How We Spend Our Days

Last night I started watching Dr. Justin Sung’s video 13 Years of No BS Productivity Advice in 67 Mins and the first piece of advice is “Don’t trust your brain.”

Your brain isn’t there to help you achieve your goals. It’s there to keep you alive.

When we sit down plan out our days/weeks/months or set goals for ourselves we do it with the assumption that our brain will be there to back us every step of the way. But the brain doesn’t actually care about our task list. It cares that we get enough sleep. It cares that we’re eating properly. It cares that we’re safe.

You have to find what works. What times are optimal for concentration if there’s a need to do deep work. What times are more suited for breaks and relaxation. What spaces contribute to focus and which keep us distracted.

It’s not because every day will lend itself to the ideal conditions, but because knowing what those ideal conditions are helps to make smarter decisions.

You can force it, as we often do, but you burn more energy doing that.

You cannot have sustained productivity without sustained self-compassion. – Dr. Justin Sung

We’re rarely taught to prioritize ourselves so most of us don’t grow up knowing how to. We’re told working harder leads to greater success, so we attach our self-value to the amount of hours we put into things.

Annie Dillard said that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” and how we spend our days is quite often how we think we have to. That, or procrastinating on what we think we should be doing, then feeling bad about not doing it.

Very rarely do we spend our days on the things that nourish us fully, assuming we even know what those things are.

I always remember something Maria Popova wrote in The Marginalian:

Seek out what magnifies your spirit.

For me, that is and has always been reading, writing, and sharing. If I die tomorrow, I don’t care that I didn’t leave this Earth a millionaire. I care that while I was here I created work that made a few people smile, laugh, think, and hopefully feel better about themselves.

Don’t trust your brain, but don’t ignore it either. Make time to listen to yourself. Productivity for the sake of productivity is just a different form of distraction.

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it. – Seneca, On the Shortness of Life