I'm Jocelyn K. Gly, and this is Hurry Slowly, a podcast about pacing yourself,

where I explore how you can be more productive, creative, and resilient through the simple act of slowing down.

In my last meditation, I shared a concept called tender discipline, which

explored the idea of answering the question, who are you without the doing? A question it took

me over four years to answer. And today, I want to take you back to where I was before I went on that journey,

to the moment when I had what I now call my busyness breakdown,

to a moment when I was speeding through my days like a freight train,

obsessed with productivity and achievement no matter what the cost.

A feeling that I'm guessing might sound a little familiar to you.

Back in 2013, I'd been working at a startup for about four years, and I had been given the

opportunity and the autonomy to make tons of cool stuff. A Webby award-winning editorial website,

a quarterly magazine, a huge annual conference. It was an

extremely busy but also heady time. And I made the mistake of starting to get high on my own

supply, by which I mean I became intoxicated with my own productivity. Unable to ever be content with my own

achievements, I decided to ratchet up the pace even further. I got wildly ambitious about what I

and my one little human body could accomplish, and I decided to 3x my workload, adding multiple massive new projects of my

own devising to an already intensive work schedule. By the end of that year, it's true. I had

produced a ton of incredible things. But what's also true is that I was a burnt out husk of a person. I had no energy left to

nourish myself, whether that meant eating healthfully, exercising regularly, or just doing

extracurricular activities for fun. My usual routine involved getting home from work at about

8 p.m. at night with just enough

energy to pour a glass of wine, order takeout, and watch Netflix until I passed out.

...