Here’s Your New Year’s Resolution: Stop Depriving Yourself of Things You Love For The Sake of “Productivity”

You can still be productive if you wake up at 9, refuse to meditate, throw out your journal, and ditch the forced routine

Photo by Mike Kenneally on Unsplash

With the new year right around the corner, we’re about to see an influx of “new year, new me” posts on social media. Self-improvement articles are about to flood our news feeds, reminding us of how inferior we are because we didn’t allocate our entire days to productivity. Just like always, we’re about to be told that the key to being successful and productive is to wake up early, meditate, journal, skip the coffee, watch the sun rise with bags under our eyes, and develop a routine from which we should not deviate.

In the words of Sheldon Cooper, this is hokum.

The actual key to productivity is acknowledging the things you have to do, making time for the things you want to do, and accepting that sometimes, you just need to be flexible.

Guess what? It doesn’t matter what time you wake up. Doesn’t matter if you see the sun rise. It’s fine if you never meditate and if you don’t give a crap about journaling. And it’s also fine if you like to stay up late, take a lunchtime siesta, forget to do…