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

by Madeleine Dore

It’s unrealistic to think we can be doing the important or fulfilling thing all the time. Sometimes we need to do a bit more thinking, planning, and absorbing to make the juice worth the squeeze. Equally, the squeeze—the radiant action and the times we are in flow—gives what we have absorbed its meaning. It’s where we put what we’ve learned into action, where we turn thinking into writing, study into knowledge, fresh produce into recipes, and solitude into a deeper connection to ourselves and to others. Just as we need to honor the absorb phase, we also need the well-timed squeeze. It makes sense that we might linger in the absorb phase when we face adversity, uncertainty, or exhaustion. We are protecting ourselves. Yet there are also times when we can become saturated with planning, overthinking, and even researching, to the point of inertia. We resist the squeeze we’ve been preparing for and forget that some things don’t need to be overthought. Knowing the difference between needing the absorb and needing the squeeze can be like a dance. Sometimes when I’m stuck and can’t figure out what action to take next, I ask myself whether I need to absorb or whether I need to squeeze.

The key to balance, it is often said, is moderation. But for some of us—myself included—moderation can feel impossible to sustain. Instead of trying to uphold moderation, only to fall into the “if only” spiral, we can embrace our all-or-nothing tendencies.

Maybe oscillating between abstaining and indulgence can be our version of balance. We often try to dilute intensity or excess with moderation, but great things can come from being someone who swings to different sides of the pendulum.

If variety adds meaning to our lives, then maybe the shifts in our day can have a similar effect. We might search for balance as a comfort to ourselves—life can appear easier with a semblance of predictability—but by narrowing our days, keeping things on an even keel, we miss out on the reflections, lessons, and meaning we find in the wobble. Striving for constant stability and productivity limits our freedom to express all that we are and can be—there is an incredible richness in being imbalanced because it is there that we encounter variety.

It’s an important reminder not only to reserve self-judgment when we wobble, but to reserve judgment about somebody else’s wobble—the notion of balance, enjoyment, and how we look after ourselves is different for everyone. Even more reason to find what works for us. Instead of trying to follow someone else’s rules or getting caught up in our own, we can seek things that feel congruent with who we are at this moment in time and wobble as we discover more. We can allow our days to unfold with curiosity rather than judgment. Life is movement, not stagnant balance. Enjoy the slice of leftover cake, enjoy the moments by yourself, enjoy the squeeze, enjoy the absorbing, and enjoy the soup and the biscuits. Be all and everything, or all or nothing. Enjoy whatever is your particular way of wobbling through your days, and learn to value the variety.

What we often overlook when we delay putting an end to our options is that there’s no guarantee we can keep them alive anyway. Eventually, the very options we are contemplating might disappear entirely. Our indecision is a decision.

Barry Schwartz calls the paradox of choice: although more choice often brings more individual freedom, not only is it difficult to choose, but even when we do, we can end up less satisfied than if we had fewer options in the beginning. Perhaps the gravest aspect of the indecision standstill is that it is making us miserable. As Schwartz said in a TED Talk titled “The Paradox of Choice,” “There’s no question that some choice is better than none. But it doesn’t follow from that that more choice is better than some choice.”

Unlike another popular term McGinnis coined, “FOMO”—fear of missing out—which can teach us more about what we want in life, a fear of better options offers very little benefit. We can find ourselves coveting possibilities that may never be within our reach. That’s the thing about options: sometimes the alternatives don’t have to exist for us to become stifled by them. Real or imagined, the most toxic part of decision-making, McGinnis told me, is going over the same options again and again.

we should appreciate that there is meaning to be found in the settling, in arriving at a decision and giving ourselves the opportunity to become comfortable with it. What we settle into doesn’t have to be grand. We can settle into a place, a hobby, a plan for the weekend, a community, a regular dinner with friends or family.

Imposing our own limits can help reduce decision fatigue. We can spend less time sweating the small stuff and have more mental space for the big stuff. Having our own set of predetermined decisions—living frugally, perhaps, or creating a uniform for work—can help reduce the number of trivial decisions we have to make in our days. In turn, we have a greater capacity to consider the important choices, whatever we deem them to be, or meet the urgent and unexpected decisions sprung upon us. But even with the handy hints, at times I’ve still longed for someone to tell me what to do. Indeed, for a long time I would turn to friends, family, and even practical strangers to help make a decision for me, only to find myself with a surplus of conflicting options.

