You Don’t Have Unlimited Bandwidth
The hidden cost of switching between priorities, and how to design around it
Recently, I’ve been thinking about my priorities.
I’m carrying three important things at the same time: my family, my 9 to 5, and the work I’m building with Self Disciplined. None of these feel optional to me, and none of them feel like a burden. I chose them, and I’m grateful for them. Still, lately I’ve felt friction; the type of friction that doesn’t go away just by “trying harder,” and I wanted to name it out loud because I think a lot of people feel it and assume it means something is wrong with them.
My kids are little, so most weekdays have a predictable shape. After work it’s pick up, home, food, play, bath, bedtime, and bam! the day is gone. That takes energy, a lot of it, especially if you’re trying to be present and not just physically there. At the same time, it gives me energy back, it anchors me.
It reminds me what I’m building for.
Building for them turns effort into meaning, and meaning changes how tired feels.
My 9 to 5 matters too. Full disclosure, I was briefly unemployed at the end of 2024. It was short, but it was enough to feel the market and enough to feel what instability does to your nervous system. So providing matters to me, and job safety matters to me. I also care about the craft. I like problem solving, building systems, and being useful through what I build. That’s why work can take a lot of my focus, because it isn’t just tasks, it’s pride and responsibility.
Then there’s Self Disciplined. It started as a newsletter, a place to channel what I was learning and a way to become better for my kids, with something I can leave them beyond advice. Over time it became bigger. It turned into a framework, a TEDx talk I’m preparing, and a book I’m working on. The overlap is real too. What I learn outside work makes me better at work, and what I learn at work makes me sharper in my writing. I’m grateful for that. I just don’t have infinite capacity to run everything at full speed, all the time.
That’s the topic for today.
Why the real overhead isn’t the workload
At some point, your mental bandwidth becomes a constraint you can’t negotiate with. Past that point, prioritizing stops being a preference and becomes the only way to stay steady; to stay sane.
The part I think we miss is that the load is not only the amount of work.
It’s the cost of switching.
In software, a CPU can make it look like many things are happening at once, but a lot of what’s really happening is fast switching with overhead. Every switch requires the machine to reload context, rules, and state. Your brain does something similar. You can keep multiple priorities “alive,” but you still re-enter one context at a time. You rebuild where you were, you remember what matters, you re-orient, and you pay the entry fee again.
That cost shows up silently. You technically have time; you care about the thing; you sit down. And starting still feels expensive; not because you’re lazy, and not because you lack discipline, but because you’re switching lanes all day, and every lane change leaves residue.
Nobody has unlimited bandwidth. Anyone who tells you they do is selling something.
What overload looks like in real life
This matters because most adult lives are built on stacked commitments, and those commitments are often good ones: family, career growth, health, friendships, creative work, a side project, learning, community. Each one makes sense in isolation. The problem is that “good” still adds up, and the mind doesn’t care that the load came from meaningful choices.
When the stack gets too full, one of the first symptoms is procrastination. Not necessarily the one you have read about nearly everywhere. I’m talking about the version in which everything feels important, so you start searching for the perfect priority, and that search ultimately becomes the work. You stare at the list and it feels like you’re being asked to choose which part of your life deserves oxygen tonight. That’s a brutal decision to force yourself to make when you’re already tired, so you delay, you avoid. The pile keeps growing. Then the pile starts to feel threatening, and you begin associating “starting” with discomfort.
That’s drift. It’s chaos that doesn’t look chaotic from the outside. It’s why capable people start feeling unreliable, not because they lost ambition, but because they’re paying the switching tax all day without accounting for it.
It also connects directly to self-governance. If you don’t know your capacity, you can’t set boundaries with integrity. And if you can’t set boundaries, your life turns into a series of yeses that look reasonable until they collide.
Your brain pays for every switch
Cognitive psychology has studied task switching for a long time, and one of the consistent findings is that switching between tasks creates costs in speed and accuracy1. Those costs grow when tasks are complex or require different rules, which is basically adult life in one sentence. The conclusion isn’t that switching is bad; the conclusion is that switching is not free, and the cost accumulates when your day is built around constant re-entry.
There’s also research on attention residue2, which describes how part of your attention can remain attached to the previous task even after you move on. That residue makes the next task harder to enter and harder to do well. In plain language, it means you can sit down to do the next thing and still feel like part of your mind is somewhere else, because it is.
If you’ve ever finished a work day and then tried to jump straight into something that matters to you, and felt your brain resist, this explains a lot of it. It’s not a personality problem. It’s mechanics.
