Completing tasks, no matter how inane, made me feel productive—and through the years I’d convinced myself that I needed to be productive at all times in order to achieve broader life goals. Never you mind the fact that most of those tasks have no real importance and frequently represent phony work.

—This wonderful, first-person account on Living a FI describes what it takes to deprogram the stay-busy mindset that plagues ambitious people who crush their todo list (but miss out on life). Anyone else give yourself a nightly performance review of whether or not you got enough done that day? Yeah. This one’s for us.