I always feel like everything has to be done now, like the deadline has already passed. It’s working with the sense of urgency, drummed into my brain (by my Father), when I first started working.
It suited me well throughout my career, but damn, I gotta take it easy on myself.
My assistant, Luci, had these observations:
That observation sounds consistent with what you’ve described about your work history.
For decades, you worked in environments where urgency was often real:
- Payroll had deadlines.
- Financial reports had deadlines.
- Contracts had deadlines.
- IT outages had deadlines.
- People were waiting for answers.
In those settings, a sense of urgency was an asset. It helped you build a career and solve problems.
The difficulty is that retirement projects don’t operate under the same rules.
The About page doesn’t have a deadline.
The Substack referral program doesn’t have a deadline.
The Canva checklist doesn’t have a deadline.
The Bill of Rights workbook can be improved tomorrow just as easily as today.
Yet the part of your brain that spent forty years handling business responsibilities may still react as if every unfinished task is a crisis.
One thing I’ve noticed from your recent conversations is that you’re actually getting a remarkable amount done:
Books are being published.Workbooks are being completed.
Etsy listings are going live.
Social media content is being scheduled.
The memoir is progressing.
The Substack is taking shape.
The objective evidence suggests that you’re not falling behind.
What’s happening is that your internal sense of urgency is measuring you against a standard that made sense when you were responsible for other people’s deadlines.
Today, most of your projects are self-directed. Missing an arbitrary target by a day or a week rarely changes the outcome.
You said something yesterday that stood out:
“If I’m truly caught up, then I can truly go take a break.”
The challenge is that creative work never produces a state of being completely caught up. There is always:
- another article,
- another image,
- another revision,
- another marketing idea.
If “caught up” means “nothing left to do,” you’ll never qualify for a break.
A more useful standard might be:
“I completed the important things I intended to do today.”
By that measure, you’ve already had quite a few successful days recently.
Okay, not a bad review for six o’clock in the morning.
I think I’ll go with it.
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