I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

by Madeleine Dore

For many of us, our days have become containers for internalized capitalism, or the pervading sense that what we do is tied to our worth.

When we conflate productivity with worthiness, what we do is never enough. We can always do more, and there is always more to do.

We’re running just to stand still, and we’re missing the point. We’re doing all this work to improve ourselves, only to go on judging ourselves for being imperfect.

The English word perfect comes from the Latin verb perficio, which means “to finish, complete, carry out, or achieve.” When we pursue perfection in our days and in ourselves, we’re creating an impossible standard. We’ve taken what’s incomplete as proof there is something wrong with us, when in fact being imperfect is an inevitable part of being human. We blame ourselves for not being exactly where we think we should be. We berate ourselves for inactivity. We shrink in our self-comparison to others. We doubt our decisions. We become so stifled by the pressure of being productive that we sometimes don’t do anything at all. Rather than making us better, this “doing obsession” leaves us feeling overwhelmed, burned out, dissatisfied, inadequate, and alone. When others wear what they do as a badge of honor—talking in terms of busyness, of having a packed schedule, of accolades and accomplishments—we feel inadequate by comparison, yet under pressure to do the same. Doing, doing, doing, all just to keep up, to prove we are worthwhile—yet we never quite feel that we get there. In the swirl of it all, it’s difficult to see that we’re being set up to fail. We’re told to work hard in a society that undervalues our labor. We’re being told to self-optimize in a culture that also tells us we’ll never be enough. Instead, we need to buy, pursue, or do this thing if we’re to have any hope of reaching contentment—all the while, we’re chasing a shadow. If we aren’t benefiting from our overwor...

Perhaps, instead of trying to optimize, we can learn to reroute the guilt, anxiety, and shame we encounter on days like these and accept ourselves as imperfect people simply experiencing the day.

We’ve mistaken doing things—being “productive”—as the measure of a day well spent, when really that’s just one of many by-products of living well.

Productive work is not merely what makes us money, either. It also refers to the things that bring us emotional satisfaction or a sense of achievement—renovating a home, cooking for people we love, studying. Being unproductive is equally amorphous, especially as it can be the moments of idleness or rest that yield insight, meaning, and satisfaction, too.

Perhaps we don’t want to be more productive in our days, but more fecund—that is, more capable of producing new growth, but not always in producing mode.

To be fecund, we need to be nourished. This view shifts the emphasis away from the things we accomplish and toward the things that feed us: how well we have slept, how dedicated we are to something, how kind, how assertive, how generous, how well we treat the people we love, how much we learn, how resilient we are. We so often overlook these parts of the day, but it’s the very mulch that we need to yield growth.

If there was a resounding insight I gained after sifting through people’s days, it’s that nobody has all the answers; nobody knows what they’re doing; and everybody is looking at everybody else, trying to keep up, adjusting where necessary. We all stumble; we all make mistakes; we all have days where we didn’t do the thing.

I’ve had too many days to count that have been flattened by productivity guilt. They follow a pattern: there is the thing I should be doing, but for whatever reason I find myself not doing the thing at this time, so instead I don’t do anything. Instead of turning my attention to something else that can be done, the day seems to evaporate as I sit, stifled by the taunt I didn’t do the thing today, I didn’t do the thing today. Wouldn’t it be more satisfying to at least try to enjoy the day for what it did bring, instead of washing it away with guilt?

If productivity narrows our days, creativity expands them. Creativity doesn’t follow a plan but has its own ebb and flow. Instead of confining a day to doing, it enlivens us to the ways we can do it differently. Creativity can be the antidote to the anxiety, guilt, and shame we can encounter because it responds to what arises in our day rather than prescribes it. The creative process itself reflects this. In his book The Art of Thought, British psychologist Graham Wallas outlined the four stages of the creative process. There’s the preparation stage, where we gather inspiration and research; the incubation stage, where we step away and allow connections to simmer; the illumination stage, where a solution often spontaneously arrives in an “aha” moment; and the verification stage, where we take necessary action and do the thing. There are no checkboxes for the creative process, but rather a constant oscillation among these various stages—and arguably many others. In this nonlinear cycle of gathering, stepping away, arriving, and doing, we can take away our self-judgment about where we are and allow for a natural ebb and flow. Instead of rushing to the part when we are “done” or discarding fragments of our day just because there isn’t a clear link to output, creativity can help us embrace what is not yet done. In place of the guilt, anxiety, or shame we might feel when we didn’t do the thing, we have a more malleable, flexible, and open guide for our days. With the creative p...

