The Morning Productivity Theater
I used to wake up at 5:30 AM every single day, convinced that early rising was the secret sauce of successful people everywhere. There I’d be, bleary-eyed and resentful, forcing myself through a morning routine that felt like performance art nobody asked for. Meditation app open, journal ready, workout clothes laid out the night before like some kind of aspirational shrine.
The thing is, I’m not a morning person. Never have been. My brain doesn’t fully come online until around 10 AM, and trying to force it awake with artificial enthusiasm was like trying to start a car with a dead battery. Lots of noise, zero forward motion. I spent months feeling like I was failing at the basic act of being alive because I couldn’t sustain this routine that worked for exactly none of my actual rhythms.
Somewhere around March, I just stopped. Not the getting up part (unfortunately, jobs still require your physical presence at reasonable hours), but the elaborate morning ceremony. Now I wake up when my body wants to wake up, drink coffee like a normal human being, and save the deep thinking for when my brain actually wants to participate. Revolutionary stuff, really.
Chasing Every Networking Opportunity
Remember when everyone decided networking was the answer to everything? I sure do. I spent the better part of two years showing up to every professional meetup, industry mixer, and “coffee chat” that crossed my path. I collected business cards like they were Pokemon cards, had conversations that felt like elaborate performance pieces about mutual professional admiration, and came home exhausted from trying to be the version of myself that seemed most likely to advance my career.
The breaking point came at a particularly soul-crushing event where I found myself nodding enthusiastically at someone’s pitch for a blockchain-based dog walking app. Not because I thought it was brilliant, but because I’d trained myself to find something positive to say about everything, just in case this person might be useful later. That’s when I realized I’d turned networking into its own weird form of social media. All surface-level engagement and strategic positioning, zero authentic connection.
These days, I’m much more selective. I go to things that actually interest me, talk to people I genuinely want to talk to, and if something professionally beneficial comes out of it, great. If not, at least I didn’t spend an evening pretending to care about synergy and disruption. My career hasn’t collapsed from this approach, which tells you something about how necessary all that networking theater actually was.
Maintaining Friendships Out of Obligation
This one’s harder to talk about because it sounds callous when you say it out loud. But this year I stopped forcing relationships that had naturally run their course. Not the friendships going through rough patches or the ones requiring extra effort during difficult times. Those are worth fighting for. I’m talking about the relationships that had quietly shifted from genuine connection to social maintenance, where every interaction felt like going through the motions of a friendship rather than actually having one.
You know what I mean. The group chats that feel like obligation, the birthday dinners where everyone’s checking their phones, the friends who only surface when they need something or want to complain about the same problems they’ve been complaining about for years without any intention of changing anything. The relationships that leave you feeling drained rather than energized, where you find yourself making excuses to avoid hanging out.
It’s not about cutting people off dramatically or making grand statements. It’s about recognizing when you’re both just going through the motions and having the grace to let the friendship evolve into whatever it naturally wants to become. Sometimes that’s an occasional text exchange. Sometimes it’s nothing at all. Both can be okay.
Optimizing Everything
I used to track everything. Steps, calories, screen time, productivity metrics, reading goals, how many glasses of water I drank, which route to work saved the most time, whether listening to podcasts at 1.5x speed actually improved my learning retention. I had spreadsheets for my spreadsheets. I turned my entire life into a continuous improvement project, as if I were a small business trying to increase efficiency quarter over quarter.
The absurdity reached its peak when I found myself timing how long it took to make different breakfast options so I could optimize my morning routine. That’s when I realized I’d lost the plot entirely. I wasn’t optimizing my life, I was optimizing the life out of my life. Every moment had become data to be analyzed rather than experience to be lived.
Now I track almost nothing, and somehow I’m not less healthy or productive or informed. Turns out most of that optimization was just anxiety wearing a productivity costume. I still pay attention to patterns and try to make good choices, but I do it the way humans did before we had apps for everything: by noticing how I feel and adjusting accordingly.
The Quiet Revolution of Subtraction
Here’s what nobody tells you about stopping things: it’s harder than starting them. Starting feels productive, proactive, like you’re taking control. Stopping feels like giving up, even when the thing you’re stopping was making you miserable. We’re so conditioned to believe that more equals better that the radical act of less feels like failure.
But this year taught me that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is nothing. Not starting a new routine, not taking on another project, not saying yes to every opportunity that presents itself. Just existing in the space you’ve already carved out and seeing what happens when you’re not constantly trying to improve it.
I’m curious about what you’ve stopped doing lately, and whether it felt like quitting or like finally coming up for air. There’s something comforting about realizing other people are also quietly opting out of things that don’t serve them, even when those things look perfectly reasonable from the outside.