I Didn’t Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

How to release productivity guilt and embrace the hidden values in our daily lives.

Any given day brings a never-ending list of things to do. There’s the work thing, the catch-up thing, the laundry thing, the creative thing, the exercise thing, the family thing, the thing we don’t want to do, and the thing we’ve been putting off, despite it being the most important thing. Even on days when we get a lot done, the thing left undone can leave us feeling guilty, anxious, or disappointed.

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.

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.

Madeleine Dore is a writer and interviewer exploring how we can broaden the definition of a day well spent. For the past five years, Dore has been asking creative thinkers how they navigate their days on her popular blog Extraordinary Routines and podcast Routines & Ruts. She regularly conducts life experiments and hosts events to examine how creativity isn’t just something we do, but how we approach our lives.