For years I believed an empty schedule was the reward. It turned out to be the trap. On busyness, purpose, and the small promises that hold a life upright.
By Ann Estaki
I used to treat the word busy like a diagnosis. Busy was the friend who cancelled dinner for the third time. Busy was the tight jaw, the half-eaten lunch, the feeling of running hard down a hallway that never opened into a room. If you had asked me five years ago what I wanted, I would have said space: a clean calendar, white and quiet as fresh snow, with nothing in it but me.
Then I got some of that space, and I did not know what to do with it.
That is the part nobody warns you about. Emptiness is not automatically peace. Sometimes it is just emptiness, a room with the lights off, where every worry you have been too occupied to hear finally gets its turn to talk.
So I have changed my mind, and I want to be honest about how. I do not want less to do. I want the right things to do. I am not after a blank schedule; I am after a meaningful one. And somewhere along the way I stopped seeing organization as a straitjacket and started seeing it as the thing that finally let me breathe.
The Fog of “Whatever Happens”
For a long time my to-do list lived only in my head, where it rattled around like loose change in a dryer. I called this spontaneity. I told myself that keeping my days unstructured kept me free.
It did not keep me free. It kept me on call.
Every day became a contest between whatever was loudest: the email with the red flag, the phone that buzzed, the dishes giving me a look from the sink. I answered all of them, and at night I lay awake replaying the ones I hadn’t. I was tired in a way sleep did not fix, because the tiredness was not in my body. It was in the part of me that kept trying to remember everything at once.
Psychologists have studied that low hum. Unfinished tasks tend to linger in the mind and tug at our attention. What surprised me was the follow-up research: in a 2011 set of studies, E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that simply making a concrete plan for an unfinished goal quieted those intrusive thoughts, even before the task itself was done.1 The plan, not the finish line, was what let the mind set the thing down.
Emptiness is not automatically peace. Sometimes it is just emptiness.
My problem had never been a lack of time. It was a lack of intention. I had never told my days what they were for.
From Cage to Trellis
The turning point was not dramatic. It was an ordinary evening, the kind where I sat down to rest, picked up my phone “for a minute,” and surfaced an hour later feeling worse than when I started. I hadn’t rested. I had simply dissolved.
So I did the counterintuitive thing. I got organized, not with a vague promise to “do better” but with actual systems. I grouped similar tasks so I wasn’t switching gears forty times a day. I gave my calendar colors. I peeled the wild, half-formed ideas off the sticky notes curling on my monitor and gave them a home on a “Someday/Maybe” list, a practice I borrowed from David Allen’s Getting Things Done, where ideas that aren’t ready yet can wait without nagging.2
I stopped waiting to feel inspired and started trusting routine.
At first it felt stiff, like new shoes. Then something loosened. When Tuesday mornings belonged to writing and Thursday afternoons belonged to planning, I stopped spending my best energy deciding what to do and started spending it on doing. I used to call structure a cage. Now I think of it as a trellis: the thing a climbing vine leans on, not to be held back, but to grow toward the light without collapsing under its own weight.
The Room That Order Makes
This is the paradox I live by now: being organized gives me more mental space, not less.
When I know where a file lives, when my calendar tells me plainly what this hour is for, when a system catches the details so my memory doesn’t have to, something in my chest unclenches. I am free to focus. Free to be creative. Free to actually sit with the people I love and listen, instead of nodding while some forgotten task taps on the back of my skull.
Structure isn’t a cage. It’s a trellis, the thing you lean on so you can grow toward the light.
And I have had to admit something about myself: I need purpose the way I need air. It doesn’t have to be grand. It just has to be mine. Writing, building, learning, helping someone untangle a problem they were sure was hopeless: these are the things that pull me out of bed. When I give them a real slot on the calendar, I am telling myself, in the only language my days understand, that they matter.
Choosing to Be the New Monkey
There is a story that travels through management books and motivational talks. A handful of monkeys share a cage with bananas at the top of a ladder. Whenever one climbs, all of them are doused with cold water, so they learn to drag back anyone who tries. One by one the original monkeys are swapped out, until none of them has ever been sprayed, and still no one climbs. No one remembers why. It is simply how things are done.
