I have been more than busy the past month. Starting a new job takes more time than the job description suggests. You are not only doing the work, you are learning how to do it. Meetings run longer because you need context before you can contribute. Documents take more time to read because you do not yet know which details matter. Tasks that would take an experienced person twenty minutes can take you two hours because you first have to understand the system, the history, or the relationships involved. The job temporarily expands to fill more of your life than it will once you find your footing.

I knew this going into my new job. What I did not fully account for was everything else happening at the same time. I am starting this role while also consolidating households with my new husband, selling a house, supporting my daughter through her final months of high school, and helping her prepare for the transition to college. I would not recommend this particular combination to anyone. But sometimes you can’t control the timing of life events.

Managing it has required constant prioritization and a willingness to let some things go. I am eating more takeout than I normally would. I am delegating things I might otherwise handle myself. I am giving myself permission to do that without guilt, because the alternative is paralysis.

Which brings me to the second best piece of work advice I have ever received. The best, as I wrote a few posts ago, came from my father: make the best decision you can with the information you have, and then move forward. The second best came from Anne Lamott’s book “Bird by Bird.” The book is ostensibly about writing, but its lessons apply to anyone doing work they care about.

Lamott opens the book with a story about her brother. He was ten years old and had been assigned a report on birds. He had three months to write it. He had not started. The night before it was due, he sat at the kitchen table surrounded by paper, pencils, and unopened books, unable to begin. Their father sat down next to him, put his arm around his shoulder, and said: bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

I am a birder. That framing landed for me. The principle is universal. When the whole feels unmanageable, the answer is not a better system or a longer to-do list. It is choosing the next discrete thing and doing it. Then the next one.

That is how I am getting through this period. Not by solving the whole thing at once, but by identifying what matters most right now and doing that. The rest will follow, or it will wait, or it will turn out not to have mattered as much as it seemed.

For my regular readers, I will miss next week because I will be busy with a Board meeting and working at my organization’s national conference. Bird by bird!