Living creatively, then, means to live flexibly and openly, not sequentially.

The pressure to optimize our days has led some of us to revere elaborate routines to the point where they’ve become precarious structures built atop our aspirations to be better. Personally, I’ve long made a pastime of drafting ideal daily routines for myself, filling row after row of my notepad with perfectly timed steps, convinced that if I could just get my routine right, I could get my life right.

The aspirational routine to which we’re pinning our hopes of being better is more like a mirage. Although we strive for it, we rarely reach what it promises, and the reason for this is the variance inherent in our days—in our energy, in our interests, in our interactions, in our everyday chaos. A perfectly ordered life will always remain outside the imperfect reality of our daily lives. We can place so much emphasis on adhering to an aspirational order of things, but often the day has other ideas. We shouldn’t bear yet another layer of guilt, anxiety, or shame because we haven’t followed a routine that might have been too stringent in the first place.

The best days, I find, aren’t the ones when I’ve crossed off everything on my to-do list or adhered to the perfect schedule, but rather when I’ve experienced a surprise, a flirtation, a new idea, an encounter with flow. Only when the tower has fallen over can we appreciate each individual piece instead of focusing only on how perfectly they might stack up.

Routines are not for everyone. There’s nothing inherently better about being someone who can stick to a routine. It doesn’t make you smarter, more likable, more fulfilled, more generous. Besides, as musician Ella Hooper reminded me, a routine isn’t always filled with “good” habits: “I do have some things that I do every day—and they are mainly my foibles.” By that logic, there’s nothing inferior about being someone who doesn’t have a routine. In fact, as I’ve observed, we can fold our own version of joy, discipline, and contentment into our days without one.

Instead of trying to play catch-up, maybe we should simply shrug and get on with it. Doing so can open us up to possibility. It shifts the focus from what we didn’t do today to what can happen today. Our output ebbs and flows, too, depending on the task at hand: sometimes we seem to get so much out of a day; sometimes we don’t know where the day went.

even when we embrace that routine is not for us, we may still need structures to help us do the things we want to do in the hours we have. Having no set pattern can bring more freedom, but it also brings uncertainty-fueled anxiety. It can be a difficult task to create our patterns on our own—perhaps this is why it can be hard to meet our own deadlines. So how do we best set ourselves up to do the thing without creating the same rigid ideals we tumble over?

Our days improve not because things are done in perfect order, but when we are present to whatever is in them. Sometimes that means leaving a checkbox unticked for the day; sometimes it means giving yourself permission to do another thing instead of remaining splayed out on the carpet like a starfish, lamenting the thing you haven’t done. Sometimes it’s simply reminding yourself that it’s okay to be higgledy-piggledy because the way you approach your day is your own and nobody else’s.

“Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”

Time feels slippery in part because our perception of time changes. Time itself is a measure of change. It is not passing by us; we are passing by it, comparing the moment before and the moment after. We can perceive time either prospectively, while an experience is happening, or retrospectively, but time also varies depending on how we feel about an experience. Time flies when we are having fun in the moment, but our memories of such novel experiences can make them seem longer because there is more to look back on.

Perhaps, instead of filling time, we can inspect whether what we fill it with creates a sense of fulfillment. It’s not that we don’t have enough hours in the day for what’s on our to-do list—although that can certainly be the case, of course—but rather we don’t inspect what’s on the to-do list often enough, or question what goes on it in the first place. If “time is how you spend your love,” as Zadie Smith wrote in On Beauty, then perhaps it’s worth asking how we can manage our love rather than our time.

While we are waiting for the perfect swath of time to arrive, we miss the time we do have for the fulfilling thing—and postpone the enlivening act of doing things for ourselves.

we have to ask ourselves from moment to moment what we want to be doing. Perhaps once more we have to learn to occupy our time—to live in it—rather than optimize it. Occupying our time requires that we take it for ourselves. While the rhetoric of “it’s all up to you” overlooks that structural inequalities require structural solutions, perhaps we can find some agency in contemplating what is ours to grasp in days.

There’s one caveat to this attempt to swiftly grab time: as soon as we think we have it, it slips from our grasp. With that in mind, perhaps it’s worth finding a more malleable representation of time than that which a clock provides. I’m fond of author Robert Dessaix’s description of time as a “splodge.” As he wrote in his memoir, What Days Are For, “A liberating way to view time, I find, is as splodges lying in clusters all around me. Instead of hopping obediently from link to link along a chain toward extinction, I pause in a puddle of it here and wallow in a pool of it there.”

