In this week’s newsletter, we share what unfolded when our idea of productivity was turned upside down. In the midst of sticky notes, calendars, productivity apps, and endless to-do lists, is there still room to be an intentional human?
DECEMBER 5, 2025
Life has such interesting lessons to teach me every day…but I don’t always listen.
In the thick of rushing through my day and trying to get everything done, I think I know better, until inevitably something happens that reminds me to pause and think.
With the past few weeks taking a lot out of me physically, mentally, and emotionally, I have sticky notes all over my desk to remind me of the tasks still outstanding.
The sheer amount of notes nearly gave me a panic attack and I decided to compile some of the separate notes onto one, to make it look like there were fewer. It didn’t help.
I have tried everything from paper day planners to digital productivity apps but I still find myself reaching for sticky notes to quickly jot down something that needs doing.
This is how my to-do list gets completely out of hand and my desk gets taken over by stickies in all colors and shapes, giving me a startling visual of what I still need to accomplish.
Some stickies are rigid like filing deadlines for taxes and some are more flexible like answering emails and messages. All are necessary for networking, staying in touch, planning our content, and keeping the programs and podcast running.
Some stickies can be delegated, an artful skill in itself honed over many years of having projects implode because the delegation went to the wrong person, and it continually raises the same question for me as to what actually moves the needle.
Where does my time need to be spent directly to have the greatest impact?
And as I collected my mountain of stickies and put them in a box to finally have some peace, I allowed myself to think for just a moment about what would happen if I burned the stickies, never to be seen again.
At first, panic took my breath away as I thought about the countless emails and messages piling up. What if I missed an important assignment deadline or failed to connect with someone to collaborate with?
Was the deeper issue my inability to simply let go?
There is a certain element of control to sticky notes in the way that every task is detailed and completely visible to my conscious mind. A constant reminder to be productive and to stay productive, allowing for very little unstructured time to be creative and just flow.
What would happen if I left the stickies in the box and walked away, just for a day, to be unproductive? Did I have the capacity to separate myself from this to-do list without it looming in the back of my head all day?
On a whim, I decided to find out.
The first thing I did was take a nap (gasp!).
I had been sleep deprived for quite some time and my body was asking, more and more impolitely, to rest. I don’t even remember lying down and I slept blissfully for several hours.
After my nap, I could feel the tension in my body and I hadn’t been able to touch my jaw for weeks. The muscle pain was palpable and even impacted my neck movements. I did a restorative yoga class and then settled into a beautiful meditation.
By mid-afternoon, my mind was firing with all sorts of ideas for content, writing, assignments, organization, and collaboration and I excitedly went back to my box of stickies. I wanted to get all these ideas on paper.
As I added the sticky notes to the box, I glanced at some of the old notes and new ideas started popping into my head.
I grabbed my phone and sent voice notes to people, sharing some of the ideas I had been working on. The excited messages coming back got me even more fired up.
My brain was dancing with creativity and excitement that I hadn’t felt in a long time. I couldn’t sit still, so I moved much of my work to voice notes, which created another avenue for flow and alignment.
I seriously asked myself if the key to everything is actually being unproductive.
In my mind, I had “wasted” an entire day, yet I cleared out that box of sticky notes in an amazing flurry of creativity, joy, conscious awareness, and intentional energy that would usually take me several days to do otherwise.
It left me wondering if real productivity isn’t about constantly doing it all, but about choosing the pace that allows our best work to surface. Perhaps slowing down is not wasting time but investing it differently, giving us back what we were rushing to find in the first place.
What would slowing down look like in your life right now? How might it change the way you move through your days?
Where could there be room, even in the smallest ways, to shift the pace? What might become possible if you created that space intentionally throughout the day?
Maybe the sticky notes were never really the problem. Maybe it was how tightly I held on to the belief that every task has to be visible, accounted for, and completed before I can rest.
Slowing down, even for a single day, made me realize that the list will always be there. It is endless by design and will replenish the moment we clear space for something.
But we can hold that space just for “being” instead of filling it with something else, even just for a few minutes or hours, or if you can, a day or a weekend.
There is presence in that slow space that allows for more productivity because we can decompress, we can flow, be creative, let our thoughts meander, and align ourselves with the energy and frequency of who we truly are.
It starts in those small slow-downs, and it does have the power to create immense change in our lives.
By Petra Brunnbauer
Petra Brunnbauer is an award-winning Mind-Body Coach, founder of The Jōrni®, host of the globally-ranked Jōrni Podcast, and author of The Functional Freeze Formula™. With a Master’s in Psychology and as a doctoral student in Mind-Body Medicine, Petra is committed to advancing holistic approaches to health and healing.