One Question That Can Cut Your Pressure in Half

You can set work down without losing your purpose

You’ve got four or five projects spinning. You sit down at the desk intending to make progress on one of them. Instead you work haphazardly for a couple of hours, then check out completely. You get that deer-in-the-headlights look and tell yourself you just need a break.

Maybe you don’t need a break. Maybe you need to look at the deadlines.

Pick the project eating the most hours right now. The one you keep coming back to even when your wife is talking to you. Ask yourself who set the deadline. If it came from a client, from money on the table, or from a promise to someone who’d be hurt if it slipped, you owe it. If you picked the date yourself, that’s not a deadline, it’s pressure you invented.

Most men who run this find that at least half the dates on their list came from their own head. No client waiting, no contract on the table — just a date you wrote down once and started treating like it was carved in stone.

The first way to fail in the second half is to slow down because you’ve earned it: sit on the beach, drink the margaritas, and fade away without noticing until it’s too late. The second is to speed up because you’re running out of time: load every plate, run hot, and burn out the body and the marriage you worked hard to build.

I’ve done the first one, and I’m currently sitting in the second. Neither is the right call.

After I sold Game Rant and my divorce was final, I had nothing to do. At first that felt like winning. No deadlines, no payroll, no analytics to scrutinize. When people asked me about retirement, my standard reply was “You can only sit on the beach and drink so many margaritas before you start to lose your mind.” After about six months, the aimlessness started to seep in: no motivating reason to get up in the morning, nothing productive to do. I felt directionless and lacked purpose.

I escaped the first failure mode and didn’t see the second one coming.

The return of purpose

Last year a few men started telling me I should be mentoring other men. I wasn’t looking for it. Now I’m usually the guy who says he never hears God speaking to him, and I’ll admit I get a little annoyed by people who claim to hear Him constantly, but I think this time I heard Him. The Substack came together in a way I can’t fully explain, and I believe the Holy Spirit put a series of men in front of me that led to it.

The first couple of months reminded me of building Screen Rant. I had the same rush: figuring out the algorithm, building dashboards, learning what hits and what flops. By my third month I had over a thousand subscribers. Running hot felt familiar and extremely productive, so I kept loading the plate. I was in the groove.

Then a reader-driven idea turned into a vibe-coded app project that I think will help men in dark places. I dusted off The Last 10 Pounds, a fitness eBook from 23 years ago and watched it morph into a full fitness-centric memoir. On top of that, a daily online course that drops a new concept every morning, each one waiting to be applied.

Anyone who’s built anything knows the rule: the last 10% of a project takes longer than the first 90%. The deeper I got into each one, the more new items I’d find that needed adding to the task list. For a while the lists were shrinking and I had visions of app rollout and book publication. Instead, the lists started getting longer and completion dates farther away.

I went from bored out of my mind to so busy I couldn’t think straight in a matter of months.

The cost

My wife Mai noticed before I did. She told me I wasn’t really present when I was with her, and that she wasn’t getting to see much of me. She wasn’t wrong. When I’m in the zone, I sit down at 8 AM, come up for a light lunch, sit back down, and disappear again until seven or eight at night.

The answer was clear: the deadlines I’m carrying are mine. I’m the one holding the gun to my own head. I’m the only one setting strict deadlines on the app, the book, and the course. The one external deadline I do have is this article, every Sunday at 7 AM.

The reason you load yourself up like this isn’t logistics. You’re trying to prove something. To yourself, to a wife who’s seen you fail before, to the version of yourself at 30 who’d have judged the version of yourself at 60.

Augustine had a phrase for it: ordering your loves. The fitness, the building, the writing aren’t wrong on their own. They become wrong when they start standing in for your self-worth. When the project list stops being a tool you use and becomes a god you serve.

Numbering the days

“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.”
Psalm 90:12

That verse used to sound like a warning about mortality. Now it sounds more like instruction. Numbering your days means knowing what each one is really for.

I talked to my wife about it. I talked to my sister, who shares my Type A wiring and recognizes the pattern in herself. I had a couple of prayer sessions asking God what to set down.

I’m putting a couple of my projects on hold. That won’t come easily. The part of me that built two media companies still believes I can grind through it all, alone. At 64 I know better. The grind cost me a marriage of 24 years once. I’m not doing that again.

If you’re running a loaded project list right now, sit down with it tonight. Skip the reorganizing. Ask yourself what you’re trying to prove with each deadline, and to whom. The ones you owe, keep. The rest are yours to set down.

The work you set down will still be there next month. The people sitting across from you at dinner might not wait that long.

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Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

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