So you got the job. Now what? Join me, Eleni Mata, on HBR's new original podcast, New

Here, the Young Professionals Guide to Work, and how to make it work for you. Listen for

free wherever you get your podcasts. Just search New Here. See you there!

Welcome to the HBR IDA Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish.

On this show, we're all about working better and smarter, whether it's through big ideas that

can give your career a quantum leap or through bundles of smaller ideas that help you work

better, faster, and cheaper, practical advice to do more. But today we have a radical notion

for you. Maybe it's a good day to do nothing. Because today's guest says that too many

of us are living in hyper drive, constantly paying homage to productivity, and it's

often just too much activity, often for the wrong reasons. She says we're setting ourselves

up to fail, and then just feel productivity guilt when we do. She asks, if we aren't

benefiting from our overwork and overachieving, why do we tie our self-worth to how productive

we are? Madeline Door is a writer and interviewer. Her new book is, I didn't do the thing today,

and she joins me now. Hey Madeline. Thanks for having me.

You take issue with this obsession with productivity. I get the sense that even the word and how

we think about productivity is a fraught concept for you.

Yeah, I think it's definitely the obsession that I think can have us feeling like we're

in tangles day to day. I think that there's nothing wrong necessarily with being productive.

I think that we need to do things as people in society. But it's this relentless pressure

that is put on us, and we put on ourselves, this demand, and this endless to-do list

that we braid ourselves for not getting through. I think it's this equation that we've created

with productivity being a measure of our worth, that means that if we do that, what we do

...