A COLLECTION OF CHOICES FOR MAKING CHOICES For when you don’t know what you want, try to focus on what you want to be—lighthearted, spontaneous, curious, brave. For when you’re second-guessing whether something will make you happy, ask if it will expand or diminish your life. For when you’re caught between two good options, imagine what your future day will look like. If you don’t like the sight of a desk, for example, don’t take the office job. For when you are fearful, make the choice that will put you more into the world and connect you with the people you cherish. For when neither choice is appealing, choose the problem you want to have—or, as Mae West put it, “When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I’ve never tried before.” For trivial decisions, don’t underestimate the simplicity of flipping a coin. Decision-making is like building a muscle, and if we learn to do it well for the small things, we will do it better with the big things, too. For when you’re unsure where a choice will take you, if it’s worth it, or if it will take too long, try to focus instead on what you might learn. The one thing you might never regret is learning something. For when you don’t know where to start, focus on the step in front of you. Do the next necessary thing instead of tripping yourself as you try to look a hundred steps ahead. For when you’re anxious and worried, try to recall your past successes and where you’ve encountered good things before. For when you’re...

regardless of whether we choose the “right” or “wrong” path, we might be very good at convincing ourselves retroactively that we chose correctly. A phenomenon known as “choice-supportive bias” suggests that we have a tendency to ascribe positive attributes to the option we chose and demote whatever option we had to forgo—as

Our encounters with the emotions that tend to niggle at us the most can be our greatest guide. In my conversation with psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel, I learned about using the “change triangle” as a tool to identify our core emotions and use them as pointers for action. We can learn a lot from emotions, yet many of us have developed clever ways to inhibit them—either through shame, guilt, or anxiety—or defend against them through behaviors ranging from procrastination to a deflecting sense of humor. Inhibitory emotions and our defenses are the mind’s way of protecting us from emotional pain and being overwhelmed by feelings, but they often keep us stuck in the spiral.

Working the change triangle is about trying to identify the core emotion beneath our defenses or inhibitory emotions, to feel it, and then to approach it with curiosity, creativity, or compassion. When we think about it this way, extracting ourselves from the comparison spiral becomes an exercise in curiosity—getting closer to the emotion so we can better understand it, feel it, and use it as a guide.

Curiosity can also help diminish empty comparison by revealing to us that something isn’t for us. There’s only one timeline or trajectory that matters—the one with the plateaus, dips, falls, ascents, and redirections: the one that’s yours.

Enriching comparison, by contrast, lights us up to what we want, but it’s generally a slow burn, not a flash in the pan. It can guide us to the thing we didn’t know we longed for or didn’t think we were worthy of. Instead of telling us it’s too late or we have fallen behind, enriching comparison surprises us by whispering, “Maybe we can do that, too.”

We can cast a wide net when we are using comparison to find our secret joy. Comparison can also time-travel, with a little imagination. When we compare, it’s usually in reference to the society we live in or the social circles we move in, which makes it easy for us to feel stuck and confined. I rather liked Annie Raser-Rowland’s liberating idea of comparing ourselves to anyone in history in order to remember that we can do things differently. As she told me, “There are so many human lifestyles throughout time and a lot of wiggle room in who you compare yourself to—you just have to keep reminding yourself that it doesn’t just have to be your best friends.”

More and more, the direction I find myself glancing in isn’t upward or downward, but inward. We tend to spiral in what’s called “upward social comparison,” comparing ourselves to those who appear to be farther ahead. But we can also turn our attention back to where we were a few years ago and cultivate appreciation for where we may be in our own lives now. Instead of comparing timelines and tracking accomplishments, assessing whether we’re ahead or behind, we can create our own scorecard. Who were we yesterday, last year, a decade ago? Perhaps by looking inward instead of at everybody else, we can finally find the value in the messy parts, the rejections, the moments we thought we were behind. These are the experiences that are pivotal in making us who we are today: someone who’s incomparable.

