Twenty Tabs Open and Nothing for Dinner

What I do when the workload starts winning, and why slowing down might be the most professional thing you do all week.

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Right now, at Coast Wide Training Solutions, we are in that strange, good, exhausting phase of growth. Our team is smaller than it was, so we are recruiting. Our client base is expanding, and every week seems to arrive busier than the one before it.

If I am honest about what that actually looks like on a Tuesday afternoon: fifteen browser tabs open across three screens. Four documents, a spreadsheet, three folders and a four-hour old screenshot. An inbox refilling faster than I can empty it, a Teams chat blinking in the corner of the screen every 10 minutes, a client meeting reminder pinging me and a phone that won’t stop ringing (not to mention the incessant dog barking and a cat that wants to sit on my keyboard). I feel pulled in every direction at once, and not one of those directions is the wrong one.

And that is precisely the problem.

The part we do not say out loud

Then there are my other jobs - My “mum” hat and the “wife” role. I want to be present when my kids get home from school to hear all about their day. I want to be the mum who has dinner sorted, pets fed and lunchboxes ready for the morning. I want to keep a clean house, support my husband, cook his dinner, help him in the office (I draw the line at rubbing feet).

But alas… It is impossible to wear all three hats effectively at once.

And then there’s me.

Most days, I am so buried in work that I forget to eat. Sometimes, my kids’ stories bore me and I’m truthfully, I’m not listening properly. At times, I yell at my dogs, leave the kids to sort out their own dinner (they’re old enough to cook dinner for me, frankly), and don’t have much left to offer anyone else in the household.

But the guilt still sits there quietly in the background while I answer one more email.

I suspect a lot of you reading this know the exact feeling I am describing. Women in this sector especially. Anyone working from home, where the office never really closes because it is also in or near the kitchen.

The bit that should worry us professionally

No wonder, amid this chaos, small deficiencies start to creep into my work. Little spelling errors, incorrect titles, and missed details not being caught, because I’m moving too fast. Minor on their own, but a big deal to me. If an ASQA auditor pointed them out, I would be embarrassed. Put them in front of a client and they quietly undermine the very thing I am so passionate about - accuracy, attention, and quality you can rely on.

And I have stopped assuming this is a me problem. I see it in the RTOs we work with every week, and I see it across the sector. Fully capable people making uncharacteristic mistakes and oversights, not because their standards have slipped but because the volume and pace have not.

Speed is not the same as productivity. When a team runs at capacity for too long, quality erodes quietly. You do not notice it happening. You notice it at audit.

For everyone working at that pace, in that kind of organised chaos, the risk is not just to wellbeing. It is to quality. In the RTO sector, fatigue shows up in a variety of ways, including frustration, self-deprecation and self-doubt. Not to mention policies with spelling errors, confusing or unsubstantiated validation records, a TAS with incorrect duration calculations, version control errors, and an enrolment file missing key evidence.

The 2025 Standards for RTOs expect systematic, evidence-based practice, and systematic practice requires people with enough headspace left to be systematic.

None of this is a confession of incompetence - quite the opposite. I know when I have too much on my plate. I see the mistakes and the oversights, and I take practical steps to pull things back into line. That is the whole point: the deficiencies that end up in front of an auditor are the ones nobody noticed.

"Yeah, but how do I actually balance it all, Jodie?"

I get asked this a lot. And I want to be honest with you - I cannot answer it for you. Everyone’s life is built differently, and the adjustments that work have to suit you and the people around you.

What I can tell you is what I do.

Pilates is my answer

Four or more times a week, I do Pilates. It is non-negotiable, and it is the best time I spend on just me.

Little promo to my fabulous instructors and their beautiful space - Active Barre-Barre and Pilates Classes

It is not so much about fitness (though it is a bonus). It is the one hour of my day that is entirely mine. It brings me back into my body, quiets my mind, and lets me re-enter everything else calmer than I left it. It is my reset button.

You do not have to do Pilates. But I would encourage you to find your version of it and then defend it in your calendar the way you would defend a client meeting.

Here are some other tactics I use

• I reprioritise properly, on paper. I pull up my task list, my calendar and my inbox, and I sort every item into the categories of the Eisenhower matrix:

It takes about an hour, but it saves me a fortnight. Most of what feels urgent turns out not to be important, or can be dealt with in minutes. And most of what is genuinely important has been sitting quietly in the corner for weeks, waiting for someone to schedule it.

• I take back control of the inbox. I run on a clean inbox policy – the cleaner my inbox, the more in control I am. Every email containing an action becomes a task and then that email leaves the inbox. Then I use colour categories for those emails that remain. Remember, an inbox is not a to-do list. It is everyone else’s to-do list, delivered to you.

  
  

• I use Claude to build the plan. I load in everything from my workload – my task list, my inbox, my schedule. I tell it what is coming up and ask it to give me a prioritised list: today, tomorrow, later this week, next week, beyond. Then I work top to bottom. The value is not that AI knows my priorities better than I do. It is that it gets everything out of my head and into an order I can actually follow.

  
  

• I set a daily start time and a finish time, and I hold them. A workday without an end will quietly fill every hour you give it. I head out to my Pilates class as an indicator that my day is finished so I can then reset and be present for my family.

  
  

• I plan meals. Nothing elaborate. Just enough that I am never standing in front of the fridge at six o’clock, eating a piece of cheese and trying to make a decision on what to eat. Pull out the bits, put it together, done.

  
  

• I schedule the low-thought work deliberately. I schedule the low-thought work deliberately. My finish time holds most nights, but not all of them, and when I do head back to the desk, it is for the low-attention housekeeping. Filing, tidying, admin. Never the work that deserves a fresh brain.

  
  

• And most of all, I ask for help. My family. My team. Anyone available to me. This is the one most of us are worst at, and the one that changes the most. Asking for help is not an admission that you are failing. It is simply what capable people do when the load exceeds the hours.

And when you need a hand

Balance is not something you achieve once and then keep. It is something you renegotiate constantly, out loud, with the people around you. And on the days it is not working, it is something you are entirely allowed to ask for help with.

That is part of why we built the EmpowerU Support Series - short, self-paced online courses covering the skills nobody formally teaches you but everybody expects you to have. I’d specifically highlight two for you:

1. Remote Working and Learning is for those of us whose office is also the kitchen. Five strategies for the challenges of working from home, including the one this whole post is about - holding some kind of line between the professional and the personal.

   
   

2. Queens and Warriors: Put Your Crowns Back On is for anyone who has ever felt like a fraud in a role they plainly earned. Written for those in leadership, in consulting, and in male-dominated industries, it takes on imposter syndrome, negative self-talk, and the practical work of silencing the inner critic.

And if the honest answer is that there is simply too much work for the hours available, that is the other thing we do. RTO Compliance and administration support, so the load stops being yours alone. No course fixes a workload that is genuinely too big, it just needs another pair of hands.

 A problem shared is a problem halved.

Reach out to us at admin@coastwidetraining.com.au. We would be glad to help.