This is the first in a series of reflections I am writing on the ideas of How to Calm Your Mind by Chris Bailey.
Assessing a Day
In the first chapter, the book instructs the reader to reflect on this question: “How do you determine whether a day of your life went well?”
There are many potential answers to this question, but when I reflect on the thoughts that go through my head as I fall asleep at night, the answer for me is clearly “how much stuff I got done”.
The book calls this an “accomplishment mindset”. On the surface, this didn’t sound all that bad to me. I consider it a virtue to be productive and hard-working, and I generally enjoy trying out different productivity strategies and seeing how they can apply to my day. I am even developing some of these strategies into a productivity app.
But Bailey writes a perspective I hadn’t fully considered before:
Productivity became the end I was seeking. Of course, productivity is a terrible end in and of itself: it should be thought of as a means to a more important end, such as having more free time, financial freedom, or more space to genuinely connect with others.
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If you lose sight of this, as I did, you may also find that everything becomes work—something you need to do to get a result. Your to-do list becomes a diary of stuff you have to do, not things you get to do.
What feels mostly problematic about an accomplishment mindset for me is that it leads me to fill the extra time in my day with more stuff, which can make me anxious and burnout, which paradoxically makes me get less stuff done. And the cycle continues.
Savoring the Day
So, then, if I no longer want to assess a day by how much stuff I got done, what is the alternate? Here’s the answer I’m going to try out: “The amount I was able to savor the day’s activities”.
My life is, thankfully, filled more with things that I enjoy than things I don’t enjoy. And yet I easily lose sight of that when everything I enjoy is shoved into a to-do list. But with a set of small changes, I think it should be possible to measure my life by my presence and contentment.
I believe this is a more meaningful and worthwhile goal.
