Working Mom Overwhelm: Everything Matters, and Not All of It Gets to Stay

What if the reason you can’t decide what to drop is that you’ve never actually decided what you can’t live without?

What if the reason you can’t decide what to drop is that you’ve never actually decided what you can’t live without? I started really sitting with that question after a call with a client a few months ago. Her job had just gotten a lot bigger, and she asked me something I didn’t have a quick answer for.

Welcome back to Unscripted, a Momtoring podcast, the show for the ambitious working mother who is everyone’s default and is finally ready to hear her own voice again. I’m Andi Salcedo. I’m a coach, a working mother, and the founder of Momtoring, the coaching brand and community for working moms behind this show. If you end up wanting to go deeper after listening, momtoring.com is where you’ll find me. But right now, this conversation is what matters.

Last episode I gave you a way to see what you’re carrying. Conception, planning, execution. If you haven’t listened yet, go back after this one because today builds directly on it. Now here’s the thing though. Seeing what you carry doesn’t tell you what to do with it. And that’s today. And before we’re done, I’m going to walk you through a way to sort one thing you’re carrying right now, live on the spot.

So here’s a coaching call. My client’s role had just gotten bigger. And I mean a lot bigger. And all at once. Her territory went from Spain to all of Europe. Which sounds like a line on a resume until you actually think about what it means on a day to day basis. More countries, more time zones, more flights out of the house on a Wednesday she used to be home for.

And here’s what mattered to her. She’d built a life where work didn’t swallow everything. Work mattered to her, genuinely. She wasn’t looking for an excuse to do less of it. But so did being present for her family. Not performing presence while her head was somewhere over Western Europe.

And here’s the thing. She wasn’t scared of the growth itself. She was proud of it. She had worked hard to get there. And this was genuinely what she wanted: more responsibility, more trust, more of her own reach. That part wasn’t the tension.

The tension was underneath it, because she could already feel herself reaching for the same playbook that had gotten her this far. The one where you just do more, you just show up harder, you figure it out. And that playbook worked. It’s literally why Europe landed on her desk in the first place. But some part of her already knew that the exact same playbook was not going to let her keep the life she actually wanted on the other side of it. What got her here was not going to get her there.

And she said it to me, very quiet, like she was almost afraid to say it out loud. How do I keep delivering at this level while staying present for my family and taking care of myself? That’s the question. And it’s not really a scheduling question, even though it looks like one on the surface. It’s a question about what happens when the thing that used to fit your life stops fitting and nobody hands you a new container for it.

So here’s where I usually start, and it surprises people every time. Not with her calendar, not with her task list. I start with her values. When something feels off, it’s usually because somehow you are not embodying what you believe is important to you. And I believe that very deeply. Values aren’t a poster on a wall, they are the compass. And when your life stops feeling like yours, it’s rarely because you are lazy or disorganized. It’s because somewhere along the way, what you are doing with your days stopped lining up with what you believe matters.

So I proposed we start with the values work before we touched anything about Europe or her calendar. And she did something I didn’t expect. She didn’t just list her values and move on the way most people do. She sorted them. Some of her values she marked as non negotiable, full stop, no matter what. Others she marked as negotiable, meaning they mattered, but how she honored them could flex depending on the context. That distinction is the whole engine of what we are about to do. Because if everything you value feels equally important, equally urgent, you can’t make a decision about anything. You just carry it all, and it all feels like too much. Because in a sense, it is too much when nothing has been ranked. Non negotiable versus negotiable. That’s the sort that makes every other sort possible.

Only after she’d done that did she go back to her list, and this time it was mostly her work list. The actual things she was doing day to day now that Europe was hers. And she went through every single item and asked one question. Does this touch a non negotiable value or doesn’t it? That one question is only step one though. Because a yes or no answer gets you two piles, the stuff that matters and the stuff that doesn’t matter as much. But let’s be honest, life is rarely that clean. So, once she started going item by item, other questions started stacking up underneath that first one. For the things that touched a value, she had to ask how much they touched it. Did this actually need her hands on it, or could it live just fine with someone else’s? And for the things she was already doing, she had to ask a harder question. Was she giving this the amount a value actually asked for? Or had she been giving it more than that for years, out of habit or fear, or a version of herself that doesn’t run this business anymore? That’s how one question turned into four zones.

So let me give them to you the way I ended up naming them.

First, there’s keep. Keep is not everything you want to do, and it’s not everything you’re good at. Keep is what actually touches a non negotiable. For her, that meant the handful of client relationships that mattered most. The ones tied directly to the work she’d built her reputation on, and that were directly related to the business strategies. Those stayed on purpose and not by default.

