😔 Feeling overwhelmed with work, any advice?

Six new tasks landed on my desk this morning before I'd even finished the three from yesterday, and that's basically been the shape of every week for over a month now, the list never really shrinks, it just gets rearranged into a slightly different order of urgent depending on who emailed last. I'm checking email before I'm properly out of bed and again right before I fall asleep, which I know isn't sustainable, except every time I try to stop, something makes me feel like the whole thing will come apart if I look away even for an evening, so I keep checking anyway. Weekends have started blending into weekdays too, I'll tell myself I'm only checking one thing quickly and two hours later I've done real work that could have waited until Monday without anyone noticing or caring either way. Part of what makes this harder is not being able to say anything to my manager without it sounding like I can't handle the load, especially with a couple of people on my team who seem to carry just as much without ever saying a word about it, though I have no real idea if they're managing better or just better at hiding it behind a calm face in meetings. I've tried the obvious fixes, proper to do lists, blocked out hours for focus work, waking up earlier to get ahead of meetings before anyone else is even online, and none of it has reduced how much there is to do, it's just reshuffled the same pile into a different shape each week, moving the weight around rather than lifting any of it off. Some evenings I finish and can't fully remember what I did between two and five o clock, the day just sort of happened to me rather than the other way around, and I go to bed already dreading tomorrow's version of the same list.

Reorganising the same pile into a slightly different shape, that's what every productivity trick did for me too. The amount of work never changed. What helped was accepting a few low priority things would not get done that week, and saying it out loud instead of carrying the guilt.

The biggest mistake most people make is trying to finish everything at once instead of prioritising.

Weekends blending into weekdays because of just quickly checking something is such a common trap, it happened to me for months before I even noticed how much of my actual rest time had quietly disappeared. Setting one firm rule, no laptop open past a certain hour on Saturday, made a bigger difference than any to-do list ever did for me.

Hesitating to say anything to your manager because others seem to be managing heavier loads without complaining is something I have felt too, though I eventually learned some of them were just better at hiding it rather than coping fine.