Padraig O’Morain, asking “Why do we need to be always busy?” in the Irish Times:

Our lives have become like a maths problem in one of those old schoolbooks: a man fills bath with x gallons of water. When he has filled the bath the man unplugs the stopper. Given the dimensions of the plug hole and of the bath and the speed of the water, how long will it take for the bath to empty?

I was never able to answer such questions, though if you’ve been paying attention it’s probably a breeze. I’m pretty sure though that if the man with the bucket keeps filling the bath it’s never going to empty.

And in our world the bucket seems to keep getting bigger and the filling of the bath never ends.

To cope with all this we have become as productive as we can and we search for new ways to get even more done. But we’re like elite athletes: we’ve reached the pinnacle of what we can do. We can work on little improvements around the margins but, really, there’s no big leap waiting to be made.

I derive some strange comfort from accepting that I don’t have to be more productive because it’s impossible anyway. I don’t have to get to the end of the to-do list because the guy with the bucket is always going to be there, pouring away. And I don’t have to clear the inbox because unless you cheat (by filtering lots of emails out of sight and out of mind) you can’t do it – it’s that guy with the bucket again, or maybe his wife.