If You Wait to Rest Until Your To-Do List is Done, You'll Never Take a Break

Learn what to do instead

Welcome! I’m Dr. Jillian, a physician leader, mom, and coach who is on a mission to help other high achieving professionals and recovering perfectionists live less stressed, more satisfying lives. If the full post doesn’t show up in your e-mail, come over to the webpage or Substack App to see the whole thing. Subscribe here to get future posts straight to your inbox:

The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about time. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!

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I don’t know who needs to hear this, but…

…You’ll never finish your whole to-do list.

I recently blew a workshop participant’s mind when I told her this. I’ve never seen someone so mind boggled.

She had come up to me after my stress management workshop to tell me that she enjoyed my session but struggled with prioritizing herself due feeling like she couldn’t take a break until her to-do list was empty.

I acknowledged her situation and told her I understood how hard it was since I had once been her… until I experienced burnout for the second time.

My body and mind had been screaming for a break, but I hadn’t been listening. So, they decided to take one for me.

Now, I know better. Here’s what I do instead.

How to rest better in spite of having things on your to-do list:

Reframe “Me Time” as essential, not optional

• You are not a machine, but, even if you were, you’d get regularly scheduled maintenance to ensure that you were functioning optimally. These breaks are less energetically costly than the breaks we are forced to take when we experience burnout or illness due to stress.

• Without regular rest and recovery, we will break down. Allocating even brief moments to yourself isn’t indulgent, it’s an essential part of maintaining energy and wellbeing.

Redefine rest

• Rest doesn’t have to mean doing nothing—consider active rest like taking a walk or creative rest like journaling. Discover more ways to incorporate rest into your life here:

You Probably Have the Wrong Idea About Rest

Embrace Imperfection:

• Let go of the belief that everything needs to be “done” perfectly or fully for you to be able to rest. Identify what can wait or be delegated (see below for more on this!).

Time Blocking for Rest:

• Intentionally schedule short breaks and downtime. Treat rest as non-negotiable, just like work meetings.

• Example: 20 minutes of phone-free, screen-free time where you do something that really restores you.
  

Practice Micro-mindfulness:

• Use small moments in your day to rest your mind (e.g., focus on your breath for 1 minute).

• Build brief pauses into routine tasks like waiting in line, riding the elevator, or drinking coffee.

• This “Ten Breaths” meditation is one of my favorite things to do while I ride the elevator up to the floor I work on in the hospital. You can do it with your eyes open, and other people won’t even notice that you’re doing it.
  

4 Ways to Create a Realistic To-Do List

1. Prioritize Ruthlessly:

• Use the Eisenhower Matrix to help you prioritize the tasks on your list. Give yourself 15 minutes to draw your own matrix using the graphic below as a guide. Fill in the 4 quadrants that are split up by importance and urgency.

• After you have filled in it, identify which tasks you actually need to get done by noticing what is urgent and important (the top right quadrant of the graphic below). Put these on your to-do list for the day.

• Ideally, you would not have more than 2-3 things on your list.

• If you do, take another look. Are there things you can delegate or schedule for a later date? The world has a way of making us feeling like everything is urgent. But, as I wrote here, it’s important not to fall into the trap of false urgency.

• At the end of the day, take time to plan what you need to get done tomorrow. Transfer tasks you haven’t finished yet to the next day (or farther into the future. or delegate them!).

Another great resource for prioritizing and scheduling is the Must-Do Method, which

Dr. Kate Henry

recently wrote about here.

2. Acknowledge the 85% Rule:

• Accept that completing 85% of tasks is still a success.

• As mentioned above, avoid overfilling your list—it’s okay to carry tasks over. You’ll never be able to get everything done that you want to do. For more ways to accept this, I recommend Oliver Burkeman’s new book Meditations for Mortals.

3. Include Rest on the List:

• Schedule rest activities as you would any other task. Without scheduled breaks, we are more likely to experience burnout and health issues.
  Example: “15-minute walk” or “read for 15 minutes.”

4. Reflect and Adjust:

Regularly evaluate what’s realistic and recalibrate expectations. Ask yourself: “What is enough for today?”

How will you schedule rest for yourself this weekend?

Let me know in the comments!

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