Every day I get up in the morning, trying not to worry too much about what to do with my waking moments. I’ve gotten pretty good at getting through breakfast at a leisurely pace, probably because I’m a night person and truly terrible in the morning. As the caffeine break through the walls of sleep, my brain start to work.

I get ideas.

I remember what I was supposed to do today.

I start thinking in terms of work, in todo’s, and in musts.

There are a lot of things I want to do, ever day. The list is never short, it is always long and impossible to tick off. More often than not, what I want to do in a day is not even remotely possible to pull off in a week. Yet I go to bed every night fairly content, more or less depending on how the day went. I rarely fall asleep stressed, and I never think about work in the last few hours of the day.

The key to this is to figure out what you should actually do with your day, and then do just that. Sometimes you’ll do more, but more often you’ll do less. At times you know exactly what you’re capable of, and the day after that you overestimate your productivity. All that is fine, as long as you know what you should do, pick the right things to do, preferably in the right order, and then, when the working part of the day is over, you turn it off.

Every day I wake up and know, in the back of my head, that there is no way I can achieve everything I want. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. It is a battle I cannot win, a race I will never ever finish.

I’m content with that. You need to be too, if you want to be truly productive and, more importantly, happy with what you do. Because you do it every bloody day.