It can be tempting, when we have a spare thirty minutes, to convince ourselves that it’s not enough time to do something, but this ignores the benefits of just making a start.

Often, when we worry about wasting time, we are comparing ourselves to how productive we assume other people are. But I have a suspicion that most people are “wasting” more time than they let on. People often hide that they are time-wasters, which perpetuates the sense each of us feels that everyone is using their time well except us.

Even the notion of time passing us by can fling us into worry about all the time we’ve let pass by. What has been helpful for me in such moments is to remember that time cannot be wasted in advance, a sentiment I’ve borrowed from Arnold Bennett. In How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, Bennett writes, “The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career. . . . You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.”

every supposedly useless day, every supposedly useless hour can still be valuable. It can be valuable thinking time, akin to putting savings away in the bank that will accrue and be there to withdraw when you’re ready. As July said, the “useless” days can be preparation: “You can’t do it today, you are just not smart enough, you have to accrue more time before you suddenly have the whole idea. That is how it is for me—it’s a whole lot of misery but these days I just think, well, great, another miserable day in the bank.”

We’re quick to label preparation as procrastination, and we easily overlook that things take the time they take. Some days we may only spend an hour doing the thing, but it can take all day to set ourselves up for that one potent hour. The time we spend thinking about doing the work can be a necessary part of the process of doing it.

Sometimes what can look like a block is just a work process. Things are always on the way to us, even if they haven’t yet arrived. We can be patient with the time this expedition can take, knowing we will be better placed to receive them when we are more prepared.

When something rolls over to the next day’s to-do list again and again, there may be a reason. I’ve seen this in my own projects. There have been times when I’ve found myself putting off something like starting a podcast or writing a book proposal and berating myself for not doing it week after week. It’s only when I’ve stopped pushing for something to be done, when I’ve taken it off my to-do list and let it take the time it takes, that the insight and knowledge I needed arrived on its own timeline. In almost all instances, this loosened grip on a thing, and patience toward it, has made the doing of the thing far less strained.

when it’s self-sabotage, I find myself not doing anything at all because I’m not doing the thing I ought to do; when it’s patience, I can turn to another thing and trust there will be a right time to return to the something. I remind myself of what writer and artist Marieke Hardy told me she’s come to learn: “If the creativity is not coming to you for a project, then do something else and trust that it will get done another time.”

Perhaps we can favor doing things more slowly and with more consideration. We can put less on our to-do lists so we don’t entrap ourselves with more to rush through. We can do another thing if one thing isn’t ready yet. Instead of pursuing instant success, we can take our time with the fulfilling things. As I learned from designer Debbie Millman, anything worthwhile takes a long time.

We often ask ourselves where the time goes, and no one really knows. But for things to be worthwhile, for making good times, for things to be timeless, we have to allow them to take the time they take. This doesn’t mean that we have to make them perfect, or wait for the perfect moment, or be perfectly optimized. The fruits of our labor might not reveal themselves in a day—some days it can look like we didn’t do anything at all—but the knowledge we put in the bank is priceless. So trust the timing of things—trust the timing of your life.

Ambition can create in us an avalanche of dissatisfaction, with ourselves and with our days. By its very definition, it describes a state of being—be it successful, wealthy, or famous—that we don’t yet possess. Instead of finding fulfillment in what we currently have, we are entranced by the allure of what we could have—or what’s next.

To lack ambition is often regarded as a flaw in character—a sign of complacency or timidity. But I’ve come to see that it’s often our ambition, rather than our lack of it, that can perpetuate disappointment. Ambition can convince us that we can play every part, strive for every accolade, pursue every coveted opportunity. But this can come at a cost: we forgo what we enjoy for something we deem more noteworthy. Instead of taking a moment to uncover what we really want, we keep up a pace that helps us maintain the appearance of success, hurtling toward an image of ourselves or the shadow of someone else, but in doing so, drift farther and farther away from what we really want to be doing.

Whereas ambition fixates on external recognition—that proverbial gold star—drive is rooted in what we do and how we do it. It’s not about reaching the top in competition with those around us; it’s about doing our best.

Satisfaction in our ambitions is contingent on them being fulfilled; drive brings a satisfaction in taking the steps toward something—in doing our best. Drive is also something we control. We can’t guarantee the outcomes of our ambitious striving, but we take our drive with us wherever we go. This differs from “being driven,” I think. Being driven has a target, whereas our drive doesn’t go away when we finish something, fail, or experience rejection—it continues to propel us.

