The Difference Between Surviving Your Day and Deciding It
On task mode, possibility mode, and what it actually cost me to get there.
You have a list in front of you and you cannot even look at it.
It’s not that you don’t care. It’s not that you don’t know what needs to happen. It’s that somewhere between the morning your plan fell apart, the week that got blown up, and the thing someone needed that you didn’t budget for — you stopped asking what’s possible and started just reacting to whatever was on fire. Task after task after task. And the pile doesn’t shrink. It just reorganizes itself.
I see this everywhere. Women who are smart, capable, and completely buried — not because they lack ability, but because they have become so task-focused that they’ve lost the ability to be possibility-focused. Those are two different modes, and most people don’t realize they’ve been stuck in one of them for years.
Task-Focused vs. Possibility-Focused
Here’s what task-focused looks like when it’s running your life. You wake up and you’re already behind. You’re moving from one thing to the next — the to-do list, the kid who needs something, the parent who called, the email that can’t wait. You’re not making decisions so much as responding to whatever just landed in front of you. And the question of what you actually want — in the next hour, the next season, the next chapter of your life — doesn’t get asked. There’s no space for it. You’re playing defense before you’ve even decided to play.
Possibility-focused is something different. It’s not the absence of a to-do list. It’s the ability to step back from pure reaction long enough to ask: what could this look like? What do I actually want here? What becomes available if I stop treating every moment like a problem to survive?
I have a client who went through a divorce recently. She was stuck — in the house, in the situation, managing around her soon-to-be ex while also trying to hold everything else together. She could not see past the immediate circumstances. I said to her: when he moves out, you are not going to believe how much lighter you’re going to feel. You are not going to believe how much metaphorical weight you have lost.
Within a week of him leaving, we had our next check-in. Oh my god, she said. She hadn’t been able to see it from inside the task mode she was living in. The possibility was always there. She just couldn’t access it.
That’s what I mean. Task-focused keeps you reacting. Possibility-focused lets you see what’s actually in front of you.
The Cooking Class
I want to take you back to 1998. I was living in London, working a ton, going out plenty, not taking care of myself, and had just been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I did not know how to cook (well I didn’t want to learn but that’s a story for another day). Not a little — at all. I once paid my sister to make me scrambled eggs. I was in my mid-twenties. It was sad.
I kept seeing an ad for a catalog of continuing education classes advertised on the Tube. I’d vacillate between deciding to buy the guide or not. Every day for a month. The internal dialogue went something like:
What class would I even take?
I have too much work to do.
A cooking class could be interesting.
I’d have to leave work at 6pm. Too much going on.
You had to sign up in person back then. You couldn’t just click a button at midnight from your couch. You had to make the physical effort to go do the thing.
Fuck it. I went.
Every single week I found a reason why I couldn’t go. And every single week I went anyway, because I remembered how happy I was coming home with leftovers I’d made myself. I never missed a class. Those stuffed mushrooms I made were a crowning achievement (with apologies to the hubs who hates mushrooms).
That was a BFD moment — because I stopped reacting to all the reasons not to do it and made a decision about what I actually wanted. I shifted from task mode to possibility mode. What could this be? What becomes available if I just go?
That one step helped get me healthy a few years later. I didn’t know that when I signed up. I was just deciding what was possible given what was in front of me at that moment.
The apron from that class is still in my kitchen and being used. Let’s just say it’s well worn as you can see above. But it means something to me.
Zero-Zero
I was at my sister’s house on Long Island when the Knicks won the championship last Saturday.
And when my brother-in-law saw that Dick’s Sporting Goods had merch available at midnight, we didn’t deliberate. My niece, my brother-in-law, and I piled into the car and went. It was ridiculous and completely worth it. It also randomly brought up a memory from my mom who chimed in on the family text thread that it reminded her of when she and my dad went to Modell’s right after the Giants won the Super Bowl. #IYKYK
I’ve been a Knicks fan long enough to know what it means to wait. While there were many reasons to love this run, what stood out to me was Jalen Brunson’s mindset. Zero-zero. Every possession starts fresh. Whatever just happened — good or bad — you don’t carry it into the next play. You adapt. You adjust. You figure out what the moment in front of you actually requires instead of reacting to the moment that already passed.
That’s possibility-focused. Not ignoring what happened. Not pretending the score doesn’t matter. Just: what can I do right now with what I have?
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just read about Game 4 of this series. Absolute insanity and took years off my life.
You have problem-solved your way out of harder situations before. You’ll do it again.
And underneath that reset is something that gets undersold: self-belief. Not arrogance. The evidence exists in your own history. You just can’t see it when you’re deep in task mode, convinced that this time it really is too much.
That’s not a character flaw. It’s what happens when you’ve been the reliable one for so long that reacting has become automatic.
What I work on with clients is creating enough structure that the reset becomes available. Not a productivity overhaul. Not another system on top of an already full life. Just enough breathing room to stop reacting long enough to ask what you actually want to do next.
This Week, Try This
The next time something goes sideways — a plan falls apart, a week gets blown up, someone needs something you didn’t budget for — before you go full task mode, try the reset first.
What’s actually in front of me right now? What’s possible from here?
Not where you should be. Not what you’ve already lost. Just this moment.
You have problem-solved your way out of harder things before. Trust that. And then figure out what the moment requires.
A great one as always. And love the cooking class story. I wonder if because things were harder back then it meant more. Now we can easily do or not do things because of virtual and online everything. It's so much easier to bail and when you do it means nothing. But when you had to commit and go in person? Then it meant effort.