I hate that in our modern world, we are obsessed with being "productive". Why is this important? Why do we punish ourselves for being "unproductive"? Maybe we should try and spend as much of our time in things that are unproductive or unquantifiable as possible. Is having a relaxing afternoon the beach "productive"?
We've lost our ability to just "be". We must always "do". A sad state of affairs.
I see why this response came to be, but I just wanted to briefly annotate that this was not my intended point at all.
I'm not obsessed with being productive at all, it's just something that has been on my mind - and I'm interested in the psychology of it. Many of my days are filled with non-productive activities which I thoroughly enjoy. I just don't write about it on my profession-related blog. So I guess it's all about the context.
Maybe it’s feels important/necessary as it can give a feeling of control.
Things are uncertain(were they ever certain?), every day there is another armageddon prophecy screaming at you from social media and newspapers.
So one can try to hedge, squeeze more out of oneself to make sure he did all he could.