The Invisible Load (And Why Your Diary Needs to Know About It)
By Emma Kershaw
Founder of EVA
There’s a moment every September that feels like a fresh start. Kids are back at school, the diary resets, and for about three glorious weeks it feels like a mini New Year. I get the same burst of energy every year thinking ‘this is the quarter I’m going to finish strong’ but, and you probably already know where I’m going with this, Q4 can be busy for most people, and it creeps up fast. Blocking tasks out now will help you protect yourself from scrambling around at the last minute.
I talked about this at BROOD’s mini masterclass on time blocking recently, and the truth is, most of us are brilliant at blocking time for work. Meetings, deadlines, client calls all safely go in the diary. What we forget to block is everything else. The school run, life admin, personal appointments usually aren’t treated with the same seriousness, and if it doesn’t go into the diary, it doesn’t exist. Until it does, all at once, usually in December.
I call it the invisible load: the thinking, remembering and chasing that happens underneath the visible to-do list, and that almost never gets its own slot in the diary. It’s not that we’re bad at time management. It’s that we’ve only been managing half our time. Running your own business, you wear many hats that you don’t always account for: your social media, expenses, invoicing, client catch-ups; how many of these do you actually account for in your calendar?
The fix isn’t complicated, but it is deliberate. That might mean a Friday power hour where the only job is blitzing your inbox and tackling your to-do list. It might mean 30 minutes of buffer either side of a big meeting, so prep isn’t rushed, and an overrun doesn’t tip your whole day into chaos.
And crucially: don’t block every single minute. The people who cope best with a chaotic Q4 aren’t the ones with the most rigid diary; they’re the ones who’ve left room for the curveball. If nothing goes wrong, that space becomes catch-up time. If something does, you’re not starting the day from a deficit.
One more habit worth stealing for the invisible load specifically is that if there’s a task you’ve been repeatedly avoiding, the one making everything else feel heavier just by existing, then give it a deadline. Pick a day once the week’s settled, a Tuesday rather than a Friday afternoon. It’s almost always smaller in practice than in your head.
The aim is never to have a perfect system. It’s one that works for you. A flexible, realistic system beats a rigid one you can’t stick to. It’s not about being available less; it’s about being intentional when you are available, and protecting the rest.
Emma Kershaw is the founder of EVA, supporting founders and business owners with time, systems and the invisible load of running a business. Find her at e-v-a.co.uk.
