I felt like cr*p last Wednesday
I have a pretty consistent routine on weekdays:
- I wake up (my morning routine is just getting out of bed, having breakfast, and heading out as soon as I can to catch to bus)
- work from 9-5
- head back home for dinner and to rest for a bit
- hit the gym for my daily workout
- and finally spend 2-3h at home trying to do some sort of work on side projects (a lot of the time I just end up scrolling through my phone while having a snack).
That’s not what happened last Wednesday.
What happened is I felt a bit tired, so I decided to scroll through my phone lounging on my bed instead of the couch like ususal.
Big mistake.
The more I scrolled, the more tired I got, and eventually I just fell asleep. Which meant that I missed my 8pm workout, and by the time I woke up (9:30pm), it was too late to go.
(My gym closes at 9pm on weekdays… it’s a really cheap gym, ok?)
As anyone who’s ever accidentally taken a nap in the evening knows, it can really throw off your whole night.
And so in addition to feeling terrible from that evening nap, I also felt a wave of guilt. I had missed my workout, something I only started doing for the past few months but since then has really evolved from being a habit to a genuine part of my routine.
It sounds almost silly thinking about it now, but in the moment, it felt like a huge setback.
I’m a min-max kind of guy when it comes to stuff like trying to make gains at the gym (within reason). I track my workouts, I think about progressive overload, I try to optimize recovery.
But reflecting on that evening, especially on how I felt, I realized that I need to go easier on myself.
What “doing your best” actually means
I used to think that doing my best meant maximizing every hour of every day.
This was a whole productivity phase I went through back in the day: I’d make these to-do lists describing what exactly I wanted to get it done for every hour of the day between when I’d wake up and when I’d (planned) to go to sleep (this used to be done in a paper journal, and later evolved to be daily notes in Trello).
If I wasn’t learning something new, building something useful, or working toward some goal, I felt like I was wasting time. I felt guilty for watching movies, for taking naps, for just sitting and thinking, for spending an evening doing absolutely nothing productive.
But doing your best doesn’t mean doing the most.
It means:
- Showing up consistently when it matters, not forcing intensity when your tank is empty
- Listening to what you need in the moment, whether that’s pushing forward or pulling back
- Making sustainable choices that you can maintain over months and years, not just days and weeks
- Being honest about your capacity instead of pretending you’re a productivity machine that never needs maintenance
I don’t always hit my goals in the gym
Some days, I just don’t have the energy or motivation to push myself as hard as I’d like. Other days, even when I do have that energy, I’m just physically unable to push myself and hit my targets (oftentimes I’m not even able to hit that same weight/set/rep combination that I did previously).
And you know what? That’s ok.
Living life one day at a time
I do the best I can. I push myself where I can. And that means I can’t succeed all the time either. It means I fail often. It means I often have hardly enough time to do everything I really want to do (or at least feel like I should be doing to get ahead in my career or make the most of my free time).
And that’s ok.
I could do far, far less and still get by fine. But I push myself because I care. That’s good. What I have to do is make sure I don’t push myself too hard.
Caring about your growth and future is admirable. It means you care. But burning yourself out in pursuit of some impossible standard of productivity isn’t.
Permission to rest
If you’re reading this and feeling like you should always be doing more, this is your permission to take it easy sometimes.
Take the nap when you’re tired. Skip the gym when your body needs recovery. Spend an evening watching TV without feeling guilty about it. Say no to the networking event when you’re socially exhausted. Order takeout instead of meal prepping when you’re overwhelmed.
These aren’t signs of weakness or laziness. They’re signs that you’re human.
It’s ok
It’s ok to not be productive.
It’s ok to have days where you accomplish less than you planned.
It’s ok to choose rest over optimization sometimes.
It’s ok to have limits and to respect them.
It’s ok to take it easy.
You’re not falling behind. You’re not being lazy. You’re not wasting your potential.
You’re just being human. And that’s exactly what you should be.