To-do lists are inevitable. Remember: if you don’t have a to-do list, it means you’re dead. You never finish being a good friend or graduate from brushing your teeth. Life maintenance doesn’t end until life does.

If you haven’t read Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, I highly recommend dedicating a brief span of your mortal life to doing so. He rationally and soulfully points out that there will always be too much to do. So instead of striving to do everything and punishing ourselves when we inevitably fail, the task becomes getting wise about which things to water down or edit out. Burkeman writes, “The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control….The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”

I’m not going to rehash how to “neglect the right things,” as I’ve already written quite a bit about to-do list containment, calibrating the appropriate amount of effort and stress, and supporting ourselves in those moments when we really do just have to get some things done. But what happens next, after we’ve taken a clear-eyed look at our work and decided to dig in? Are we assigned to a life of drudgery

What makes our to-do lists so burdensome, I think, isn’t usually the tasks themselves. It’s the relationship we have with them. Of course we feel drained when we find making dinner to be a slog. When an unanswered email serves as evidence that you’re a slob who always drops the ball. When a sink full of dishes becomes the obstacle to relaxing at the end of the day.

I think we can all agree that handwashing dishes is the worst chore, right? To me, the slow and grubby process feels obscene in a world of hustle and convenience and quick pleasures. And that is exactly the problem.

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Zen teacher and writer Thich Nhat Hanh wrote about his experience washing the dishes. He proposes that the trouble with a bothersome task is not the act itself—washing dishes can be an intrinsically pleasant experience, with the sensations of warm water and suds, the sounds of splashing and the shine of bubbles and glass—but that the suffering comes from thinking that there’s somewhere else we ought to be and other things we ought to be doing. He writes:

I know that if I hurry in order to be able to finish so I can sit down sooner and eat dessert or enjoy a cup of tea, the time of washing dishes will be unpleasant and not worth living. That would be a pity…

If I am incapable of washing dishes joyfully…I will be equally incapable of enjoying my dessert or my tea when I finally have them. With the fork in my hand, I will be thinking about what to do next...I will be constantly dragged into the future, miss out on life altogether.

I don’t think Hanh is arguing that we all need to become huge fans of washing dishes—(I remain unconvinced)—but I do think he’s pointing to something that makes unpleasant tasks considerably more unpleasant: our insistence that they are standing between us and our real lives.

He writes, “Washing the dishes is at the same time a means and an end. We do the dishes not only in order to have clean dishes, we also do the dishes just to do the dishes.”

What a thought. Maybe the work isn't finish everything, then live.

Maybe it’s figuring out how to live while things remain unfinished.

What a radical idea for those of us accustomed to viewing our day-to-day doings as a series of obstacles between ourselves and the next thing. If I treat tasks—difficult or mundane—as an impediment to the part of my life I actually want to be living, I am going to end up wishing away a hefty percentage of my life. I’ll wash the dishes so I can relax. I‘ll finish my work so I can enjoy the weekend. I’ll get through this week so things can calm down next week. I’ll get through this busy season so I can finally…

This doesn’t mean we have to romanticize drudgery. Some things just suck. I don’t need to convince myself that sitting on hold with the insurance company is a spiritually enriching sensory experience. But there’s a difference between disliking something and experiencing every minute spent doing it as a minute stolen from your life.

The minute is your life, too.

All seven installments of my series Deprogramming from the Cult of Productivity:

1. The Pot of Gold at the End of the To-Do List
2. Work Expands to Fill its Container
3. "I Feel Weird When I'm Not Busy"
4. Productivity is a Tool, Not a V irtue
5. Productivity ≠ Worth
6. "Okay, But I Still Need to Get $h!t Done"
7. Living in Peaceful Parallel With Our To-Do Lists

© 2026 Summer Hopkins Myers | Already Good
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Living in Peaceful Parallel With Our To-Do Lists

“Okay, but I still need to get $h!t done”