and places the chest wall at its optimal mechanical advantage so the next breath begins from the best possible position. The reserve is not waste. It is what makes the next breath possible.
When I think about my own commitments, I have started to look for the signs that I have gone too far. Returning to a project and realizing I have lost all context. Being reminded of something I agreed to and having no memory of the agreement. Watching the end of a school year arrive and knowing the calendar will make everything harder for a few weeks, regardless of what I planned. When I see these things, I am learning to pause. To turn toward that part of me that keeps reaching for the next task and say, quietly: I see you. You did your job. But the goal is not a full plate. The goal is enough reserve that when something truly matters, I can breathe.