# Cleaning up my productivity act

By [Serra S.](https://paragraph.com/@serra-s) · 2024-01-03

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I spent the final week of 2023 in Massachusetts, in a cozy home amid trees with my fiance’s parents, sister, and sister’s newborn. I thought I would spend this week buried in books. And while I read and wrote a fair amount, it didn’t come close to how much more “productive” I thought I would be.

In fact, I grappled with this sense of “not being productive enough” all week. I read, then felt guilty for not doing other things in huge chunks of free time. I scratched the surface of a few checklist items but didn’t bring any of them fully to completion because I felt like I was stealing from my undistracted reading time. When else in the year do I get to shield myself in a cozy room with no one demanding anything of me?

I lingered in an in-between, low effort state. I felt dissatisfied at not having finished X books or written more (though the “more” is undefined). My fiance entered my “study” room at regular intervals, only half jokingly demanding that I give him an account of how productive I’d been, how I’d spent my time. This dissatisfaction I felt with myself, and my fiance’s all too serious expectations, prompted me to think more about what “productivity” really means and why I always felt that I was missing the goalpost unless I had external pressure.

I found I had vague ideas for _what_ I wanted to get done, without properly orienting myself in the _why_. Nor did I consider the time of the year, its particular rhythm, and the mental state I was in after a year of non-stop anxiety, flights, and busyness.

It’s easy to try and impose an arbitrary form and expected output from my days. But without the proper orientation and prioritization, it’s not a surprise that the form fails to hold.

So before diving in to “read X books and write X pages,” the considerations could have been:

*   What will be the most meaningful way to spend this break after a long, intense year?
    
*   What activities align with this time? What makes me feel more connected to myself, my surroundings, others around me?
    
*   What will help me reflect, absorb, and start the new year in the freshest way?
    

Better thought-of answers were the following:

*   I’m going to read X novel by Stephen King because I’d been looking forward to absorbing myself in his writing (it feels so delicious against the backdrop of a New England landscape)
    
*   I’m going to go for plenty of walks and just take in the fresh air I don’t get in New York
    
*   I’m going to reflect and write about the good things I’m taking with me from this year
    
*   Nothing else
    

After banging my head against the wall with failed “productivity” in the first half of the week, and identifying where the mismatch was, I found it easier to relax. The rest was much more satisfying and appropriate to the dead zone between Christmas and New Year’s Eve—curled under blankets, absorbed in _Carrie_ or listening to _The Unbearable Lightness of Being_, musing about the different meanings I was extracting compared to my high school self.

The calmness of the holidays are now over. Still, the importance of _why_ has not waned. Just in time for the inevitable New Year’s resolutions, my biggest and only resolution this year is to ask _why_ and cut dead weight—from words, tasks, travels, purchases, and everywhere else it applies.

This year is focused on doing the right things, doing them more intensely, and feeling lighter.

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*Originally published on [Serra S.](https://paragraph.com/@serra-s/cleaning-up-my-productivity-act)*