Instead I went swimming. Twice. Sat with a smoothie afterwards both times. And somewhere in between, I wrote a whole chapter of a book that wasn’t even supposed to be happening yet, and finally did the social media posts I’d been putting off for weeks. And loads of other things I can’t even remember.

Three days. Less time than usual. More done than usual. And the odd part isn’t the productivity…ok that’s quite odd, but I didn’t feel rushed once.

The Panic Was Doing More Damage Than the Deadline

I’ve been trying to work out what actually changed, because it wasn’t that I worked harder or found some clever new system. If anything, I spent less time working and more time doing things for me.

What I think changed is this – I didn’t let myself panic about the three days. And without the panic, I didn’t do the thing I usually do when there’s “not enough time” – which is freeze.

That sounds backwards. Surely feeling short on time should make you move faster? Sometimes it does. But I think there’s a point where time pressure stops sharpening you and starts shutting you down. You look at everything that needs doing, feel the walls close in, and instead of picking the nearest task and starting, you do nothing. Not because you’re lazy, but because the sheer weight of “not enough time” makes starting feel pointless before you’ve even tried.

I’ve done it for years. The longer the to-do list gets, the less of it I actually touch.

I remember doing it nearly 20 years ago in my Finance Manager role. There’s always something to do there but so many times I froze, not knowing were to start.

This Isn’t Just a “Me” Thing

There’s actual research behind this, and it made me feel a lot less like I was making excuses for myself. Behavioural scientists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir spent years studying what scarcity – of time, money, or anything else – does to the way we think. Their finding was that feeling short of something doesn’t just change our choices, it changes our cognitive bandwidth. We tunnel in on the shortage itself, and everything outside that narrow focus gets harder to act on, including the very things that would help.

That tunnelling is what I recognise in myself. A packed to-do list doesn’t just sit there waiting patiently. It takes up room in your head that you need for actually doing the things on it.

It’s Not Just About Having Three Days

It happens in ten minutes too.

You know the feeling – less than half an hour before you have to leave the house, usually for the school run in my case. And there’s a task that’s been sat in your head for weeks, or on your list if you are a list person. Something admin-y and vaguely dreaded. You look at the clock and think, there’s no point starting that now, I’ll do it later. Which is exactly how it ended up living rent-free in your head in the first place.

Then, for no obvious reason, you just start. And it takes ten minutes. Not the hour you’d built it up to be in your mind. Ten minutes, and suddenly you’ve got time to do two more things before you leave. Then you’re locking the front door wondering how on earth that happened, and why you didn’t just do it three weeks ago.

I’ve had that with things that felt properly heavy at the time – phoning the insurance company to sort out my business policy, which I’d been putting off because I’d convinced myself it would be complicated. And getting my paperwork together for my self-assessment tax return. Both times, once I actually started, I could have kicked myself for how long I’d let them sit there. If I were being less kind to myself about it, anyway.

(There’s a fine line here worth a blog of its own – the difference between using time well and over-engineering it, like batching errands that are all in the same direction and then somehow doing none of them because the list in your head got too long. That’s one for another day.)

Deciding You Have Time Isn’t the Same as Having Less to Do

But that’s a different tangle for a different day. Back to the actual point.

Three days, or ten minutes – same pattern either way. My to-do list this week was no shorter than any other week, and that admin task didn’t magically get lighter while it was sat in my head. What changed both times was that I relaxed about how much time I had and it made all the difference.

That’s a strange thing to try and explain to someone still living the old way, because it can sound like wishful thinking. “Just decide you have time” isn’t advice, it’s a platitude, unless you can see what it’s actually doing underneath. What it did for me was remove the panic. And without the panic, I wasn’t frozen. I could just start. I felt like I had found out how to make more time. Like real time, it felt like time must have moved slower.

You don’t find more time. You decide you have it – and then you go and prove yourself right.

If you’ve ever searched how to make more time in your life, I can tell you now there’s no trick, no app, no system I can point you to. There’s just the decision, and the decision is doing all the actual work – it’s what clears the panic out of the way so you can start.

I don’t think this is something you can talk yourself into overnight. I think you have to be somewhere in your life where you’re ready to hear it, or it just bounces off. Because, I know it would have bounced off me a couple of years ago. But if you’re in a season where the to-do list feels endless no matter how much you clear, it might be worth asking whether it’s really the list that’s the problem, or whether it’s the panic about the list.

Three days. Two swims. One chapter I wasn’t expecting to write yet. I’d take that over a “productive” week of feeling like I was drowning, any time.

Have you noticed this in your own life? That the pressure of not having enough time sometimes stops you doing anything at all? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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Remember, loving life more isn’t about perfection or having all the answers. It’s about remaining open to growth and finding joy in the journey, wherever it leads you.

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