Inquisitive.me

Do you optimize your workflow to save time?

Yeah, me too.

Do you let yourself have the time you saved?

Well, not so much.

Slightly inconvenient, isn’t it? Considering that having more free time was the whole point.

I’m trying to improve the workflows in my practice, my blog, and all the other things that somehow end up on my to-do list. I want less friction. Fewer unnecessary steps. More freedom to read a book, play video games, or decide what I feel like doing without consulting a list first.

And some of those improvements actually work.

I finish what I planned for the day earlier than expected.

Great. Time to close the laptop?

Apparently, my brain didn’t receive that part of the instructions.

“Oh, since we’ve finished early, we could already do that thing we planned for tomorrow.”

And that other thing.

Maybe one more. We’re already here, after all.

Tomorrow’s tasks quietly become today’s tasks, and the free time I wanted disappears into another round of being productive.

A newsletter by Sahil Bloom about Jevons paradox made me notice this pattern. It described how becoming more efficient at something can lead us to do more of it.

I have to admit, I recognized myself a little too well.

I’d been trying to create more room in my day. Whenever I succeeded, I immediately filled it.

Looking back, I did something similar while studying.

If I found a more efficient way to learn for an exam, I rarely used the saved time to stop studying earlier. I went deeper. Read more. Went through my study materials again. Followed another connection. Learned something beyond what I needed for the exam.

Now, I like understanding things. Going deeper can be enjoyable, and I don’t regret everything I learned beyond the syllabus.

But if my intention was to free up time, then spending that time studying more didn’t achieve it.

The same question applies now: am I choosing to do more because I want to, or do I feel obligated because I could?

There’s a difference.

Sometimes I want to improve something because I genuinely enjoy it. I want to keep working on an idea. Nothing wrong with that.

Other times, it’s guilt.

Yes, I feel guilty for wanting to read, play video games, or just Netflix and chill when another task feels like the more acceptable use of the next half-hour.

Guilty for not doing more. For not putting in more work. For not using every single minute to improve.

That’s exhausting.

“I still have time” somehow turns into “I should still be working.”

And there will always be something I could work on. Another blog post. Another improvement in my practice. Something I could prepare so that next week becomes easier.

Except next week has its own list of things I could get ahead on.

That makes it difficult to feel finished. I can complete everything I intended to do today and still feel as though stopping would be leaving something undone.

Technically, it would. There will always be unfinished things on my to-do-list.

I have enough items on that list to fill every single free minute of the day. Almost as many as on my to-be-read list.

And that’s saying something.

I could always be working on something, no matter how productive I am or how well structured my workflows are.

For me, that newsletter was a reminder of why I wanted to become more efficient in the first place: to have more time I could freely use.

Today’s plan doesn’t suddenly become insufficient because it took less time than expected.

I wanted these better workflows to give me more freedom. At some point, that has to include the freedom to close the laptop while tomorrow’s tasks are still waiting for tomorrow.

🧪 Let’s Experiment

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Feeling guilty about stopping doesn’t automatically mean you should keep working.

Let’s look at what happens between “I’m done” and “maybe one more thing.”

🎯 Try This:

If you constantly have the feeling that you have to do yet another task to feel even more productive, pause.

This might be your guilt talking.

Instead of following that urge, declare that evening (it can sometimes even be a day) as a Reitoff—borrowing Ali Abdaal’s idea of deliberately setting aside a day or evening without productivity expectations.

Choose the thing you want to do—even if some guilt comes along.

🧠 Final Thought:

“I could do more” tells you there’s more available. It doesn’t decide how you spend the rest of your day

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