The Things I Did

My To Do List

This post was originally published September 21, 2023.

Productivity. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with it. It feeds my self-worth, which means that some days I feel on top of the world and others I feel like the world’s biggest failure. I’ve spent a lot of time the past few years trying to detangle my self-worth from my productivity, which has been aided by more reporting on mental health and burnout. I’ve spoken about my experience with both in regards to my writing in my posts When Writing Gets Hard and Truly Terrible Writing. The journey continues, as it probably will all my life, but through my self-reflection and research, I keep coming back to the symbol of my productivity.

My to-do list.

It turns out, you’re not supposed to have many things on your to-do list. I’ve seen reports of having only one thing, no more than five, and the most being nine with everything clearly ranked by priority. Many other reports will make it known that we are not capable of spending most of our day being “productive” and only really have about 4 hours where we can be deeply focused on getting things done.

My trouble comes from what should go on that to-do list. Frequently, I think that I can do things a lot quicker than I actually can, and my list is filled with big, hard, time-consuming tasks that often depend on the same skill (like writing). At the end of the day, I’d cross off one task if I was lucky and resent myself for not doing enough. I thought to myself, how is it that your days pass by and you’re never getting the stuff you want done? So I started a different list that I called: “The Things I Did.”

For a week, I wrote down every little thing that I did from brushing my teeth to going to the park to working on my book. It didn’t matter how small I thought the task was or whether I thought it was easy or hard. I wrote it all down. As it turns out, I do a lot of things every day. Little expenditures of energy are spent on tasks that I take for granted. To function and survive as a human is no easy task, which is why our bodies crave calories and sleep. Here I was, wondering why I was not exceeding my natural output every day, forgetting that I am a high achiever disabled by chronic pain. The fact is. I’m always productive.

Unfortunately, I am not the only one with high expectations for myself. The world continues to function in a way that requires me to continually challenge myself. This is not always a bad thing. The struggle is trying to find the balance between the level of productivity required to survive as a human being and the level of productivity that makes me feel like I am on top of the world. As of now, my to-do list varies in length and subject matter, but I promise myself every weekday to do one hard thing. Sometimes that hard thing is getting out a blog post on time. Sometimes it’s making the call to insurance that I’ve been dreading. Whatever it is, I can rest easy, knowing that I overcame one challenge that day, and am therefore, capable of overcoming whatever the next day’s challenge is too.