I should confess that the story, as it is usually told, is more parable than science. It seems to be a loose retelling of a 1967 study of learned behavior in rhesus monkeys by Gordon Stephenson, later popularized by Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, and the dramatic version has never been documented as a real experiment.3 But parables survive because they tell a truth about us, and this one tells a truth about me.
I think many of us live in some version of that cage. Somewhere along the way we absorbed the message that wanting a full life is a flaw, that the ideal is effortlessness, that a good life should look like a permanent beach vacation. Researchers have documented how busyness gets worn as a badge of status,4 and the essayist Tim Kreider has warned, rightly, against the frantic, self-important kind of busy that crowds out real living.5 I take that warning to heart. But I have come to believe the answer is not to stop reaching. It is to reach on purpose.
So I am choosing to be the new monkey. The one who wasn’t there for the cold water. The one who looks up, sees the bananas, and climbs anyway.
My busyness is not a sign that I have lost control. It is a sign that I am curious. It is what happens when I refuse to let my appetite for life be trained out of me by the fear of what other people might think.
Not Perfect, Just Practiced
Please don’t picture me as one of those naturally tidy women with labeled drawers and a serene desk. My desk has, more than once, been mistaken for the recycling. I once bought three planners in a single year and abandoned every one of them before Valentine’s Day. Organization is not my personality. It is a choice I make, badly some days and well on others, every single morning.
Mostly, I make it for her: Future Me. She is real to me now in a way she didn’t used to be. Hal Hershfield’s research suggests that people who feel more connected to their future selves tend to make choices that serve them better over time; they treat that later person less like a stranger and more like someone they are responsible for.6 I know that feeling. When I spend ten minutes setting something up today, Future Me doesn’t melt down tomorrow hunting for the file. When I work ahead, Future Me gets a lazy Sunday with no guilt in it. It is one of the kindest things I know how to do for myself.
Every checked box is a tiny monument to a promise I kept to myself.
Why I Stay Full
I don’t keep myself organized and busy to impress anyone. And I am not running from stillness. Stillness and I have made our peace, and the full calendar is what brokered it.
Because here is what all those colored blocks and checked boxes have taught me.
I have learned to love a slow morning, as long as I am the one who chose it.
I have learned to say no to the things that only look urgent, so I have room to say yes to the things that truly matter.
I have learned to leave white space on purpose, the way a beautiful page leaves margins, so the words have somewhere to breathe.
I have learned to forgive the days that fall apart, and to begin again the next morning without a lecture.
And I have learned that rest I plan for is rest I can actually feel, while rest that simply happens to me usually slips through my fingers.
I do it because my time on this earth is limited, and I refuse to spend it foggy, reactive, and stuck.
I do it because checking a box is not just finishing a chore. It is a tiny monument to a promise I kept to myself, and after years of breaking those promises, keeping them feels like coming home.
And it makes me happy. Quietly, steadily, stubbornly happy. ■
— Ann Estaki
Notes & Sources
- Masicampo, E. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (2011). Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 667–683.
- Allen, D. (2001; rev. ed. 2015). Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. New York: Viking/Penguin. The “Someday/Maybe” list is Allen’s term.
- Stephenson, G. R. (1967). Cultural acquisition of a specific learned response among rhesus monkeys. In Progress in Primatology (pp. 279–288). Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer. The ladder-and-bananas version was popularized in Hamel, G., & Prahalad, C. K. (1994), Competing for the Future, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, and is widely regarded as an embellished parable rather than a documented experiment.
- Bellezza, S., Paharia, N., & Keinan, A. (2017). Conspicuous consumption of time: When busyness and lack of leisure time become a status symbol. Journal of Consumer Research, 44(1), 118–138.
- Kreider, T. (2012, June 30). The ‘Busy’ Trap. The New York Times, Opinionator.
- Hershfield, H. E. (2011). Future self-continuity: How conceptions of the future self transform intertemporal choice. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1235, 30–43. See also Ersner-Hershfield, H., et al. (2009). Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow. Judgment and Decision Making, 4(4), 280–286.
All prose in this essay is original. Ideas drawn from the works above are paraphrased in the author’s own words and credited here; no passages are quoted from them.
© 2026 Ann Estaki. All rights reserved.
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