Once upon a time, it was so easy to say that I had no time. It might have even been true.

I would wake up before dawn to get out on the road before the traffic picked up, only to find that thousands of others had done the same and I’d be stuck in traffic anyway. Work was a constant flow of meetings and conversation and collaborative activity, punctuated by precious moments of alone time in which I tried to chip away at the ever-growing to-do list.

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I’m building a new business, and I’m finding it hard to shake the feeling that I need to be moving faster.

In the past, when I’ve created a new offering, it was often accompanied by the desire for a quick return on investment. I wanted to launch a thing because I needed some money coming in.

But now, despite COVID, things are more stable. I’m creating something new because I want to, not because I’m desperate and digging myself out of a hole. And that means I can take my time. However, I still feel that underlying sense of urgency. And this urgency carries a cost.

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In some jobs, you get to go home at the end of the day. You might even clock out when your shift is done. At that point, you know your work is complete.

Though this type of job might come with disadvantages (never more so than during this pandemic), many of us long for the comfort and predictability of this type of routine. When we’re working from home and we have the possibility of being perpetually connected to our work, we run the risk of perpetually working. How do we know when it is enough?

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Productivity is a trap, you know.

It can be very satisfying to knock out task after routine, mundane task. Answer an email, then archive it so it disappears from your inbox. Load the dishwasher and start the cycle. Proofread the document.

It’s a little scarier to do things that don’t have clear beginnings and endings. Some of these things aren’t tasks at all.

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In the early days of my business, I was doing all of my own marketing, sales, customer service, and operations.

That meant that I lived in my email. Each weekday, I would start around 8 AM, crank through as many emails and phone calls as I could, and then start teaching music lessons at 3 PM.

Hiring help was necessary as the business grew, but the volume of email didn’t go down. If anything, it expanded. But I was committed to processing it all, based on what I had learned from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, a painstaking process that required making a decision about what to do with each email, phone call, and piece of paper I received. And once everything was processed, my reward would be an empty inbox, an empty voicemail box, or an empty actual box. Everything would be filed, archived, put away, and dealt with.

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