We aren’t solely responsible for stamping our days and lives with expectations—we are surrounded by them. There are those we place on ourselves, societal expectations, cultural expectations, the expectations others have for us (or don’t), and the expectations we imagine they have. Judging our lives based on whether we have fulfilled an expectation can create a gap between our present-day reality and what we think our lives should be. We compare who we are today with who we wish to become and find ourselves once more in the deflating gap of comparison. Expectations, it would seem, lead to misery. This is affirmed when we look up famous quotes on expectations and then find variations on a theme: expectations lead to disappointment.

sometimes our expectations of ourselves or of others can disappoint us, and at other times, they can cloud our view. Hope itself may be a veil—it can prevent us from acknowledging something we fear or consider unjust and, consequently, from doing the work to confront it. Concealing our fears with hope might make things more palatable, but if we avoid inspecting fear and injustice—in ourselves or in the world around us—it can lead to complacency. It’s only in finally seeing what we are afraid of that we can find ways to address it. Perhaps there is a place for pessimism when it comes to our personal expectations. When we acknowledge that a situation will not always be hopeful, or that some expectations are impossible to meet, we can put ourselves in a better position to look for solutions. We can assess our hope—whether it’s having a certain career, finding love, starting a family, achieving creative success—and ask the question we have been avoiding: Can I still find something in my days, some vitality, without this? What if things never change? Can I still find something to enjoy about my life?

Perhaps what’s most corrosive to our ability to feel good about the day is when we keep trying to do so much in a day that we only disappoint ourselves. Expectations are like tiny promises in our days that can knock us over. If we are more realistic about our expectations, we are more likely to keep the promises we make to ourselves and feel good about the things we did do.

Instead of pinning our great hopes onto tomorrow, we can be okay with holding our disappointments in our days: we can find ways to live with them, and maybe we’ll find something great within them, too. We can ask what we want from this day rather than be directed by what we expect the day should be.

We don’t need to abandon all expectations or the hope that comes with them, but instead learn how we can let go of our attachment to particular outcomes. By definition, an expectation is a strong belief that something will happen or will be the case. There’s an element of certainty to an expectation. For better or worse, it’s a feeling that there is a guarantee—it’s a bid for control, when of course we can’t control the future. Just like feelings, expectations shift and move. Yet we are disappointed when something moves beyond our grasp. So we hold on tightly, make plans, or add more shoulds—only for them to shatter. As Brandon Sanderson wrote in The Way of Kings, “Expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack.”

Some level of planning is necessary so we don’t feel like shapeless blobs, but also to manage conflicting priorities, appease demanding schedules, or ensure we don’t delay others. But there is a difference between planning that is preparation and planning that is driven by anxiety, restlessness, or fear of uncertainty.

We cannot rid our futures of uncertainty, but we can loosen our grip on our desire for certainty. We can change our great expectations of our future self and relieve some of the pressure. When I find myself grasping my plans too tightly, I try to soften them into intentions rather than expectations. An intention is lighter—it’s an aim rather than an assumption. It’s a gentle guide, whereas an expectation is a prescriptive outcome. Expectations fixate on how a goal should look—say, to cook the perfect meal—but intentions emphasize the experience around the goal—say, to enjoy the meal with the people you love.

Intentions are less stifling than expectations or rigid plans, I think. Expecting so much of ourselves can curtail our ability to do something—either by exacerbating our feelings of being already behind or by setting us up to fail. When we don’t do something right the first time, or when we fall short of our expectations, we can take it as proof that we’re incapable and never try again.

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.

“Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.”

When we conflate who we are with what we do, it’s perhaps no wonder we crowd numerous shoulds onto our to-do lists—it helps us feel tethered to something. But if to tether is to restrict, do we really want to restrict ourselves and narrow who we are? When we tie who we are to what we do, we can get stuck in an “if only” spiral—we might say we are a runner, for example, but then shame ourselves when we don’t manage to run every day. We make the mistake of labeling ourselves as nouns, when we are really verbs—we are not a runner, but rather a person who runs; we’re not a writer, but a person who writes. Our sense of self doesn’t have to be bundled up with whether we did the thing today—because we are not the things we do.

When I’ve got an inkling that I’m carrying too many shoulds in my days, I’ll often write out my entire to-do list so I can see it on the page—every should, task, commitment, job, project, idea, correspondence, and chore that I can think of. When I survey the list, more often than not I’ll see a page filled with superfluous shoulds—expired ideas, unessential commitments, tasks that can wait. Instead of carrying something over to tomorrow’s to-do list for the tenth time, I can ask: What is essential? What can I cross off? What can I delegate or come back to later?

