Published in 2022
288 pages
Madeleine Dore is a writer and interviewer exploring how we can broaden the definition of a day well spent. For the past five years, Dore has been asking creative thinkers how they navigate their days on her popular blog Extraordinary Routines and podcast Routines & Ruts. She regularly conducts life experiments and hosts events to examine how creativity isn’t just something we do, but how we approach our lives.
What is this book about?
How to release productivity guilt and embrace the hidden values in our daily lives.
Madeleine Dore has long felt a pressure to be productive. In the pursuit of getting things done, she tried every way to optimize her day, only to keep falling short and feeling behind. She turned to interviewing hundreds of creative thinkers and experts to find the secret to productivity. What she discovered instead was far more enriching: There is more to value in each day than what we did or didn’t do.
I Didn’t Do the Thing Today is a reprieve from our doing obsession. Designed as a companion for the days that go off track, the book’s chapters explore the various ways we encounter productivity guilt–including comparison to others, striving for perfection, and our great expectations–to point to how a day doesn’t have to be optimized, but simply occupied. When we take away judgment from how moments unfold, we can find our way out of the productivity spiral and step fully into our lives.
For anyone who has struggled with worrying about wasted time or felt caught in the busyness trap or stifled by indecision, I Didn’t Do the Thing Today shares how to take productivity off its pedestal and find more connection, creativity, and curiosity in its place.
