All These Morning Routines Are Making Me Shame Spiral

The evidence that I am inadequate had been mounting for some time, but it reached a critical mass last week when Melania Edwards, an HSBC executive in Northern California, told Business Insider about her daily routine. Her day starts at 5:30 a.m. and includes meditation, tennis, yoga, continuing education, and volunteering—plus a full day of work spread across two cities. Here she is, FaceTiming with friends at the beach. Taking a long and refreshing lunch by the harbor. Carrying her books across Stanford campus. The travel time alone made me want to crawl back into bed.

Edwards fell into a trap that had been years in the making. These day-in-the-life articles are suddenly ubiquitous, and they’re very hard to come off well in. You have to strike the right balance of work, not-work, self-improvement and self-deprecation. Daily routine diaries aren’t voyeuristic like food diaries, money diaries, sex diaries or Sunday diaries. They’re instructional. Presenting the daily habits of one highly successful person, they’re meant to offer the keys to unlocking your own future potential. Edwards claimed a level of productivity that exceeded people’s visions of their best selves, and she was just far enough removed professionally from media to elicit Twitter mockery. Also, she’s a woman.

Looked at one way, Edwards’s matter-of-factness about her two daily workouts ought to be refreshing. Male CEOs have been bragging, without self-deprecation, about how early they wake up in business magazines for years. (Before 5, to check the Asian markets.) Optimization-obsessed Silicon Valley spawned a cottage industry of productivity experts explaining how to get more done, faster, in email newsletters and podcasts (though productive people rarely list these in their daily routines). Maybe men’s productivity diaries get less attention because women are socialized to judge other women. Or maybe the question of how men get things done was less interesting because there was always an imagined woman in the background, feeding and bathing the children so that he may “spend time” with them.

Around the time work-life balance became a major public debate, outlets that once might have asked women what they wore started asking women about their daily routines. (Us included. See also: ELLE’s “This Woman’s Work” series.) The trend reached new heights this summer, after Instagram launched the questions feature, allowing one’s followers to ask them anything. One by one, the influencers I follow responded with their daily fitness, beauty, and wellness routines—“because you guys keep asking.” The women I follow described days that were as packed as the one Edwards spelled out. One recently said her routine begins at 5:30 a.m., with hot lemon water. The water is followed by lighting a candle, tongue-scraping (10x), meditation, tarot, yoga, dry-brushing, vegetable stir-fry and a bowel movement—all before looking at her phone.

It was probably time to unfollow some influencers. Instead, I started a Bullet Journal, a proprietary yet customizable diary method created by a digital product designer. My Bullet Journal included a “tracker” page to keep me honest about the habits I sought to implement. The tracker page listed the days of the month on one axis and, across the other, all of the things I would want to tell an imagined audience I do everyday. Exercise, drink eight glasses water, pack a lunch, maintain inbox zero. Because I aspire to be a soulful person, I included unproductive things like reading fiction. This only added to my feelings of inadequacy on the days I was neither productive nor soulful.

Now that I’ve tried my hand at productivity, morning routine diaries raise more questions than they answer. Can you really make a smoothie—and it’s not the blending, it’s the chopping and the dishwashing—in fifteen minutes, while doing a face mask? What if your sun salutation wakes up your kids? When does a productive person wash her gym clothes, her yoga mat, and her eco-friendly Tupperware? When does she roll over her 401(k)?

Maybe the husbands of high-powered women take care of it. I would read an article about that. It seems more likely the diarists pay people to help. And there’s nothing wrong with that! (Although it’s worth asking what those people’s work-life balance looks like!!) In any case, it is physically impossible to do the mundane things that make your life work and all the life-affirming and career-advancing things productive people do every day. Diarists present their ideal days—the ones immediately followed by days of dishes and laundry and errands and doctors appointments—or they lie by omission.

Occasionally, women open up about how it really works. In her ELLE Women In Hollywood speech, Shonda Rhimes called her nanny “the single most important working woman on the planet.” Taking a more open-ended approach to productivity than a day-in-the-life, The Cut’s How I Get It Done often reveals that, some days, even the most successful women don’t make it to the gym or home in time for dinner. Asking women specific questions about childcare, lucky breaks, and negotiating raises can be illuminating. (Still, nobody asks men these questions.) But for the most part, a genre aimed at demystifying work-life balance has made work-life balance another impossible ideal.

I think it’s worth remembering that, in the 2012 Atlantic cover story that started the debate, the answer to whether women can have it all was “no.” Anne-Marie Slaughter laid out a number of reforms (albeit limited mostly to academics) that would be necessary in order for people to be successful and have a life outside work—diary-worthy, in other words. But instead of letting ourselves off the hook, we made superhuman productivity the goal. We ask women to explain how they have it all, as if we should learn from the exceptions from the rule.

What bothers me is the causality implied: if you were this productive, you would be successful. For one thing, we should probably be suspicious of a productivity movement that was born on tech campuses. It’s very easy to be productive when your employer pays people to feed you dinner and do your laundry; that’s the point of the perks. When I think about the reasons I failed to be the human I described in my Bullet Journal, it’s not that I was lazy. It’s that I was tired from commuting to and from work, grocery shopping and doing the dishes, picking up my dry-cleaning and getting my winter boots resoled. Knowing that I can barely do all of these things in spite of my many advantages—no children, healthy parents, just one job—bolsters my sense that, for most of us, maximum productivity is aspirational.

I used to wonder how successful people got it done. Now I think I should marvel at how much you can get done if you are already successful, or at least rich. I should probably read morning routine diaries the way I might approach an Architectural Digest spread. Not to shame people with nice houses, but also not expecting to learn how to rearrange my living room. It’s just fun to think about.

It must be nice to live near tennis courts, or a brisk 20-minute walk from work. It must be nice to have a wife, or a personal assistant, or a driver. It must be easy to do stuff when somebody else does the work of being a person.