#39 Could this wellness practice be the key to success?
Plus, the real reasons we procrastinate...
There’s an influencer I’ve long admired and for one very good reason. Grace Beverly is just 26 years old, but wow does she get shit done. While at Oxford University she became a fitness influencer before going on to write The Sunday Times bestselling book Working Hard, Hardly Working—as well as launch a podcast of the same name—and found activewear line Tala, workout app Shreddy and planner brand The Productivity Method. She retains me among her one million followers because she inspires me to likewise *try to* get shit done.
I’d hasten a guess that many of her other fans feel the same way, hence the ginormous waitlist that amassed following The Productivity Method’s initial launch. The ‘Zillenial’ CEO has recently announced the launch of a new £42 digital planner, which she describes as the ‘bible to your life’. Despite the fact it’s not exactly cheap, I’ve been kind of tempted, given that it promises to help me start ‘working smarter, not harder’. Which feels like a small price to pay to ‘become the most productive version of yourself’’.
However, I caught myself and quickly closed the window on my laptop. I’ve previously written in this newsletter about the toxic pressure to always be achieving stuff at the expense of our wellbeing (a topic Emma Gannon covers in her latest book The Success Myth, in which she links her fear of being ‘lazy’ to burnout). As part of this, I’m fighting back after becoming conscious of how such marketing vocab about productivity plays on my insecurities, in favour of taking a more compassionate approach to my to-do list. But just before the web page was absorbed into my screen—like a hard-working face serum—one claim jumped out: beat procrastination.