What happens when you’re getting back up?

Well, it feels great! You’re hustling. You’re grinding. You’re cranking. You’re burning. You’re putting yourself in small ponds. You’re seeing results. You’re on the incline. You’re being productive.

And that’s a word to pause on.

Productive.

Isn’t being productive fantastic?

The truth is we’ve never been more productive in the history of our species.

A 2015 McKinsey white paper on global growth says that in developed nations labor productivity grew 1.8% a year over the past half century, faster than in any previous period in history. The average employee generates 2.4 times as much in output as in 1964.

The pace of productivity growth is faster than at any other time in history.

And maybe that sounds all well and good.

But is it?

A New Yorker feature by Alexandra Schwartz calls our focus on productivity and hustle “improving ourselves to death.” She writes, “It’s no longer enough to imagine our way to a better state of body or mind. We must now chart our progress, count our steps, log our sleep rhythms, tweak our diets, record our negative thoughts—then analyze the data, recalibrate, and repeat.”

Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants, wrote an article in the New York Times called “In Praise of Mediocrity” where he says, “If you’re a jogger, it is no longer enough to cruise around the block; you’re training for the next marathon. If you’re a painter, you are no longer passing a pleasant afternoon, just you, your watercolors and your water lilies; you are trying to land a gallery show or at least garner a respectable social media following.… The promise of our civilization, the point of all our labor and technological progress, is to free us from the struggle for survival and to make room for higher pursuits. But demanding excellence in all that we do can undermine that; it can threaten and even destroy freedom.”

Right now we probably soak in more information, communicate more often, and get more done in a day of work than our great-grandparents got done in a month.

But the trade-off is that we now feel less comfortable letting loose, getting creative, coloring outside the lines, taking wild risks, spilling paint all over the place, and tapping deeply into things that will ultimately matter more to us.

When the leader at your company cancels training or a conference or an offsite, what reason do they always give? “We’ve got too much on our plates right now.” You can picture the stern look and furrowed eyebrows and roomful of people nodding. “Oh yes. Plates full. Very busy. No more can do.”

We feel like we can’t afford to stick a twig in the spokes of our productivity wheel or the bike will go tumbling down the hill.

We are so tightly wound!

But we can stop it.

We have to stick the twig in our own spokes.

Yes, one way we need to get to awesome is by mastering the ability to turn off the noise from everything around us in order to sit in those tiny little ponds of tranquillity where our thoughts and ideas can scramble and ferment and marinate and grow…

We need to find space. Space where we can escape. Space where we can process. Space where we can reflect. Space where we can get off the deck, climb up to the captain’s chair, and make sure our ship is really going the right way.

How do we do it?

Untouchable Days.