Why Those Days That Feel Unproductive Are Actually Beneficial

Every so often, when I ask someone how their day is going, the response I get is akin to “Dude, I haven’t gotten a thing done all day because I’ve been in meetings and on phone calls.” I can understand that feeling of the day slipping by, having experienced it many times in my own career - the end of the day comes, and you feel like nothing changed on the to-do list. It can be frustrating.

However, I think this is pretty common once one gets towards the middle of their career. My N=1 experience is that at first, it was easy to have some number of things on my to-do list, and they could all be completed in relatively short order. However, as I’ve gained skills and experience, the projects I am involved in are more complex, with more moving pieces. This takes more time and more deliberate effort to keep things moving, leading to some days feeling like I haven’t really done anything. This, in turn, can easily lead to increasing my level of anxiety.

To use a football analogy - I eventually came to realize that not every play is going to be an 18 yard breakout run, or a 30 yd down-field pass. Sometimes a project just needs someone to pick up the ball, run it a couple yards, and get a new set of downs. It’s not sexy, it’s not glamorous; however, it is required to keep things moving. Those days spent on conference calls and meetings are part of those grind-it-out plays, where the purpose is simply to keep the ball moving. Just because it doesn’t appear that the needle has moved significantly, doesn’t mean that no progress has been made. It just means that additional prep work was needed to progress to the next step, now that everyone is on the same page.

This realization has led to some interesting outcomes for me.

First, the anxiety of not feeling productive is significantly reduced, which makes it easier to turn off the work-brain at the end of the day. This, in turn, has had a major (positive) impact on my interaction with my family at the end of the day, when my leaving the home office coincides with dinner preparation. I actually spoke a bit about this in a previous post about some of the challenges of working from home.

The second outcome is that those days actually provide an opportunity to step away from the weeds, and think about the current status in a big picture view. Usually projects start to stall when things become difficult, and they become difficult because there is lack of vision for a clear path forward. On those days where I find my calendar is full of meetings or calls, taking some time in between to step back and think about what the next best steps should be helps me maximize my efficacy on days when I have solid chunks of uninterrupted time.

As we progress through our careers, the scope of what we are doing changes, and the expectations and how we view progress and execution on our projects must change also. We have to learn to be kind to ourselves, and be OK with days that seem unproductive, but are still necessary.