Letās play with a thought experiment for a minute. A little dramatic⦠but stay with me... š„
What if you burned the pile?
You know the one āthe mental stack of to-dos,
the obligations you said yes to out of guilt,
the āshoulds,ā
the open tabs,
the DMs you havenāt replied to,
the 4,000 (do I hear 10,000? 30,000?) unread emails you swear youāll deal with āsomeday.ā
What if you piled all of it upā¦struck a matchā¦and let the whole thing go up in flames?
What would happen?
Would there be anything in that pile youād actually miss?
Anything truly urgent or essential⦠OR is most of it just noise youāve been carrying out of habit?
Would anything bad happen if you didnāt respond, fix, finish, or follow up?
Or ā and this is the real question ā would it feel like release? Like creating a clean slate your brain hasnāt felt in years?
Sometimes the reason we feel behind isnāt because weāre failingā¦itās because weāre dragging around a pile of busywork that doesnāt even belong to us anymore.
So today, just imagine:
If you burned the pile, what would be lost?
And what freedom might you gain?
You donāt have to actually set anything on fire (tempting as it is š
)ā¦but noticing what you would burn tells you a lot about whatās still worth carrying.
(Thanks to for sparking this reflection by suggesting I burn my own pile lol)