I Didn't Do The Thing Today On letting go of productivity guilt
Reviews
Lots of references from different people which actually proves that you are not the only one /not doing the thing today/ !! There are books meant to be read at an irregular intervals of time or even days, and this is one of those. It has great quotes, anecdotes and little reminders that is delightful to read but there are also too much references and infos sprinkled all over it. I go one chapter per every other day and thatโs how I recommend reading it. Also recommending it most to the burnout creatives (like myself) out there. hi i see u ๐ฅฒ๐๐ผ๐ซถ๐ผ
didn't thoroughly enjoy and it took me 4 months to finish this one, ironically.
I really wanted to like this - love the message. But I found this a very very slow and hard read.
Highlights
As Hans Christian Andersen wrote, โThe whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to seeing them that we call them ordinary things.โ
To find something to be curious aboutโto learn somethingโcan bring shimmer back to our days. As the novelist TH. White wrote in The Once and Future King, "The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails.โ
After all, isn't it the people in our lives rather than the things that are of utmost importance? Perhaps that's one way we can all be day artists-we may not be able to shape our day entirely the way we might hope, but we can shape the way we love. As Vincent van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother Theo in 1888, "The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.โ
As the artist and author Austin Kleon told me, we do need to sand off our edges. โWeโre so obsessed with life-hacking and with becoming these productive, shining examples of ourselves, but so much of good creative work comes from being a person that has tensions in their life.โ For Austin, this means embracing his โdeeply lazy' side as well as his driven workaholic side. 'For a long time, I thought I had to pick one side, but I've realised itโs sometimes bouncing between these two modes that really gives my life meaning- I dont feel the work would be meaningful if I didnโt have those deeply lazy moments, too.โ
I'm reminded of the words of writer Maya Angelou: โIve learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision.โ
This is where the key Hferences between a happy lite and a meaningful life are drawnโrather than the emphasis being on whether a given experience is good or bad, it's about the intensity of such experiences. This is because intensity prompts contemplation, which is where we create meaning.
As the British novelist and thinker C.S. Lewis supposedly once observed, โIsnโt it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back everything is different?โ
Whereas ambition fixates on external recognition โ that proverbial gold star drive is rooted in what we do and how we do it.
I'm fond of the author Robert Dessaix's description of time as a 'splodge'. As he wrote in his memoir What Days Are For, 'A liberating way to view time, I find, is as splodges lying in clusters all around me. Instead of hopping obediently from link to link along a chain towards extinction, I pause in a puddle of it here and wallow in a pool of it there.
If 'time is how you spend your love, as Zadie Smith wrote in On Beauty, then perhaps itโs worth asking how we can manage our love, rather than our time.
We can turn our attention to what we want from the hour, rather than what the hour wants from us.
If productivity narrows our days, creativity expands them.