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Designing for strict lanes and flexible lanes
Once you see switching as a real cost, the response changes. The goal is not to become tougher. The goal is to become more intentional with how many contexts you keep active, and when you switch between them.
The first step is treating your bandwidth as a design constraint, not a personal flaw. Your capacity changes by season. Parenting season is different from single season; high-pressure work seasons are different from calmer ones. Sleep, stress, health, and emotional load all change what you can hold. Knowing your capacity isn’t pessimism. It’s basic honesty, and honesty is what makes good systems possible.
The second step is reducing re-entry cost on purpose. The biggest shift for me is when I stop making decisions at the exact moment I’m least equipped to decide. Instead of sitting down at night and asking, “what’s the best use of my time,” I try to pre-decide with simple defaults. That way, I’m not negotiating with myself every night, and I’m not paying the switching cost again before I even begin.
This also forces you to face the difference between strict commitments and flexible ones. My 9 to 5 is strict. My time with my family is strict. Self Disciplined is flexible, which means it can get crushed unless I rotate it intentionally. So some days I write the newsletter, some days I work on the TED talk, some days I work on the book, and some days I do nothing because I’m at capacity. That’s not inconsistency. That’s me refusing to build a system that only works on my best days.
If you want a simple model, treat tasks like a queue. Without a system, tasks pile up faster than you can drain them, and the queue itself becomes stressful. With a system, you drain it consistently, even slowly, and two things start to happen over time: the pile shrinks because you’re finishing, and the intake slows because you stop overcommitting.
Why simple systems actually reduce mental strain
Working memory is limited3. When you try to hold too many active items in mind, decision quality drops and cognitive fatigue rises. This is one reason “I’ll just keep it in my head” works until it suddenly doesn’t. Overload doesn’t always feel like panic4; sometimes it feels like fog, friction, and delay.
This also explains why defaults help. Pre-deciding reduces decision load at the exact moment you’re most vulnerable to avoidance. You’re not removing responsibility; you’re moving the decision to a time when you can make it cleanly.
And this is where AI can genuinely help if you treat it like an assistant. Not by doing the meaningful work for you, but by removing overhead around it: outlining, summarizing notes, turning a dump of thoughts into structure, generating checklists, helping you identify a next step when your brain is tired. Less clutter in working memory means less switching pressure, and that often means you start faster.
In my case AI helps me in my creative process; to brainstorm (I’m actually amazed at how good AI is for that), to proofread, to edit and to research. Tasks that could take me hours now take me minutes; I can get things done faster, with less mental effort. And to the critics, the ideas remain mine; the content you are reading is still written by me. AI is handling the menial friction, not the thinking.
At the end, the value isn’t the AI output; the value is that your brain carries less.
What I hope you take from this
If you feel behind while doing things you care about, don’t jump straight to self-judgment. It for sure doesn’t mean you’re broken. It might mean your life has too many active contexts and you’re paying the switching tax every day without seeing it.
Nobody has unlimited bandwidth, and switching has a cost. That cost, the overload, often shows up as procrastination, and the way out isn’t force. The way out is design: know your capacity in this season, reduce re-entry cost, and protect your yes so you stop feeding the queue faster than you can drain it.
In the next paid companion, we’ll go one level deeper into the question that usually comes after this: how do you know when you’re reaching your limit before you hit it. We’ll map the signals, define capacity in a usable way, and build a simple method for making tradeoffs on purpose.
Until then, if you are feeling overwhelmed, set boundaries and lead yourself with self-compassion. Not because you got into that it means that you deserve to be stuck there forever. There is a way out.
Have a wonderful week!
✨ Ideas Worth Exploring
If this piece resonated, here are a few more that go hand-in-hand.
Rubinstein JS, Meyer DE, Evans JE. Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2001 Aug;27(4):763-97. doi: 10.1037//0096-1523.27.4.763. PMID: 11518143.
Sophie Leroy, Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Volume 109, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 168-181, ISSN 0749-5978, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002.
Baddeley A. Working memory. Science. 1992 Jan 31;255(5044):556-9. doi: 10.1126/science.1736359. PMID: 1736359.
Sweller, J. (1988), Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning. Cognitive Science, 12: 257-285. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4
Hey
All the best for your TED TALK and for your BOOK as well 💯👌🏽🙏🏿💪🏿🙌🏼🤝
True that none of us have the bandwidth to balance everything and walk the rope steadily.
Very nice analysis 😃