By Leo Babauta

When I was in my 20s, I really tried to be as productive as I could — and that usually meant rushing through things, pressuring myself to do more, and acting from a sense of urgency.

I think this is how most of us are trained, culturally:

Productivity = urgency, pressure, rushing, have to perform well

But as many of us have discovered, urgency isn’t a great environment for creating, doing things with a sense of purpose and a longer vision. It’s also not great for our mental or physical health, if we’re always in that mode.

So what if our best work didn’t come from urgency, but from settling into a deeper calm?

Calm Work, in Practice

Calm isn’t a passive, disengaged, lazy way of being (despite cultural messages to the contrary) — it’s a sense of presence.

It’s actually a high-performance state — our nervous system is relaxed and regulated, our attention is clear, and we can act from a non-reactive state.

Calm also doesn’t mean no urgency ever — sometimes we have to work with urgency, but we can still come from a grounded calm as we do so.

So here’s how it might look in practice:

• You start work with intention, not just rushing into the urgent stuff.
• You sit with a difficult task, and breathe, instead of running to something easier.
• You bring curiosity to something that you might feel fear around — exploring, not just reacting to the fear.
• Mistakes and setbacks are handled with grace, instead of letting them destabilize you. You learned something — it’s not a judgment of who you are.
• You move through the day with a more relaxed state, so you’re not so drained by the end of it.

How does that sound? Easier said than done, I know!

How to Cultivate Calm Work

This takes practice, of course.

Start each day with a pause at the threshold of your work — don’t just jump in. Let yourself begin with a quiet, intentional moment.

Choose one meaningful piece of work to focus on.

Build a small “settling ritual” that you can come back to during the day — a few breaths, a short walk, a cup of tea that you make and enjoy slowly.

Notice when you start to slip into urgency and reactivity — and give yourself a bit of grace to not do any of this perfectly. Come back to the settling ritual.

And then finish your day with a calm moment of reflection — journal, and acknowledge where you got off track and where you brought intentional calm into your life.

This is not just a productivity strategy. It’s not about optimizing our lives. It’s about creating a different relationship with ourselves, and the work that we find meaningful.

This is about trusting ourselves, and giving ourselves access to the grounded calm that we crave.