I Don't Have a Productivity Problem. I Have a Fear Problem.

Or... The myth of future focus.

I have a problem.

I find genuine joy in planning everything. The holiday menu gets mapped out in October. Conversations get rehearsed in my head before they happen (please tell me you do this too).

I know what I’m doing next Tuesday. And the Tuesday after that. And honestly? Probably the Tuesday in March.

All the productivity advice tells you to plan, to be intentional, to design your life. I do all of that. Heck, I invented an entire course that teaches you how to plan an extraordinary life. I have systems. I have lists. I have backup lists just in case I divert from the plan for which I created the first list. I love, love, love flowcharts, and entity relationship diagrams, and mind maps, and automation tools. If there is a problem to be solved, hand it to me so I can plan how to solve it for you. I think I became a consultant after I sold my business so I could solve other people’s problems now I no longer had my own.

Before this week I had convinced myself (and was writing this post to explain it to you) that my planning obsession could all be traced to temporal preferences. I’m extremely future-focused. Always have been.

I don’t want to be future-focused all the time. I know that joy lives in the present moment. I have had experiences galore that have taught me that.

I have shared a giggle of surprise and delight with my daughter when she was three years-old and discovered tickling. I have stood in an ugly parking lot, the hot concrete burning through my flip flops, and glimpsed the beauty of a palm tree swaying in the wind and forgetting the business disaster that had me crying all morning. I have clinked a glass against my husband’s, before he was my husband, and, looking into his crinkly brown eyes realized that he loved me. Unlike other world-changing moments I have experienced, none of these moments were planned, and all of them required me to be there, physically and mindfully in that specific second, and not in my head planning the next step.

So, I decided to write a post about the “Practicing Noticing” project I’d invented to support my goal of living more in the present, that place where all the joy is. I may still move ahead with that project, but researching this post got me all messed up, so now I’m not sure.

I wanted to understand why every time I complete a morning pages entry in 750 words, the handy text analyzer would always tell me (shout at me in really big letters) that I was writing about the FUTURE. So I started looking into temporal focus and why people might be more aligned with past, present, or future orientation.

There’s legitimate psychology research on this. Zimbardo’s time perspective work. Csikszentmihalyi’s flow states (which I’ve written about before, the “deep now” when you’re so absorbed that hours evaporate). The research tells us that past-focused people tend toward nostalgia or regret (I had this the first year I was an empty nester. I’ll bet you can relate). Present-focused people live in the moment and collect all the joy (At least that’s what it looks like to me). Future-focused people (Where are you, my people?) plan, goal-set, and optimize.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with have a preference, elective or otherwise, for any of these temporal states of being. We are all wired differently, and each state serves a definitive purpose. We’d have no history professors to teach us the lessons already learned, without past focused people. We’d have no meditation gurus, or thrill-seekers without present focused people. And we’d probably have no CEOs, or entrepreneurs with the future focused folk.

But as I dug deeper, the sneaky, spotted gremlins of my own future focused psyche kept rearing their ugly heads. These messengers were telling me that maybe my conviction that I needed to fix my future focus, was a bit of a red herring.

They were everywhere once I started looking. One gremlin pointed out that I couldn’t enjoy unexpected good things because they disrupted The Plan. A surprise dinner invitation? Lovely gesture, but now my evening’s timeline is blown. An impromptu conversation that runs long? Great connection, but I’m already mentally recalculating what I won’t get done now.

Another gremlin pointed out that I was planning things that didn’t need planning. I have a list for everything. When I close my eyes to sleep I am mentally rehearsing my morning. I tend to plan the usage of every hour as soon as I opened my eyes.

The nastiest gremlin pointed out that my “Practicing Noticing” project was nothing more than a plan to be present. The irony was not lost on me. I was scheduling presence. Designing projects around being spontaneous. Wierdo.

I realize now that this desire to produce an academicy explanation post about the importance of human temporal positioning, and how it had driven me to create my “Practicing Noticing” project, was all to avoid the revelation I had when I started writing it. I’m not future-focused. I’m anxiety-focused, and the future was just where I hid it all.

This distinction matters to me, because strategic planning is a tool. Anxiety management through planning is a compulsion.

When I’m planning I create the illusion of control. And somewhere along the way (probably around the time I started having panic attacks in my twenties) my nervous system decided that not knowing what comes next equals danger. With that decision, the loss of control of the future became a threat.

I labeled that threat “unproductive.”

Hi, my name is Lisa-Marie, and I have productivity anxiety. I may or may not be treating every unstructured moment as a low-grade emergency that needs immediate planning, organization or systematization. My brain literally can’t relax unless the next seventeen things are mapped out.

Once I saw it in myself, I saw it everywhere.

In productivity culture. In hustle culture. In the relentless focus on “intentionality” (which often translates to “never stop optimizing”). Self-help advice can be just another form of the problem. Because I wasn’t just planning my day, I was planning my presence, planning my joy, planning my authentic self.

How many of us are doing this? Treating our anxiety as a personality trait, and calling our compulsions “planning skills”?

I’ve been spending enormous amounts of energy trying to control an inherently uncontrollable experience, and calling it productivity.

I don’t have this solved, but at least now I know what I’m actually dealing with. I now know it’s not time management, or organizational skills, and it’s definitely not “being future-focused.”

It’s fear. Fear of the unplanned. Fear of the unstructured. Fear of being out of control. And I’ve built an entire identity around managing that fear through relentless optimization.

And now I’m in the messy middle of life. I’m post-menopause, experiencing my second coming-of-age and trying to control every minute of it. What would my life look like if I stopped treating every moment as a productivity opportunity? If I let things be messy and unplanned and okay?

So will I start, “Practicing Noticing?” Maybe. Maybe that’s just the anchor I need. Maybe I should just notice. Maybe I should just be in the moment without planning how to be in the moment.

I genuinely don’t know.

And that “not knowing” is exactly what I’ve been running from.

Maybe I should practice noticing that.

JOURNAL PROMPT

Think about your own relationship with planning. When does it feel like a useful tool, and when does it feel compulsive? Can you identify a moment this week when you were so busy planning the next thing that you missed the current thing? What would it feel like to let just one day be unstructured, without that being a project in itself?

Want more journal prompts and other goodies?

We have these “maybe” conversations in our monthly salon. The best thing about being our own wise women is that we don’t need to have all the answers. We have a lifetime of knowledge and experience, that will give us all the foundation to sit in the questions. Join us for our next discussion, or submit an essay to be featured. Every submission gets compensated.