You have the load on paper. Now sort it into two piles, using one question: is there something I can actually do about this?

Not should I, not whose fault is it — can I act on it, realistically, from where I sit.

• Pile one: things I can act on. Some are small and immediate. Some need a conversation. Some need a decision you’ve been putting off.
• Pile two: things I can’t. The restructure. The sector. Your manager’s manager. The fact that the role is genuinely two jobs.

Both piles get a response. The responses are different — and mixing them up is where a lot of energy goes.

Pile one gets a next step. One concrete action, small enough to actually happen this week. Not a plan for the item — the next physical thing: send the message, book the fifteen minutes, write the first sentence.

Pile two gets something else, and this is the part worth slowing down on. The instinct with an unfixable item is either to keep chewing on it or to pretend it doesn’t cost anything. Both are expensive. What actually helps:

• Name it as a cost you’re carrying rather than a problem you’re failing to solve. That sounds like semantics and it isn’t — the churn from pile two is nearly always about believing you should be fixing it.
• Ask what it changes. An unfixable demand still has implications: what you agree to, how long you stay, what you stop pretending is temporary. Those are decisions, and they’re yours.
• Ask whether it’s actually pile two. Things land in pile two because the whole thing is impossible, but often a piece of it isn’t. You can’t fix the restructure; you might be able to ask one question about where you sit in it.

The most useful thing this sort does is stop pile-two items from eating the energy that pile one needs. Most people spend most of their worry on the things they can’t move — because those are the frightening ones — and arrive at the things they could change with nothing left.

And if nearly everything lands in pile two, that is itself the finding, and it isn’t a failure of the exercise. A job where almost nothing is within your control is a job with a resources problem in the Lesson 2 sense, and no amount of personal technique will resolve it. That points at the next lesson — or at a bigger decision this program isn’t going to pretend it can make for you.