Then there’s drop. If something didn’t touch a value at all, if it was just there because it had always been there, she let it go. No guilt tour, no long goodbye. If it doesn’t touch a value, it doesn’t get to keep your time by default.

Then there’s delegate. And this one, it’s pretty easy, no? This one’s different from drop because delegate isn’t about things that don’t matter. It’s about things that matter, just not enough that they have to be done by her. Some of the regional check ins that used to be hers alone, she handed to someone on her team. The whole thing, not just the parts she didn’t feel like doing. If Episode 10 taught you to notice who’s still conceiving and planning even when someone else executes, delegate is where you hand over all three, not just the doing.

Then there’s temper, and this is the one people skip, and it’s usually the most important zone, and it’s the one people get wrong most often too, because temper doesn’t mean stopping. It means turning the intensity down, not off. It’s for the places where you are overcompensating for a value that’s already covered, giving it more than it actually needs. For her, that meant tempering a standard she’d set for herself years ago, like showing up in person for every single regional call, even the ones she could have easily joined by phone from home. She didn’t stop showing up to the calls. She stopped requiring the most demanding version of showing up when a lighter version honored the exact same value just as well. Nobody required that of her. She required it of herself a long time ago for a version of her job that didn’t exist anymore.

Now, here’s where people usually get two of these zones confused: drop and temper. Because from the outside, they can look very similar. Something stops happening either way. But they come from completely different places, and the difference matters. A drop is something that never touched a value in the first place. It was just there, out of habit or obligation, and nothing about you actually cared whether it continued or not. A temper is different. A temper still touches something real for you. You’re just overcompensating for it, giving it more than the value actually requires. When she tempered the in person meetings, that value stayed completely intact. She just stopped requiring the most expensive version of proving it when a lighter version honored the value just as well and delivered the same objective.

So here’s a version of it that has nothing to do with a corporate calendar. Say you’re the one who cooks dinner from scratch every night. If you generally don’t care about that, if it’s just a habit nobody ever questioned, that could be a drop. But if being the kind of mother who feeds her family well actually matters to you, that value doesn’t go away the moment three nights a week become a rotisserie chicken and a bagged salad instead of something made from nothing. You still care about feeding your family well, you’ve just stopped overcompensating for a value that was already covered, and brought the effort back down to what it actually needed.

So, four zones. Keep, drop, delegate, and temper. But they only work after the values sort. That’s what lets you look at a packed calendar and know what belongs and what doesn’t. Not because the calendar sets your priorities, but because you already know what you refuse to trade.

Watching my client do that sort stayed with me. Honestly. It stayed longer than most client sessions do. Because what she built for her work list is exactly what so many of us are missing for everything else. We’re pretty good, some of us, at sorting our meetings, our projects, our deliverables. What we are almost never taught to sort is the other list. The one Episode 10 already showed you exists. The mental load. The birthday you’re tracking, the appointment you are the only one who remembers. The thing you keep meaning to hand off and never quite do.

That list doesn’t get a values sort, it just accumulates, and it accumulates specifically because nobody ever asked it the question my client asked her work list. Does this touch what matters to me or is it just here because it’s always been here? So that’s what I want you to take from her today. Not just four zones, the order. Values first, then the sort. Because keep, drop, delegate, temper without the values work underneath it is just a to do list with better labels. It’s the compass that makes the sort mean something.

So here’s what I want to leave you with. Not the four zones, the question underneath them. What is one thing on your list right now that doesn’t touch what you value, and you’ve just never asked it that question?

So before you go, let’s do this. Pick one thing, just one. Something you’re currently carrying. A task, a commitment, an obligation you’ve never questioned. And ask it the question. Does this touch something non negotiable to me? Something you won’t trade. If the answer is yes, keep it, on purpose, the way she kept her core client relationships. If the answer is no and it never touched a value in the first place, that’s your drop. If it matters, but it doesn’t have to be your hands on it, that’s your delegate. And if it does touch a value, but you’re giving it more than the value really needs, that’s your temper. Not stopping it, just turning it back down to size.

You don’t have to act on it this second. Just notice which zone it landed in. That noticing is the whole exercise. Because most of what we carry has never once been asked that question.

This is the same sorting work I do inside The Edit, live, with a room full of women doing it together instead of alone on a drive home. If today’s exercise felt like just enough to want more, that’s where you’d go. The link is in the show notes. Join the waitlist to participate in our upcoming online event.

And make sure you’re subscribed to Unscripted wherever you’re listening, because next week we’re getting into something almost every working mother recognizes immediately. Why you’re still the one everyone calls first.

I’m Andi Salcedo, this is Unscripted, and I’ll see you next week!