Last Tuesday I caught myself rearranging my bookshelf by spine color instead of doing actual work. Not because it looked better that way, but because I’d seen someone’s rainbow-organized library on Instagram and suddenly my perfectly functional alphabetical system felt inadequate. That’s when I realized I’d been letting other people’s processes creep into mine again.
I’ve been keeping track of the things I’ve stopped doing over the past year. Not the obvious stuff like doom-scrolling or eating gas station burritos at midnight, but the subtler habits that seemed productive or meaningful until they weren’t. The things that made me feel like I was performing being myself instead of actually being myself.
Morning Pages Became Morning Performance
I started doing Julia Cameron’s morning pages because everyone swears by them. Three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing every morning to clear your head and unlock creativity. Sounds great in theory. In practice, I spent six months writing the same complaints about being tired and wondering what to have for breakfast.
The problem wasn’t the exercise itself but how I was doing it. I kept thinking about whether my pages were “good enough” or insightful enough, which defeats the entire point. I’d catch myself crafting clever observations about mundane things, turning my brain dump into a rough draft of something I might want to share later. Morning pages aren’t supposed to be shareable. They’re supposed to be garbage.
Now I just write when I have something to figure out, not because the calendar says it’s 7 AM. Sometimes that’s three pages, sometimes it’s three sentences on a napkin. The insight comes from the thinking, not from filling a quota.
The Productivity System That Made Me Less Productive
For eight months I maintained an elaborate task management system with color-coded priorities, energy levels, and time estimates. I had different contexts for different locations, recurring templates for weekly reviews, and tags for everything. I spent more time organizing my tasks than doing them.
The breaking point came when I realized I had a task called “update task management system” that had been rolling over for three weeks. I was procrastinating on my procrastination system. The irony was thick enough to spread on toast.
What I actually needed was embarrassingly simple: a piece of paper with today’s three most important things written on it. If I finish those, great. If not, at least I know why. The elaborate system made me feel like I was being productive while actually creating more work for myself. It’s the productivity equivalent of cleaning your desk instead of starting the project that’s due tomorrow.
Reading Like I Had Something to Prove
I used to keep detailed notes on every book I read, complete with page numbers and profound-sounding quotes. I told myself this was for future reference, but really I was building evidence that I was the kind of person who reads thoughtfully. The notes app on my phone became a graveyard of half-finished insights that I never looked at again.
The weird part is that taking notes made me remember less about what I read, not more. I was so focused on capturing the “important” parts that I stopped paying attention to how the ideas actually landed with me. I’d highlight passages that seemed significant rather than ones that genuinely sparked something.
Now I dog-ear pages and scribble in margins like a barbarian. If a book changes how I think about something, I’ll remember it. If it doesn’t, no amount of color-coded highlighting will make it stick. The books that matter leave tracks in how I see the world, not in my note-taking app.
The Weekly Review That Became Weekly Judgment
Every Sunday I’d sit down with my notebook and review the week. What went well, what didn’t, what to adjust for next week. This worked for about a month before it turned into a weekly session of beating myself up for not becoming the person I thought I should be by now.
The questions I was asking weren’t actually helpful. “Did I exercise enough?” is different from “How did moving my body feel this week?” The first one has a right answer that I probably didn’t hit. The second one gives me information I can use.
I still check in with myself regularly, but I ditched the formal structure. Instead of scheduled self-evaluation, I notice when something feels off and adjust in real time. It turns out I don’t need to wait until Sunday to realize that staying up until 2 AM scrolling my phone makes Tuesday morning miserable.
Why I’m Still Figuring This Out
The thread connecting all these abandoned habits is that they started as tools and became performances. I wasn’t doing morning pages to clear my head; I was doing them because that’s what writers do. I wasn’t tracking tasks to get things done; I was tracking them to feel organized. I wasn’t taking notes to engage with ideas; I was taking them to prove I was engaging with ideas.
The tricky thing about self-improvement is that it’s easy to mistake the appearance of having your act together for actually having your act together. Systems and habits can be genuinely useful, but they can also become elaborate ways of avoiding the messier work of figuring out what you actually want and why.
I’m curious about what you’ve stopped doing lately. Not the obvious bad habits, but the things that seemed like they should be working for you but somehow weren’t. The productive procrastination, the helpful habits that helped everything except the thing you were trying to help. Sometimes the best system is admitting you don’t need one.
