You may have noticed something in your handful of decades on this planet, which is that the to-do list never actually ends. Never.
It’s incredible, really. The fact that you can do and perform and task-master from sun up until sun down, and still, just as you strike that satisfying little line through the last item on your list and prepare to lay your sweet head down, another item scoots its way onto the list.
I’ve talked before about what it means to acknowledge and accept our finiteness, to embrace the reality of the never-done-list in a world that tries to lure us like a Siren to a mythical land of You’re Finished! You Get to Rest! But what does it look like to practice an existence in which we no longer bow to the altar of our lists? What does it take to live outside the tyranny of to-dos?
Here’s what you do: You make before you manage.
The particular phrasing and the nudge came from Tim Ferris, well-known author and podcaster. If you’re not familiar, he rose to notoriety by teaching people how to do things in less time. Some of his earlier work feels problematic for me, but he’s updated his thinking and I’ve always loved his way of putting this specific idea.
Make before manage.
Making before managing means that before we dig into the administrative tasks of the day – scheduling the doctor’s appointment, attacking our overflowing inbox, coordinating after school care, following up on those voicemails – that we pause, and we create.
It means that we set aside the sticky demands of the day for just a little bit longer and we make something – make anything.
Now, this is one of those pieces of advice that I think has the potential to sound tone deaf to a generation of parents, professionals, and others living through a capitalist and increasingly authoritarian hellscape that extracts our labor and spits us out.
But it also might be what saves us.
Because I think making before managing might just be the antidote to what ails us: lives lived for other people, lives lived at a breakneck pace, lives lived devoid of purpose, meaning, and beauty.
You might not be sure what making would look like for you. The good news is that it can look a million different ways. We might call it creation. We might call it joy. We might call it art. Making means forming or forging instead of responding and reacting. Making simply means being generative in some way.
For me, that often means writing, and I’ve been trying to live by this make before manage mantra over this past year. That can look like opening up a Google doc to write a few lines before opening up Outlook to see what’s landed on my plate since yesterday. It can look like taking the 30 minutes I have before my first client session not to see how many to-list items I can knock out – which is still what the manager part of me will try to pull me to do – but instead to start generating ideas for a project I’m working on.
The manager parts of us are strong and well-cultivated after decades of practice. They know how to jump into action and they derive a sense of satisfied security from feeling like I’ve just knocked off three annoying tasks from my list. But I think we all know how short-lived and hollow that satisfaction ends up being. It’s like chasing a shallow high and simply needing more and more to stave off the feelings of unproductivity and panic that are close behind.
But if you know the feeling of making something, it’s a wholly different sense. We so often don’t even try to make because we fear it won’t be good or won’t be enough, but if we can take an imperfectionist stance and just make something – anything – we start to savor the sweet satisfaction that comes from knowing we are makers.
This is really what it’s all about, I believe. Making is agency. It’s not actually about the thing we make at all – whether that’s a little poem or loaf of banana bread or sending a note to a friend – it’s about reminding our core selves that we are capable of generativity. It signals to our psyche that we are not at the mercy of the lists and demands, but that we are creative agents in our lives.
And because it has to be said, I suspect that we need this sense of ourselves more than ever right now. In a world that can feel downright dark and like it’s constantly stripping us of our agency, making is an act of rebellion and perhaps the most radical self-care. It’s a natural anti-depressant and perhaps the biggest missing link in our conversations about mental health.
In an interview about her recently published book, We Need Your Art, creator Amie McNee said, “We need to move away from a culture of consumption back to our roots as humans. To a culture of creation… we feel very useless, and we’re watching the world. We’re just consuming it, and we feel completely and utterly out of control, useless, without agency, without purpose. And we just think, ‘Fuck, the world’s on fire, and there’s nothing for me to do.’ When we learn that we can create and make and use our voices, we find a lifeboat in the storm.”
Making is forging our own lifeboat. And don’t think for a moment that you aren’t a maker. Because you absolutely are. Don’t want to make art, in the traditional sense? Then make a moment of joy for someone you love. Make a decision you have been putting off. Make movement by taking 10 minutes to dance around your bedroom or office. Make a new system for your workflow. Make a new recipe. Just make something.
We rightly wonder how we can possibly take time to make something before we jump into tending to everything else. I’ll give my truest and possibly unsatisfying answer to this. We just do it. If we have an hour, fabulous. If we have 60 seconds, wonderful. Again, the creation is not the point. The creating is. One line. One brush stroke. One act of kindness.
Just make something. Make the thing you most need.
