i’m going to have a productive day

There's a kind of day that leaves you flattened and moves nothing. Forty messages answered, three meetings attended, a list that finishes longer than it started. It felt like work the entire time.

And there is the other kind, where one difficult thing that had been sliding for a fortnight finally got picked up and dealt with, and the rest of the hours were fairly ordinary.

The second is the productive one, and it usually feels less impressive from inside.

Busy is loud and easy to demonstrate. Useful is quiet, and from the outside often looks like somebody sitting still, thinking.