Rather than getting caught up in lofty ambitions, being micro-ambitious plants us in the present so that we pay attention to what we want to achieve today or in this hour. It’s about being content with small steps rather than getting overwhelmed by a big, audacious goal. It focuses on the doing of something rather than the recognition or reward. When we simply focus on the next small, necessary step, the rest will often follow. As journalist David Carr said in a 2014 commencement address at the University of California, Berkeley, “Don’t worry about the plot to take over the world. Just do what is in front of you, and do it well.”

We may know on some level there’s no peak of the mountain we will reach when our lives are complete, but sometimes we orientate our lives toward the illusion anyway. Throughout our days, we might tell ourselves that life will be better when we get that promotion, leave our job, lose weight, finish this project, win that award—when we finally arrive. But the truth is that we never arrive. Not when we get that job, complete that project, find a partner, move into that house, make more money. Because even when we do achieve such things, we are always looking to the next thing, or lamenting the inevitable plateau of a specific ambition.

Starting with the end in mind can prove useful in taming our sense of overwhelm, but when it comes to our ambitions and goals, it can also exacerbate frustration, disappointment, and anxiety because there is no end in sight. The concept of “teleoanticipation,” a term coined in 1996 by German physiologist Hans-Volkhart Ulmer, suggests that when we can anticipate the end of a task, we stagger our expenditure of energy in order to sustain the doing of that task. But what happens when there is no end, like in our ambitious pursuits? Or when the sense of arrival remains elusive?

Balance, by definition, is the process of achieving or maintaining equilibrium. This can often be interpreted as a simple equation: when there is too much work, we must add some rest. But what we overlook when striving for balance is that what’s at either end of the scale isn’t like-for-like. As comedian Jacqueline Novak put it in an episode of the podcast she co-hosts, POOG, “My wellness will not be homogenous; my balance will be the tiny thousand-pound nail on one side of the scale and six thousand grapes on the other.”

What if, instead of striving for balance and stability, we embrace the wobble? Rather than striving for a life of perfect order, we can wobble between those tasks and commitments that are most meaningful, pressing, or simply desirable in each moment. Rather than setting rules primed for balance and perpetually failing, we can wobble among different habits, responsibilities, and interests. We can apply self-awareness rather than self-regulation to the things to which we give our time and attention, instead of simply checking boxes. This means we can still identify the things that have proven to steady us—whether that’s eating well, meditating, going for a morning swim, getting a coffee from that friendly barista—but we can also acknowledge that these things won’t always neatly stack up in perfect harmony each day. Wobbling is a process of constant adjustment—you can be moving toward equilibrium and acknowledge that you don’t necessarily find yourself settled there. It’s a dance between diligence and flexibility, adding and subtracting. It’s an act of balancing rather than balance itself.

We’re bound to be inconsistent because our daily experiences, emotions, and desires are inconsistent. Yet we often confuse intensity with consistency, further muddling this idea of balance.

Consistency doesn’t have to be perfect; rather, it’s an accumulation of what we do over time. As British novelist and thinker C. S. Lewis supposedly once observed, “Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back everything is different?” Balance is similar. We might feel that we wobble from day to day, but if we take a longer view, we can find that we have been balancing the various parts of our lives all along.

Starting small by forgiving our day-to-day wobbles might prepare us for the bigger, more unpredictable knocks that life presents. We can learn to let a wobble just be a wobble, adjust, and move on. We can stop being so hard on ourselves for being human—for feeling tired, for skipping meditation, for taking longer to rest and recover. We don’t need to let our entire lives reverberate around us because of a wobble. We can continue with our day and take it all in—wobbles and all.

Absorbing isn’t something to lament or hurry through, but a crucial ingredient for inspiration and restoration. Whether it’s writing, problem-solving, or recharging before a string of social events, when we skip over the absorb phase, it can lead to what Beneba Clarke calls “dead time”: “If I haven’t thought enough about something in my head and I haven’t conceptualized it enough, what I put on the page is not likely to be brilliant. It’s taken me a long time to see there is a strong point in going for a long walk, getting some fresh air, and thinking about how I can write a story.”

Productivity guilt, anxiety, or shame is a common companion in the absorb phase because we live in a society that favors the squeeze—the busy, the doing, the having-something-to-show. We’ve put activity on a pedestal, when thinking is just as important. We typically label absorbing as procrastination, but as we might remember from Miranda July’s bank metaphor, it’s often that we simply need to accrue more time. Often we don’t allow ourselves the time to think because it doesn’t count as work, either by our own or by society’s definition. But the best ideas don’t come from frantic activity; they come from the processing we do beforehand. The absorb phase is where we make novel connections and have flashes of insight.