When productivity has become closely connected to self-worth, rest can feel strangely threatening. You may sit down to watch a show and immediately think about what you could be accomplishing. You may take a day off and spend half of it feeling guilty. You may even find yourself turning rest into another goal: I need to get better at resting.
This is one of the more frustrating aspects of hustle culture. Even the attempt to escape productivity culture can become another productivity project. Rest is not valuable because it makes you more productive tomorrow. You do not need to justify it by explaining what it will eventually allow you to accomplish. Rest has value because you are a human being who has limits.
What If You Don’t Actually Need To Do More?
For someone who is accustomed to setting goals and pushing themselves, this can be a difficult question to sit with.
What if the problem isn’t that you haven’t found the right routine yet? What if you don’t need another productivity system? What if the life you are trying to build doesn’t actually require you to become more efficient at doing everything?
Sometimes the work is less about figuring out how to accomplish more and more about examining the beliefs underneath the drive to keep accomplishing.
Do you believe you are only valuable when you are useful? Do you feel guilty when you are not contributing? Do you compare yourself to people who appear to be doing more? Do you have difficulty recognizing what you’ve accomplished because you’re already focused on the next thing? Do you allow yourself to stop only after you’ve reached the point of exhaustion? These questions can tell you a great deal about your relationship with productivity.
You Can Still Be Ambitious Without Making Yourself the Project
Moving away from hustle culture does not mean you have to give up your goals or become less ambitious.You can want to grow. You can enjoy your work. You can pursue meaningful goals and take pride in what you accomplish.The difference is whether those things are expressions of what matters to you or requirements you place on yourself in order to feel okay. A healthier relationship with productivity leaves room for both effort and limitation. You can have a productive day and still be tired. You can have an unproductive day and still have value. You can change your goals when your circumstances change. You can decide that something is good enough without having to maximize it. And perhaps most importantly, you can allow yourself to exist without constantly trying to improve yourself.
Maybe “Enough” Is Not a Number
One of the hardest things about feeling like you’re never doing enough is that there is no obvious point at which the feeling resolves. There will always be something else you could accomplish.
At some point, you have to decide that enough is not something you eventually reach after completing every possible task. It is a boundary you learn to recognize. That might mean asking yourself, What actually needs to get done today? What can wait? What would I choose if I weren’t trying to prove something? What do I have the capacity for right now?
Those questions may feel very different from: How much more can I fit into this day? And that difference matters. You are allowed to have goals without constantly chasing them. You are allowed to be ambitious without being exhausted. You are allowed to want more from your life without deciding that the person you are right now is not enough.
Sometimes a meaningful life is not the one in which you accomplish the most. Sometimes it is the one in which you finally have enough room to actually experience what you’ve accomplished.
Emily Reimer
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