When the To-Do List Comes With You
Updated: Oct 4
This week's blog is a little different.
Over the past few years, I’ve been gathering thoughts, questions and stories about working within caring professions: the demands we carry, the identities we inhabit, and the traces work can leave behind long after the working day is over. Those reflections eventually became Into the Woods: A Reflective Practice Companion for Mental Health Professionals
This post explores one of the questions at the heart of the book: why do some aspects of work remain with us even when the work itself has changed?
I used to think an important distinction in reflective practice was between personal and systemic explanations.
If a clinician was exhausted, one account might locate the difficulty in resilience, boundaries, coping styles, personality or life circumstances. Another might locate it in impossible workloads, chronic under-resourcing, organisational cultures of urgency, and the relentless accumulation of responsibility.
Over time, I found myself less interested in choosing between these explanations and more interested in what happens in the space between them.
What happens when a demand that began outside us becomes internal? What happens when the organisation is no longer present, yet its voice remains?
Some years ago, after leaving a particularly demanding role, I discovered that something odd had happened. Many of the pressures I had attributed to the workplace had not disappeared when I left it. The work was gone, but the inner experience of the work remained. I was still carrying a version of the organisation within me.
The list had travelled.
I no longer had the same tasks, yet somewhere inside me, a sense remained that I ought to be attending to them. There was always something unfinished, someone I might be letting down, something I should have remembered. The external demands had become, at least in part, internal expectations.
Many of us know some version of this experience. We leave the office, but not the anticipation. We move jobs, but not the responsibility. We gain freedom, yet discover that habits developed in one environment continue to organise us long after that environment has changed.
This is not simply an individual problem. Nor is it simply a systemic one.
It is a question about the relationship between people and institutions: about how workplaces find homes inside us, how professional identities are formed, and the bargains we make with responsibility. It is also about the particular emotional demands of caring professions, where being conscientious, responsive and available are not incidental to the work but often part of what makes us good at it.
The difficulty is that the qualities that help us care can also make us unusually receptive to institutional demands. Responsibility can quietly become over-responsibility. Commitment can become an inability to put something down. An organisation may depend on our willingness to stretch, compensate, and contain; eventually we may stop noticing where the organisation’s expectation ends and our own begins.
And institutions do not only live in policies, buildings and management structures. They live in relationships, routines and expectations. They become part of how we understand what a good psychologist, nurse, therapist, doctor, social worker, or other professional ought to be.
Sometimes we discover this only when something changes.
We leave a job and find ourselves still rushing. We take a day off and feel vaguely guilty. We finish a piece of work and immediately look for the next thing that needs doing. We keep organising ourselves around an urgency that is no longer actually present.
Perhaps this is one reason why simply telling people to develop better boundaries can feel inadequate. Boundaries matter, of course. But it is difficult to set a boundary against something when part of the demand has already become part of oneself.
These questions became the starting point for a project that has occupied me for several years.
Into the Woods at Work: A Reflective Journal for Mental Health Professionals grew out of that thinking. It combines short reflective essays, fairy-tale and mythic motifs, writing prompts and questions intended to create space for thinking about professional life. It explores burnout, responsibility, organisational experience, vocation, identity and the often complicated relationship between care and work.
Rather than offering another set of solutions for managing ourselves more efficiently, the book tries to create somewhere to stop and think: about the stories we inherit, the roles we occupy, what belongs to us, what belongs to the systems in which we work, and what we may have carried away from those systems without quite realising it.
You can find out more about the book HERE
But if the book is not for now, I will leave you with a question that sits underneath much of it: What aspects of professional life have proved hardest to leave behind, even when the work itself has changed?
If you enjoy this way of thinking and would like to bring it into your own reflective practice, I’ve gathered many of the stories, reflections and questions I use in the Into the Woods books from Spinning Circle Press.
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