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

by Madeleine Dore

It’s a quiet form of self-sabotage to attempt to do too much at the beginning—to try to hold something that’s too heavy. But one of the greatest antidotes to the overwhelm of expectation is to start small. Expectations can be stifling because they ignore our tendency to make mistakes, to procrastinate, to flail, to be interrupted and distracted. So maybe set the bar lower. Simplify. Be okay with it taking twice as long. Break your expectations into such small steps that you no longer trip over them or are otherwise unable to move forward. Sometimes, when everything feels particularly uncertain, we don’t need another plan—we simply need to be okay with the unknown and do the thing anyway.