I Didn't Do The Thing Today: On letting go of productivity guilt

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After five years of searching for the secret to productivity, Madeleine Dore discovered there isn’t one. Instead, we’re being set up to fail. I Didn’t Do the Thing Today is the inspiring call to take productivity off its pedestal - by dismantling our comparison to others, aspirational routines, and the unrealistic notions of what can be done in a day, we can finally embrace the joyful messiness and unpredictability of life. Kindness, Madeleine says, is the antidote to burnout. Kindness with ourselves and with others. Whether that’s a chat with the person serving you at the post office, or making a donation to charity, or texting a friend to say hi, incorporating a bit more kindness into our days, rather than busy-ness, can be a nice way of slowing down and remembering what’s important.

For anyone who has ever felt the pressure to do more, be more, achieve more, this antidote to our doing-obsession is the permission slip we all need to find our own way. An antidote to our obsession with busyness, author Madeleine Dore explores the joys of releasing ourselves from the burden of productivity guilt. Full Book Name: I Didn’t Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt to Embrace the Hidden Value in Daily Life After five years of searching for the secret to productivity, Madeleine Dore discovered there isn’t one. Instead, we’re being set up to fail. I Didn’t Do the Thing Today is the inspiring call to take productivity off its pedestal—by dismantling our comparison to others, aspirational routines, and the unrealistic notions of what can be done in a day, we can finally embrace the joyful messiness and unpredictability of life.Obsessing over productivity can mean ignoring the variances in our circumstances – be it our health, financial position, or responsibilities. We can’t expect to recreate the same recipe when we don’t have the same ingredients. Madeleine Dore has done us a huge favour in reframing age-old wisdom and setting it in a very contemporary context. Read it and sigh with relief.” Maybe you don’t start the day by ‘eating the frog’ or doing the most unpleasant thing first, but maybe you start the day with something that’s pure pleasure instead. There’s a fantastic example in the book, about a chef who starts the day with a bowl of porridge with a dollop of clotted cream on top, along with some brown sugar, and he just thinks that’s the best way to start the day because by breakfast, he’s already won the day! A perfect example of prioritizing delight over dread. Maybe we need to stop letting ambition get in our way. Sometimes ambition can be a good thing, but sometimes it can be a pursuit of recognition from others, rather than a focus on doing things that we want to do. It’s obviously not all bad, but maybe being more micro-ambitious, a term that she took from the wonderful Tim Minchin, is a healthier and more flexible approach that allows us to focus in what’s in front of us, in the present instead of what’s next. After five years of searching for the secret to productivity, Madeleine Dore discovered there isn't one. Instead, we're being set up to fail. I Didn't Do the Thing Today is the inspiring call to take productivity off its pedestal--by dismantling our comparison to others, aspirational routines, and the unrealistic notions of what can be done in a day, we can finally embrace the joyful messiness and unpredictability of life.

Not only do our days vary; we vary within them. We all get 24 hours, but they are not available for each of us in the same way: we may work nine-to-five, care for young children, pile one gig upon another, have a longer commute, or have the flexibility of freelancing. It means letting go of expectations, or at least holding them much more lightly and letting things surprise us, which can then allow us to explore what we really want, not just what we think we “should” be doing. Kindness extends to ourselves by knowing that rest is not a bad thing. Hobbies don’t need to be a side-hustles, and we can challenge all the things we tell ourselves that we should do. Otherwise it’s easy to find ourselves too busy to actually enjoy life. There’s a really nice analogy in the book of being like a sponge. Sometimes we’re in absorption mode soaking up, resting, learning, taking in knowledge etc, but too long in absorb mode will leave us kind of sodden and a bit soggy and wet. So we need to be squeezed. We need a bit of pressure to balance us out. In our pursuit of improvement, we are often told that if we could just be more consistent, more disciplined, more productive, we could be better. But a perfectly optimised routine is rarely the grand solution it promises to be, precisely because it is so often aspirational. We can’t expect to re-create the same recipe when we don’t have the same ingredients.She has contributed columns and features to Sunday Life, BBC WorkLife, ArtsHub, 99u, Womankind, Kill Your Darlings, The Design Files, ABC Life and more. Madeleine regularly conducts life experiments and hosts events to explore how creativity isn’t just something we do, but how we approach our lives. After five years of searching for the secret to productivity, Madeleine Dore discovered there isn’t one. Instead, we’re being set up to fail. I Didn't Do The Thing Today is the inspiring call to take productivity off its pedestal—by dismantling our comparison to others, aspirational routines, and the unrealistic notions of what can be done in a day, we can finally embrace the joyful messiness and unpredictability of life.