I usually beat myself up for not getting everything on my to-do list done. This is a ritual process that occurs daily. Usually before lunch, again sometime around two, then again at four, at dinner, and then sometime before bed. It’s a habit; and it’s a bad one.

Behind this sense of unease is not just an unrealistic expectation of what should get done, but an unwillingness to fully address what has been done.

I tend to run from one thing to the next, seeking a sense of peak productivity. And at the same time, I throw myself fully into each activity. So when I’m with you, I’m with you. I give you my time.

I’ve explored countless strategies. All of them fine and more or less work in the way that they do. But this is not something I can life-hack. I don’t lack knowledge or understanding of the matter. I don’t need to work on “time management” in the traditional sense because the problem is neither my time nor my management of it.

The problem is the unexamined principle in the foundation of productivity itself: that life is a function of volume to be measured more than it is the experience of living.

The reason most productivity solutions fail is that they approach our lives as a series of tasks which need to be accomplished. The smarter ones integrate mind and body. But even these presume our tasks are our humanity.

The need for space

The most important suggestion I have ever gotten about life is to intentionally carve out space into my day. But this isn’t space to do anything. It isn’t the space I carve out for exercise or the space I carve out for reading. This isn’t the space I need to be a fully-functioning and well-rounded human being. This is on top of that space!

The point of putting margin or buffer in your day is that your brain needs the break. I’ve long known this and intentionally strive to keep back-to-back commitments out of my calendar for that very real reason.

However, space has a more important reason than that. We need to reflect and engage.

Greg McKeown challenges us to put three thirty-minute blocks into our day that is just there for space. Not to doom-scroll Twitter or mindlessly check email. But to think.

Unlike every other productivity trick I’ve tried over the last twenty years, this one is not based on the foundation of helping one do more. It inherently demands you make less time for striving to be amazing. So you can take that time and give it to the most essential human project: thinking.

This fundamentally changed my week

This week was full of additional responsibility and anxiety. This was totally not the week to try something new. But I did it anyway.

Setting aside this time every day did several things for me:

1. It helped me fully acknowledge the work that I was doing: how much time it took, how valuable it was to me, and how essential it could be.
2. Then I could accept how full that truly is and how that is enough.
3. And I could even let go of my anxiety – both toward my own work and how it compares to the idealized work of others.
4. I was even able to place my work into the context of what is reasonable.
5. Sharing about my day with my spouse or colleagues shifted from what happened to me to what is bringing me joy.
6. I even spoke about how much I accomplished in so short a time.

You could use some space

I don’t know what your life is like, but chances are good that you could use some space. This need transcends personality type and drive. Which is precisely why we do productivity wrong.

Very little of human life is actually a function of pure will power alone.

Life is far more complex than that.

Making space to examine (rather than evaluate) life is essential to living a good life. And it runs completely against the productivity paradigm and our culture of never-ending work.

In the end, that it seems counterintuitive should tell us more about the way we see our own lives.