snowed under
adjectival phrase; informal

- having so much work that it is difficult to deal with everything

- faced with a large amount of work or numerous other demands

- overwhelmed by something beyond one’s capacity to handle it

Cambridge Dictionary, Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, The American Heritage Dictionary

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PHRASE ORIGIN

The phrasal verb snow under is recorded from 1880. Its image is literal and immediate: heavy snow gradually covers roads, buildings or anything else unable to escape it. The object disappears beneath an accumulation that has become unmanageable.

The figurative meaning developed naturally. A person could be “snowed under” by work, letters, requests or debts—each individual item harmless, but the growing mass overwhelming. The phrase was also used for defeating someone by a very large margin, particularly in elections or sport.

Snow comes from Old English snāw and is related to German Schnee, Dutch sneeuw and Latin nix. The precise circumstances in which snow under first became figurative aren’t securely known. The memorable force of the expression lies in the accumulation: one snowflake—or one email—is rarely the problem.

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UNFINISHED BUSINESS

An unfinished task can interrupt you even while you’re doing something completely unrelated. You’re reading a report, but part of your mind is composing tomorrow’s awkward email or remembering the invoice still unpaid.

Psychologists sometimes connect this with the Zeigarnik effect, named after Bluma Zeigarnik, who studied the mental persistence of interrupted activities in the 1920s. The familiar claim is that unfinished tasks remain more accessible in memory than completed ones. Later studies haven’t always reproduced this memory advantage, so it isn’t an unbreakable law of the mind.

A related finding is more useful. In 2011, psychologists E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that unfulfilled goals produced intrusive thoughts and interfered with unrelated activities. Surprisingly, participants didn’t have to complete the troublesome tasks to quieten them. Forming a specific plan—how, when and where they would act—was enough to reduce the mental interference.

A vague promise such as “I’ll deal with it later” provides little shelter. “I’ll call Petra at ten tomorrow from my office” gives the mind somewhere definite to put the task.

Being busy, then, isn’t always what exhausts us. Sometimes it’s the silent accumulation of things that have no appointed place to land.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

buried, overloaded, overwhelmed, rushed off one’s feet, SNOWED UNDER, swamped

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“I’d love to help, but I’m completely SNOWED UNDER with deadlines this week.”

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