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My husband and I have a trip coming up, and as I often do before taking time away from the office, I’ve been feeling a little buried under the list of things I need to get done before we go.

After work yesterday I came into the kitchen fretting. “I just realized that with the dates we’re gone I have to write three blog posts between now and when we leave,” I said. The added to-do list items I hadn’t considered felt like a massive weight on me.

“Why?” he asked. “Just say you’re on vacation. Or rerun an older post that might be helpful for people who missed it the first time around.”

Reader, I was speechless for a moment. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could simply not do it. Despite having been self-employed for my entire career, it often eludes me that the only obligation for much of what I do in my business is self-imposed.

Reframing how I was thinking of the blog posts immediately relieved the pressure I was feeling. If I didn’t manage to write all the posts before I left, then that would be okay. And knowing that, giving myself that leeway, suddenly sparked three distinct ideas that I felt not obliged to expand into posts, but eager to explore.

You Are the Boss, Not Your List

How much of our lives do we regard as items on our to-do list? We often speak of obligations, responsibilities, duty—all the things we have to take care of before we can allow ourselves to work on what we want to.

But the truth is, as the cliché goes, the only things we have to do are die and pay taxes (and judging by the loophole-riddled tax returns of high-profile billionaires and government officials, the latter is apparently optional too).

Most things in our lives are things we choose to do, even those that feel like necessary obligations, like earning a living or taking care of our children or doing the laundry. It’s not that there’s some objective imperative for doing those things. We are trading those actions for something we value, like eating and paying the bills, or raising good human beings and caring for those we love, or having clean clothes to wear.

One of the reasons I have the career I do is because I really like having choices, and autonomy is one of my highest values. I’ve been offered “real jobs” a number of times in the past, but I knew from a young age that I wanted more agency, ownership, and control over my own career.

And yet for most of it I’ve worked as though it’s a standard nine-to-five job, getting showered and dressed and fully groomed every morning, reporting to my desk at the same time every day, working a full standard workday and rarely taking unplanned or unstructured time off. I schedule meticulously, a necessity in my deadline-oriented business, and I can probably count on a spider-monkey hand the times I’ve missed a deadline in three decades. The phrase my husband probably hears most often is “I have to get this done.”

Realizing our to-do list items are choices we make lets them stop feeling like demanding taskmasters and instead like what they actually are: paths we’ve chosen because they offer us something we value.

Yes, I have contracts and deadlines, but I agreed to those. In fact generally I set them up. I treat them as obligations, but empirically they’re not. I abide by them because it helps me build the reputation I want in my business for being reliable, because I want an author or publisher to know they can rely on me, because that increases the demand for my services, which helps me build the business that is another “obligation” that I’ve chosen to take on because it’s important to me.

I don’t think this distinction is splitting hairs. To me it feels important for the very reason my husband’s question lifted the weight off my shoulders and inspired me to tackle the work I’d set out for myself: because realizing these things are choices I’m making lets them stop feeling like demanding taskmasters standing by to whip me into ever more diligent effort just to stay afloat in the sea of to-do items, and lets them feel like what they actually are: paths I’ve chosen because they offer me something I value.

Your List Is Lying to You

We can take this even a step further. Often my days are structured around a literal to-do list that has several components: immediate tasks, near-term tasks, and long-term projects. And I frequently approach it as if completing all the tasks on the list will somehow magically clear space to do the things I really want to do, as if my life can finally begin once I check off every item.

But in the last years I have adopted a mantra that shakes me out of that obligatory mindset: This is life. The job isn’t getting through all of the obligations on my list. The list is the job. And I chose it because for the most part I enjoy doing these things.

That doesn’t mean every task or chore feels like a delight. A lot of it is hard. But hard is often the process too. I may squirm and struggle in conveying my editorial feedback in the depth and detail I feel will be most helpful to an author, or in exploring some new element of craft deeply enough to be able to offer a meaningful and useful article or post or course on it to authors, for instance, may even feel the noose of a deadline ticking in on me.

But these efforts also spark me to push my abilities, master new things, learn more about a field that fascinates me, and figure out ever more minutely how the sausage is made, which has always been a source of pleasure for me.

