Work Expands to Fill its Container
We’ve already talked about the fantasy of completing our to-do lists—how we gatekeep our own rest, fun, and fulfillment until after we’ve reached that vague, slippery finish line.
Here’s another sneaky thing about our to-do’s: they tend to grow however big we let them.
Do you remember learning about the three basic states of matter—liquid, solid, gas? One of the defining characteristics of gases is that they expand to fill their container. Tasks do the same thing. There’s been a term for this since the 1950s—Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” And I don’t think it’s just time. I think our “container” can also be defined by our mental space, our energy, our willpower, even a portion of our identity.
Our tasks tend to take up whatever we give them. If you give a task a day, it’ll take a day. If you give your to-do list your soul, it’ll take that too.
But driven, high-achieving, perfectionistic types tend to have a hard time defining a container—or pruning what goes inside it. Every task feels maximally important. How do you edit down your list if everything feels essential? And then, as soon as a little space opens up, we fill it. Another task, another obligation, another thing that “just makes sense” to add.
Now pardon me while we talk about t-shirts for a second.
You probably know what it’s like to have an overstuffed t-shirt drawer. It’s hard to close, or maybe it doesn’t fully close at all. The shirts get wrinkled, and it’s hard to find the one you actually want. Or they get shoved to the back and disappear in the nether. And yet, every shirt feels like it has a reason to stay—one is for yard work, one is from your favorite concert—so eliminating anything feels a little fraught.
Every shirt feels important. That’s how this happens.
Photo by Ron Lach via Pexels.com
Your to-do list works the same way. The tasks are the shirts. The drawer is your container: your hours, your energy, maybe your sense of self.
So imagine emptying the drawer completely. Lay everything out on the bed. Then start putting things back, one by one, in order of importance. Your favorite t-shirt goes in first. Then the second most important, then the third.
And then you stop when the drawer is about three-quarters full. The important part is that you leave some empty space.
All the shirts left on the bed can go somewhere else. Maybe some are appropriate to toss or donate, maybe some should be stored in a box in the garage. The point is that this drawer—this container—has room in it.
Because life happens: a new task appears, or something takes longer than expected, or energy dips and priorities shift. A drawer with no space cannot accommodate reality, but a drawer with space can.
The challenge of the over-achiever will always be over-stuffing their container. There will always be the drive to over-commit, to add on, to accomplish, to perpetually refine. So the life-long task of the over-achiever is to protect the blank space. To guard it like it’s a fragile and precious object, and to vigilantly thwart off whatever might sneak away with it.
This is also where it starts to feel uncomfortable. A lot of us feel low-grade dread when we’re facing real down time, with no “productive” tasks in front of us. We reach for our phones, invent new tasks. We slip back into the familiar rhythm of doing, because it feels safer than not doing.
We’ll talk about that discomfort next week; what to do when it feels so hard to rest or to let ourselves have fun after we’ve been trained to fill every container we’re given.
But for now, the big idea is to fill our containers with the most important tasks first. And then to leave some blank space, and protect it like gold.
© 2026 Summer Hopkins Myers | Already Good
This work is original and protected. Sharing links is welcome; unattributed reproduction and LLM training is not.
