I Had a Spreadsheet for Everything and Still Drowned

There's a kind of work almost every mother does that nobody ever sees.

The planning. The remembering. The coordinating. Knowing there's one clean uniform left, the field trip form is due Friday, and we're out of the one yogurt the toddler will actually eat.

It all lives in the same place: your head. And it is exhausting in a way that never shows up on a to-do list.

I didn't have a name for it for years. I just knew I was drowning.

How I got here

Back in 2018, I left nannying and got hired at a small startup. It was lean, so I wore every hat there was. I worked closely with the CEO and got a front-row seat to what it actually takes to build a business. Customer experience. Product. Problem after problem after problem.

And I loved it. There's an energy to building something. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think I always quietly hoped I'd build something of my own one day.

Then in 2020, I got the best title I've ever had.

Mom.

I had no idea that title was going to lead me here.

The year I burned out

In 2022, I hit a wall. And when I say burned out, I mean crying in the car, questioning whether I could keep my career at all. I seriously thought about quitting.

Before I torched everything, my mom said something simple: "What if you just take twelve weeks off and see where things land?"

So I did. And in those twelve weeks, I figured out something I really did not want to be true:

No matter how hard I tried, I could not do everything.

And believe me, I tried. I had spreadsheets. Beautiful, color-coded spreadsheets. Time blocks down to five-minute increments. Nap schedules. Activity schedules. Systems on top of systems.

And I was still drowning.

Naming the thing

Here's the part that's almost embarrassing: I can thank my Instagram feed for finally giving me the words.

Somewhere between the funny reels and the honest posts from other moms, I saw it. Mental load. The invisible work mothers carry every single day.

That was it. That was the thing that had been crushing me for years, and it finally had a name. And once I could name it, I could start doing something about it.

What actually helped

Two things.

Build your village. Most of us don't live near family anymore, which means the village we used to inherit, we now have to build. On purpose. And it goes both ways: you create the support, and you become the support for someone else. You share the story. You help another mom feel a little less alone in it.

Learn to delegate. This one was wild for me, because at first it felt like cheating. Handing someone a task I could obviously do myself felt lazy. And I did not want to be lazy.

But slowly it clicked:

Delegation isn't laziness. It's how you make room for the things that actually matter.

Once I stopped white-knuckling every little task, I could start saying yes again. Yes to my family. Yes to the ideas I actually wanted to build. Yes to the people and causes I cared about.

Your turn, and I'll warn you, this one is a little crazy

For one week, keep a notebook. A real one, or the notes app on your phone. And every single time you do something, jot it down. Every task. Every "I need to remember to..." Every tiny decision. The uniform, the yogurt, the field trip form, the text you had to send, the appointment you quietly booked in your head at 6am.

It sounds unhinged. It kind of is. But do it for a full week, and I promise you the list will be insane. You will not believe how much you are carrying.

That is the whole point. You cannot delegate what you cannot see, and most of this has been invisible even to you.

So write it all down first. Then look at the whole ridiculous, beautiful list and ask one question: what on here could be done by someone other than me?

Now, I know exactly what you're thinking, because I thought it too: I can't afford to hand any of this off to a person.

So don't. Hand it to AI instead.

AI won't do the whole job, but it will do the part that's stuck in your head. It won't drive to the store, but it will build the grocery list from your meal plan. It won't book the camp, but it will research your options and hand you a shortlist so you just pick. It won't throw the party, but it will draft the plan, the timeline, and the invite text.

That's the whole trick. The exhausting part was almost never the doing. It was the deciding, the remembering, the figuring out. That is the mental load. And that part, you can delegate for free.

Go make your list. You might be surprised how much of it you were never supposed to be carrying.

P.S. If you do the notebook week and end up staring at an overwhelming pile, I made a little thing that sorts it for you: The Brain Dump, $2.95. Dump it in or snap a photo of your notebook, and it splits everything into what only you can do, what to hand off, what to batch, and what AI can just take (with the AI part already done). But even if you never touch it, please do the notebook week. Seeing it is the whole point.

Next time

I want to talk about the part nobody warns you about: delegation is uncomfortable. Sometimes it's slower. Sometimes it gets done differently than you would have done it. Sometimes letting go is genuinely harder than just doing it yourself.

So next week, the honest version. The downsides of handing things off, and how to push through them without giving up on the whole idea.

Until then, start your list. Five things.

And if this one landed, do the most village thing there is: send it to a mom who needs it.