Once when my brother and I were teenagers, he decided to take apart his Volkswagen Golf to work on some issue he was having with it. What had once been a car lay in countless piece parts scattered around the garage. When my mom saw she freaked out, worrying he’d never put it back together again.

But he wasn’t worried about that at the moment. He wanted to know how the car worked and why it wasn’t, and the process of painstakingly dismembering and reassembling it taught him mechanical skills he has used and enjoyed all his life. (For the record he did indeed get the car put back together, with nary a superfluous part left over.)

I talk a lot in my teaching and speaking about writing as a process, rather than an end goal. Focusing on the latter puts our satisfaction and happiness in external factors over which we have no control. We’re in a ridiculously competitive market in a highly subjective and mercurial field. We have no direct control over how anyone responds to our creative work, and in a business where the odds of achieving the highest levels of success many authors hope for are vanishingly small, focusing exclusively on that brass ring can make it feel as if our careers are on hold until we’re granted it, turning our writing from a meaningful creative process into a production line, a project agenda—a grind.

Read more: “You Can’t Rush Your Process”

But the process is fully under our control, and it’s the foundation of our work and the vast bulk of it. Why are we pursuing this craft if we’re not enjoying the doing of it? And if that’s true, then all the many deadlines, obligations, responsibilities that we navigate in creating our writing careers are part of that process we can enjoy. We are choosing every bit of it.

Taking Charge of Your To-do List

Where I think we get into trouble, or at least I do, is with perceived expectations—the demons, of happy memory.

Like competition and comparison: I think about the blogs I admire most and note that they never seem to take a day off. I worry about whether subscribers and regular readers may freak out if I miss a week, shifting their loyalties to someone more reliable. Or my old friend impostor syndrome: I worry about other people’s reactions and expectations and thoughts: If I rerun an old post will they feel cheated? Think I’m phoning it in?

But we have to dig deeper into those assumptions and question their foundation. In fact just last week one of my favorite thinkers, Oliver Burkeman, wrote a post noting that he hadn’t sent a newsletter in a while, feeling as if he were in a creative fallow period of regeneration and rest. He was putting himself and his creative needs first, and not only did I not judge him for it; I found it inspiring.

Rerunning an old post doesn’t mean I’m washed up or out of ideas either. Like everything in nature, creativity is a cycle, and like Burkeman, if I need time to refill the well then there’s no reason I can’t reshare something I felt was helpful the first time. Longtime readers may welcome the reminder or find something new in it, and newer readers may be glad to be exposed to a post they would otherwise have missed.

And if I were to completely take a week off, or even longer, I don’t think any of you would freak out, would you? To be honest, as much as I relish and look forward to Burkeman’s posts, until he pointed it out I didn’t realize he hadn’t sent one in a little while. It’s sort of like getting a call from a favorite friend. You probably don’t notice that you haven’t talked to them in weeks or even months; you’re just delighted to hear from them when you do.

And I can also remember what is not mine to control. People subscribe and unsubscribe all the time. It’s part of the process, and if I’m constantly chasing loyalty and likes, then I’m losing sight of the creative impulse and engine for my work, focusing on the product and not the process.

Remembering that we choose all of the items on our to-do list can help us not only decide what is worth spending our valuable time and energy and attention on, but what isn’t.

Read more: “What Makes a Successful Creative Life?”

And with the things you do choose, rather than framing them as “I have to…” I’ve found it revitalizes my approach to think of them as “I get to…” or “I want to…” or even “I can”—each item is an option for what I might dedicate my efforts to…as I like.

Let things go—question whether a task is really a “must-do” or you can choose not to do it as easily as you chose to think of it as a task or obligation, depending on your values (and yes, that includes valid goals like keeping your job, paying the bills, providing for your family, etc.). But also question whether it’s your own values determining your decisions or other people’s.

Prioritize what matters most to you. Spend your days doing what is meaningful to you—and recognize that you will never have an empty to-do list (and if you did, your life would be empty).

And then joyfully leave things undone and don’t worry about it.

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