Hi First name / there,
Last week, I began to feel the weight of new routines settling in. After the initial rush of returning to work and showing the baby’s pictures to whoever was interested, I felt the tiredness creeping in. Evenings quickly filled up with the kids’ school work, the baby’s needs, and some social commitments. By the end of each day, I found myself more drained than I expected, realizing just how different life feels now, with so much to juggle.
When Friday came around, it brought a moment of relief—a chance to unwind and spend some time with my family. On Saturday, however, I found myself struggling with a familiar feeling. The day sped by, faster than I could grasp, leaving me feeling frustrated. I had imagined spending precious time with my baby while his siblings were at school and perhaps making progress on some much-needed decluttering and catching up on school emails. But the satisfaction I hoped to feel didn’t arrive; instead, the undone tasks seemed to loom larger than the moments I did spend with my baby.
While reading in bed before I slept, I stumbled on the perfect sentence that captured what I was feeling: The Weight of Undone. I realized that this mental weight—the “weight of undone”—was what shadowed my Saturday. My mind lingered on the things that didn’t happen, the tidying up I hadn’t done, the school emails I hadn't checked, and the Sunday Spark I hadn't written, instead of cherishing the simple, unstructured time with my baby.
This experience reminded me of something known as the Zeigarnik Effect. It's the idea that our minds naturally fixate more on the things we leave incomplete than on the tasks we finish. We hold onto the “unfinished business,” replaying it in our minds, while the completed moments quietly fade into the background. It’s a cognitive quirk that many of us experience— Those unchecked items on our to-do lists seem to haunt us more than the tasks we manage to cross off.
This is why I cherish doing the weekly review so much. It allows us to take the time to remember our wins of the week and savor "The Joy of Done"—to counter our natural tendency to focus on what we left unfinished because, unlike our to-do lists, our time and energy are finite.
I can't deny that the heaviness was not all about the non-doing; it was about feeling that I did not spend enough time with my son to make up for my absence the rest of the week. A friend reminded me: I don't "have to" do this; I "get to" do this. I get to have a job that sustains me and my family. It's a privilege to be a working mother and it's my turn to remind you.
