Originally published by The Clifton Courier, March 27, 2019

I’m someone who feels the need to achieve things everyday.

This makes me sound like some kind of young, enthusiastic entrepreneur with a bright future of property investments, bold blazer choices and eclectic collection of celebrity ex-boyfriends. It sounds as if I seize the day.

However, as my psychologist and I have worked out, I’m not overly ambitious. I’m not out there demanding my app/product/unnecessary social movement get more and more successful. I don’t really have any goals, at least not the big, life-changing ones. Nope, I think smaller. I just need to feel as if I’ve done something productive with the 24 hours I’ve been allotted to quiet the bees buzzing around frantically in the glass jar that is my brain.

So when I have a day of doing very little, I find myself feeling quite wretched and wasteful. I feel as if I cheated myself.

To avoid this, I write out cheeky to-do lists to keep myself on track so at the end of the day, my self-loathing is diminished ever so slightly because I’ve managed to organise my lunch for the following day or something.

But last week I was sick. And I actually called in sick rather than sniffing my way through a workday, spraying germs on my colleagues. This meant I had a whole 24 hours to fill, something that was not lost on me despite my losing my sense of taste and extreme tissue dependence. I was pretty much useless.

But at the end of the day when I assessed my productivity I was unable to accept that, by doing nothing, I was recovering, which would eventually mean my returning to full productivity sooner than if I’d tried to do something. No, that would be too logical.

So in the absence of a ticked off to-do list, I wrote myself a… did list; documenting everything I did that day. And look, it did help. Because I was able to go through that list and see that I did manage to achieve some things, however inconsequential they may be in the long run.

Watched a lot of TV: Specifically, one episode of Nigella Express, one episode of Grand Designs, half an hour of Morgan Freeman trying to answer questions about God, ten minutes of doco about Scottish witch hunts (I turned it off when a torture scene got a little bit too much), A Secret Garden, an hour of Anthony Bourdain hanging out in Budapest (which made me want to eat dense, meaty stews), three episodes of Ricky Gervais’ show After Life, four episodes of Daniel Radcliffe and Steve Buscemi’s show Miracle Workers and the first feature length film documenting the inspiring story of Paddington Bear. I mean, the sheer length of that list is impressive in itself. But I’m going to attempt to extract some meaning from it. Watching two newly released shows have boosted my pop culture knowledge, something I desperately need to top up after years of watching nothing but Cougar Town and Gilmore Girls reruns. Anthony Bourdain informed my dinner choice, Paddington lightened my soul and I got to revel in Collin’s “I’m not sour” face in The Secret Garden. It was extremely beneficial.

Showered: Considering I never left the house, you could argue that showering wasn’t entirely necessary but that’s why it was such a big victory. Showering when you’re covered in mud is something you do without requiring much motivation, because you can see the immediate benefits. But showering when you’re super comfy, have no energy and have a nose too blocked to be aware of your salty musk requires a lot of will power.

Followed Big Bird on Twitter: There’s a lot of snarky drams on Twitter, so I prefer to pad out my feed with as many wholesome contributors as possible. I also follow Paddington Bear. And look, I’m well aware that it’s a PR exercise and the accounts are written by social media managers posing as these fictional delights, but I don’t care.

Encouraged friends in my group chat to follow Big Bird on Twitter: I think it was the “thank u, nest” tweet of his that really did it for them.

Wrote a to do list for the following day: I had the next day off and I’d be damned if I was going to waste it. However, I did put really achievable goals on that list, such as lighting a scented candle and checking to make sure I paid a bill I know I already paid.