What would it mean to be done for the day?

                  Gustav Klimt, On Lake Attersee

From Oliver Burkeman newsletter  

What would it mean to be done for the day?”

As the psychotherapist David Maloney explains in this excellent video – all his videos are excellent, in my view – it’s vital to be able to “reach a point in the day when you feel finished.” Few of us arrive there regularly, he notes, but we can and should – not only because life’s more pleasant that way, but also because you’ll be much more productive in the long term. When you end the day feeling like there’s vastly more you ought to have done, you’re telling your nervous system it can’t take a break; and you’re reinforcing an idea of your work as an oppressive and insatiable force. And all of that invites a counter-reaction of procrastination: due to fear, or defiance, or a mixture of both, it gets harder and harder to make yourself work.

 I suspect all this is rather worse for we “knowledge workers”, who fiddle about with symbols on screens, than (say) a small-scale arable farmer. For the latter, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the potential work-to-be-done extends onwards into the future forever, or the fact that you’re a limited human who can only be expected to plough so many acres by nightfall. But if the crop you’re tending is emails, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the work is endless – and easy to imagine that some wildly impossible target, such as answering a hundred in an hour, might in fact be within your capacities. 

What you realise, the moment you ask “what would it mean to be done for the day?”, is that the answer can’t possibly involve doing all the things that need doing – even though that’s the subconscious goal with which many of us approach life, driving ourselves crazy in the process. If there are a thousand things that need doing, you’re going to need to arrive at some definition of “finished” that doesn’t encompass them all. Maybe it’s two hours on your main current project, and three detailed emails you’ve been meaning to write, plus a couple of quicker tasks? Your definition of “done” may be very different, of course, depending on your work, energy levels, and existing commitments. But merely by asking the question you’ll be leaving behind the daily quest to do more than you can – which systematically prevents you taking satisfaction in whatever you do manage to accomplish

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Asking this question daily is a training in patience, because when you start getting serious about what you can reasonably expect from yourself, it’ll be painful how short the list is. For the first few days, you’ll probably fail to finish even that list! And so the days go by, and your lists get even shorter, until eventually you find yourself getting through them, and permitting yourself the feeling of doneness. At this point, you have the enjoyable sensation of exerting greater agency over your life: instead of demanding that the world send you a signal that it’s time to stop for the day – which it never will – you decide that henceforth that’s a determination you’ll be making. You’re in the driving seat. And being in the driving seat means, among other things, getting more done, with less psychodrama – even though, in order to get there, you had to be willing to aim to do much less each day.

Something in all this evokes the religious tradition of the Sabbath, in which you down tools not because the work is finished, but just because it’s Friday night or Sunday morning, and so it’s time to stop anyway. “Stopping anyway” – stopping in the knowledge that for finite humans, the work is never done – reorients you to the depth of the present moment. It helps you stop ceaselessly chasing the imaginary future point at which everything will have been handled, so that life can really begin. It’s a reminder that life has already really begun: that this it. And it permits you to sit back and receive life for an hour or two – to enjoy it confident in the knowledge that you did what you could today, and that when tomorrow rolls around, you’ll do what you can then, too.