There is an art to letting go—it requires us to try at something, and sometimes try again, but also know when to cut our losses and move on to the next thing. It’s an art especially when others are intertwined in our obligations. It can be difficult to let go of a should when we feel like we are disappointing people or that someone else might not manage without us. Yet often our attempts to carry someone else’s expectations or plans is simply our own way of grasping for control over the people or things around us. If we can become more comfortable letting go of what is not ours to carry, we create space not only for ourselves to honor our own wants, but also for others to do the same.

Much like the stifling pursuit of trying to make the right decisions, our plans and expectations overlook that the most enriching opportunities in life aren’t something we can plan for—most things in life are a surprise. Whether it’s the people we come to love, friendships, career paths, or new interests, most of the things that give our lives meaning we never saw coming.

Whimsy requires us to inspect what’s around us and see where something leads. It breaks down the idea that productivity is the only measure of our worthiness, or even that there must be a measurable outcome for our efforts. Our whims take us to new places—and often require that we go out on a limb and step into something that is not yet defined, something uncertain, whether that means facing the blank page or investing our time in a new project.

Following a whim can be as simple as changing our mind or experiencing something unusual. Have a conversation, either with someone you know well or with a stranger. Change your working location from the living room to the kitchen so that you see something different. Change your route to the office, and stop at this garden, look at that bird. We can routinely change our routine, adding or subtracting new habits, trying something new each month. Being whimsical mimics the unpredictable nature of our days and requires that we step into the world in a new way, inviting more experience into our lives as a result.

We’ve internalized the idea that to be content, we must always be doing something—we need to be busy in order to be productive, successful, or worthy. In turn, we’ve become over-reliant on being busy because it provides reassurance that our lives are moving and, therefore, meaningful. But if we’re perpetually caught in a cycle of doing more, we can be too busy to enjoy life.

This needless busyness can be one of the greatest stumbling blocks to attending to the fulfilling thing. It’s perhaps no wonder—it’s easier to attend to something that has a deadline than to something limitless and unstructured. It can seem more pressing to attend to someone else’s needs, wants, or demands than to our own wishes, pursuits, and dreams. It can be less daunting to attend to the things we feel confident doing than to the things we are unsure about. It seems simpler to begin the things that have some semblance of certainty than to step into the great unknown.

This scarcity of free time can contribute to productivity pressure: we have so little discretionary time available that we feel we must not waste it. Fulfilling but nonessential activities start to feel like a waste of time—reading, going for a walk, puttering in the garden, snuggling on the couch with a lover. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that these are the very things that don’t cost a thing. The best things in life might be free, but we don’t have the time for them. When the equation is flipped—we earn less and have more time—the guilt can soften. We might not question spending an afternoon wandering around because we have the time.

Just as the sources of burnout are many—an infectious pressure to be busy, for instance, or the precarious or uncertain nature of work, or troubling external events and circumstances—so are our experiences of it. The two-phase description by writer Honor Eastly has long stuck with me: crispy and burned out. The crispy phase precedes burnout and occurs when you are stretching yourself but still enjoying the process. Perhaps it’s a state of flow, or the motivation for the project is fueling long hours. But there’s a risk—you’re moving but starting to catch on fire. The second phase comes when movement grinds to a halt—you feel stifled and burned. This two-phase framing for burnout helped me recognize burnout amnesia in myself—the tendency to forget that if I keep running when I’m on fire, I might get burned. It’s helped me recognize my own signals of crispiness before I land all the way in phase two: waking up at three in the morning worrying about a crowded to-do list, an intolerance for mess and noise, feeling alone, despondent, ruminating on what other people think. When I spot these signals, I can turn to the things that might help me cool off—asking others for help, taking deep breaths, exercising, resting, switching on an auto-email responder.

When we don’t count the work of living as work, we can quickly reach exhaustion and have no idea why. At the end of our tether but not realizing it, we wonder why such simple things feel both urgent and impossible. Responding to a text message is overwhelming. A gentle request feels like an unthinkable demand. Mopping the floor would be a nightmare. Add a layer of shame, and the conclusion is that our ineptitude must be to blame.

If we have internalized the idea that we should be busy all the time, or see no escape from the busyness of daily life, how do we find any reprieve from the consequent burnout? It’s tempting to turn to a productivity hack or a new system to organize our lives, but these are like Band-Aids if we don’t address our collective resistance to what we need most: rest.

