Madeleine Dore > Quotes

“We often ask ourselves where the time goes, and no one really knows. But for things to be worthwhile, for making good times, for things to be timeless, we have to allow them to take the time they take. This doesn’t mean that we have to make them perfect, or wait for the perfect moment, or be perfectly optimized. The fruits of our labor might not reveal themselves in a day—some days it can look like we didn’t do anything at all—but the knowledge we put in the bank is priceless. So trust the timing of things—trust the timing of your life.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“The pandemic has shaken up our days in varying ways, but one thing it has taught many of us is that we are always more adrift than we think. In our obsession with doing, we can overlook that life has a way of intervening in our plans for a productive day: distractions come to the fore, things fall through, responsibilities arise unexpectedly, and our minds and bodies don’t always cooperate with our expectations.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“Perhaps it’s not about squeezing more into our days, but removing what breaks our attention. Whether it’s meetings, to-do lists, or social media, we can scatter seemingly harmless interruptions in our day that take longer to recuperate from than we might anticipate. We might schedule a coffee meeting that’s only”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“We make the mistake of labeling ourselves as nouns, when we are really verbs—we are not a runner, but rather a person who runs; we’re not a writer, but a person who writes. Our sense of self doesn’t have to be bundled up with whether we did the thing today—because we are not the things we do.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“When we tie who we are to what we do, we can get stuck in an 'if only' spiral -- we might say we are a runner, for example, but then shame ourselves when we don't manage to run every day. We make the mistake of labeling ourselves as nouns, when we really are verbs -- we are not a runner, but rather a person who runs; we're not a writer, but a person who writes. Our sense of self doesn't have to be bundled up with whether we did the thing today -- because we are not the things we do.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“Familiar with this feeling, journalist Anne Helen Petersen described the phenomenon as “errand paralysis” in her conversation-shifting BuzzFeed article “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” “Why can’t I get this mundane stuff done?” she asked. “Because I’m burned out. Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it—explicitly and implicitly—since I was young.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“The two may be interlinked: time and attention are our two most precious resources, and both happen to be how we spend our love.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“In her TED Talk “The Real Reason We Are Tired and What to Do About It,” Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith talks about how we have incorrectly combined the concepts of sleep and rest, when sleep is simply one of the seven types of rest we need: physical,”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“mental, sensory, creative, emotional, social, and spiritual. We can determine the rest we need by looking at where we are using most of our energy in the day. Perhaps rest for you is getting more sleep. Or maybe it is walking in nature, a morning of solitude, playing an instrument, or watching the clouds pass by. I rather like going to a local grocer’s to unhurriedly wander the aisles of fruits and vegetables and return home to make a soup—for someone else, of course, this might be the opposite of restful. Giving yourself permission to rest in the way you need it can be the very thing that allows you to discover more opportunities to shape your day rather than having busyness shape it for you. Taking”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“When we conflate productivity with worthiness, what we do is never enough. We can always do more, and there is always more to do.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“Slowing down to rest isn’t a moral failing—it’s essential to help us recharge and reflect. As Hugh Mackay told me, being human is an undeniably demanding business”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“We can't be perfectly balanced as we navigate the pendulum swing of our days--we can only wobble toward what we need.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“There is no end point to our days while we are living in them. Once we arrive at the end of one, we find ourselves at the starting point of another - what happens in the middle is what we call life.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“The curiosity to learn, to be interested, to be kind is how we find the extraordinary in the ordinary. We so often overlook the ordinary, or want to rid it from our days. We multitask; we outsource; we turn to life hacks to avoid the mundane; we project a shimmering version of our lives to others. But behind the scenes, the ordinary will always remain -- and it can be where we connect to our curiosity and wonder.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“So much of what we are trying to achieve in our days is bound to the idea that we can optimize things to the point of perfection.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“The antidote is something I like to call “puddle theory”—a way to divide overwhelming tasks and take things smallest step by smallest step. Instead of contemplating the insurmountable sea, we can create tiny puddles that we don’t fear stepping into, making it easier to begin. For example, instead of focusing on a disorderly garage we want to tidy, we can take the task item by item. Puddle theory allows us to take on”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“delightful discipline”—that which is driven by a curiosity for knowledge, a commitment to the practice, without the rigid sense of obedience or punishing rules that can stifle us. The focus is on training and the pursuit of knowledge, which can subsequently bring”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“feel ease or resistance toward rest has a lot to do with how it was modeled for us when we were growing up. If, as a kid, your weekends were spent relaxing on the couch, for example, you might have an easier time leaning into rest as an adult; if they were all go-go-go, on the other hand, you might well feel like you’re being lazy if you don’t keep up that intensity.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“Curiosity is what allows us to see that the most ordinary fact about our lives is already rather extraordinary -- we're here. We're living. We may not be sure why, but we're going about our days anyway, and that's rather remarkable.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“This scarcity of free time can contribute to productivity pressure: we have so little discretionary time available that we feel we must not waste it. Fulfilling but nonessential activities start to feel like a waste of time.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“Our ambitions for the future can make us busier in the present, so we long for a sense of balance that’s unattainable or fleeting, or we add expectations to the day that will only leave us disappointed.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“Creativity doesn’t follow a perfectly consistent schedule, and being the creative bunch of day artists we are, perhaps neither should we.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“Now when I’m stuck, I try to find a way to start with delight rather than dread. Starting with fascination or delight is far more appealing than being bored or frustrated with a regular practice before you’ve even begun. It’s also more sustainable because you’re less likely to give up in the way you might when a practice is attached to punishment. As writer and activist Carly Findlay told me, “I don’t want”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“Perhaps we don't want to be more productive in our days, but more fecund- that is, more capable of producing new growth, but not always in producing mode.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“The beauty of such designated pockets of time is that they, too, can be flexible. As artist Peter Drew reminded me, “I don’t think it really matters if I get that quiet time early in the morning or really late at night, but you’ve got to get it somewhere.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“Here I am, a person, on this planet, in this solar system, in this galaxy we call the Milky Way, in the company of a limitless number of other galaxies. I am but a speck, on a speck, on a speck, on a speck—why agonize over what I did or didn’t do when it doesn’t matter as much as matter itself?”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“Time is a luxury that many people don’t have—and so is a routine. Maybe a routine is not always the perfect vessel for holding the day’s variances, or our own.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“Perhaps what’s most corrosive to our ability to feel good about the day is when we keep trying to do so much in a day that we only disappoint ourselves. Expectations are like tiny promises in our days that can knock us over. If we are more realistic about our expectations, we are more likely to keep the promises we make to ourselves and feel good about the things we did do.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“look good—it became more appealing to go for a run. The reward was in the doing itself rather than in the outcome. Because it was now inherently enjoyable, I exercised more often, inadvertently building a regular practice (or discipline) of running—and gradually I reached my goal of running five kilometers, and later ten.”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt

“The antidote is something I like to call “puddle theory”—a way to divide overwhelming tasks and take things smallest step by smallest step. Instead of contemplating the insurmountable sea, we can create tiny puddles that we don’t fear stepping into, making it easier to begin. For example, instead of focusing on a disorderly garage we want to tidy, we can take the task item by item. Puddle theory allows us to take on right-sized tasks and even move between them—splashing about in one puddle may lead us unexpectedly to another. This is a helpful reminder that often it doesn’t matter much where we start—what’s important”
― Madeleine Dore, I Didn't Do the Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt