The tidying that isn't tidying
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I sat down to write. I ended up rebuilding three Notion databases instead.
Not because they needed it. They were fine before I touched them. They're fine now. What changed is that I spent an afternoon feeling like I'd done something, instead of doing the one thing I sat down to do.
Last week I wrote about the gap between a full calendar and a busy one, and how everything else claims that time: the notifications, the meetings, the requests that land on your desk before you've opened your eyes. All external. All arguably not your fault. This week the culprit had a much shorter commute. It was me.
What was actually happening
Here's the part I said on camera but didn't unpack. I want to go further into it here. It wasn't about the databases. It was fear of judgment. If the content never gets made, nobody can tell me it's not good enough yet. Reorganizing a task list feels like work. It even feels responsible. I was two clicks from color coding a database that already had colors, fully convinced I was being thorough. It is neither of those things when it's standing in for the thing you're actually avoiding.
That's the trick of it. Staying small doesn't always look like doing nothing. Sometimes it looks like doing a lot, just not the thing that was actually on the table.
The reason underneath the pause
Reorganizing isn't the enemy. Half of what I did that afternoon probably needed doing eventually. The problem was never the tidying. It was using it to avoid doing what I was actually scared of, and calling the avoidance productive so I didn't have to look at it straight on.
Naming the reason behind the pause doesn't fix it immediately. I still had to write the thing after I noticed what I was doing. But noticing is the part that usually gets skipped, and it's the part that makes the next hour different from the one before it.
Last week's stolen time came from outside, other people's calendars leaking into mine. This week's came from inside, me handing my own hours to a database that never asked for them. Different direction, same missing afternoon.
I'm tracking where my hours actually went this week, all of it, not just the parts that make me look good. I'll walk through what I found on Thursday. If you want it before it lands anywhere else, that's what the newsletter is for.
every day. on purpose. 🖊️
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