Perhaps we resist rest not because we can’t find the time, but because we fear the boredom that can accompany doing nothing. But boredom is an important part of our lives. Often it’s used as a catch-all for feeling frustrated or upset or unfocused, but true boredom can be an important signal that something does not feel meaningful. As researcher and philosophy professor Andreas Elpidorou wrote in a journal article titled “The Bright Side of Boredom,” “In the absence of boredom, one would remain trapped in unfulfilling situations, and miss out on many rewarding experiences. Boredom is both a warning that we are not doing what we want to be doing and a ‘push’ that motivates us to switch goals and projects.” What are we missing by being so busy that we don’t have time to rest or to be bored? While boredom can feel uncomfortable, we crave those moments of mind-wandering because they allow us to notice and exhale. What would we notice if we allowed ourselves to be bored from time to time? When we allow ourselves to be bored, we might be able to solve those very frustrations that we were mistaking for boredom. We can seek boredom by making space in our days to simply be with ourselves or have an aimless conversation.

whether we feel ease or resistance toward rest has a lot to do with how it was modeled for us when we were growing up. If, as a kid, your weekends were spent relaxing on the couch, for example, you might have an easier time leaning into rest as an adult; if they were all go-go-go, on the other hand, you might well feel like you’re being lazy if you don’t keep up that intensity. For those of us who feel unease at doing nothing, perhaps we need to lean the other way—into the lazy. Maybe it’s worth inspecting why we’ve given laziness negative connotations and what circumstances, situations, or ideas lie beneath our judgments of it. Are we really being lazy, or have we internalized the idea that we should be working all the time? Are we really being lazy, or did we have a terrible night’s sleep? Are we really being lazy, or are we contending with ill health, a poor financial situation, an overwhelming schedule? Are we really being lazy, or do we just not want to do the thing—and maybe we don’t have to? Instead of lumping together our varying circumstances and the root causes of our behavior in the category of laziness, perhaps it needs its time in the spotlight. What if we wore a good night’s sleep, an afternoon nap, taking a sick day, or a weekend spent enjoying the sweetness of nothing as a badge of honor?

“How about we all embrace our inner sloth by slowing down, being more mindful, reducing wasteful convenience, being economical with our energy, recycling creatively, and reconnecting with nature,” she says. “Otherwise, I fear, it will be us humans that turn out to be ‘the stupidest animals that can be found in the world.’”

Viewing rest as self-replenishing rather than selfish might help ease the guilt or shame some of us feel for taking a break, and instead help us see that it’s part of the rhythm of the day. It also shifts the frame so we see the inherent value of rest—we need it to restore and replenish but also to rethink. The trap we can find ourselves in is that we are too busy to rest, so we don’t have the time to rethink our circumstances and come up with another way to be. Rest might be the key to releasing us from the busyness trap because it’s the very thing that can help us see we’re in it. To allow ourselves more rest, we can perhaps broaden our idea of it so we can find what is within our reach, depending on our circumstances but also our preferences. Rest can take different forms—it doesn’t have to be an expensive retreat or ten-step self-care ritual. The way we experience rest varies from person to person, as does the type of rest each of us needs. In her TED Talk “The Real Reason We Are Tired and What to Do About It,” Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith talks about how we have incorrectly combined the concepts of sleep and rest, when sleep is simply one of the seven types of rest we need: physical, mental, sensory, creative, emotional, social, and spiritual. We can determine the rest we need by looking at where we are using most of our energy in the day. Perhaps rest for you is getting more sleep. Or maybe it is walking in nature, a morning of solitude, playing an instrument, or watchin...

When we resist hitting the reset button, things can begin to deteriorate, including ourselves. Adams encouraged me when I told her about a project that I was thinking of stopping: “Do it; otherwise you’re going to have to soak it in antiseptic. It’s going to turn infected and it will be awful. Just rip it off. Do it, because as soon as you do it, as soon as you get rid of all of that, you will breathe.” She was right. I let go of the project, and even though I felt I was disappointing other people, I felt lighter. New things came to me once I made the space, just as she had assured me they would.

Maybe we can’t cancel our plans or stop doing certain things, but we can experiment with not adding more to the list. As writer and entrepreneur David Cain said, “What if, for a whole year, you stopped acquiring new things or taking on new pursuits. Instead, you return to abandoned projects, stalled hobbies, unread books, and other neglected intentions, and go deeper with them than you ever have before.”