No, Thank You. I Don’t Need That.

25 September 2026

Long before I started working in IT, I spent many years doing different things, one of them being composition. Yes, I wrote music. I still do from time to time, though very rarely.

There are many reasons for that. Yet only recently have I recognised something that had always stood between me and creative work—whether that meant composing music or doing something entirely different.

I always believed that creative work required effort.

Was I wrong?

Yes. And no.

You see, there are two kinds of effort: the kind that genuinely belongs to the craft, the work itself, the act of creation—and the kind that merely imitates it while quietly stealing precious time.

Both exist. Both influence the final work. But the younger version of me didn’t yet know which part of creative effort was truly necessary, and which part needed to be pulled out like weeds from a garden because it only created unnecessary confusion.

Necessary Effort

There is a kind of dialogue with the work itself that simply has to take place if we want to create something meaningful. This kind of effort changes the creator for the better.

It can take many forms. A composer may spend hours reconsidering a single passage so that the clarinettist has somewhere to breathe while the musical phrase remains light. A programmer may spend hours fixing a serious architectural flaw that only became apparent during testing. A writer may spend hours polishing sentences that technically say exactly what they intended, yet somehow still don’t sound quite right.

This kind of effort is essential to the making of the work. I wouldn’t remove it from my life, because I would lose too much. It’s friction that genuinely serves a purpose.

No productivity tool can measure its quality or its value—and that’s exactly as it should be. The metric we use here is deeply subjective, yet no less important because of it.

The Effort That Pretends

There is, however, another kind of effort—one that I confused with the first for many years, even though the two have almost nothing in common.

What does it consist of?

Everything that prevents me from feeling at home in my own workshop. Or, sometimes, from having a workshop at all.

A few examples:

• Inaccessible tools. I’ve written so much about those already that I won’t repeat myself here.
• Tools designed in such a way that they constantly draw attention to themselves instead of supporting the creative process.
• Notifications I never asked for.
• Meetings that should never have taken place.
• The endless need to justify why I work in a particular way or at a particular pace.
• Other people’s expectations that disrupt my rhythm, break my concentration and interfere with the creative process. Not all of them are work-related, either. Some come from family, some from society’s expectations of women, and some simply come from life itself.

The list could probably go on for quite some time.

But none of these things adds value. They don’t make creative work better. They don’t deepen the dialogue with the work itself. Quite the opposite: they suffocate the fire. They leave creative work without the space it needs to breathe.

The Problem

My problem was that I confused these two categories.

The younger version of me believed everything in the second category was simply an unavoidable part of creative work.

The result?

Less time and less attention for what truly mattered.

I confused noise with a lack of discipline. I couldn’t distinguish a space where creative work could breathe from one where it was being systematically suffocated. I blamed myself for lacking motivation or discipline when the real problem was inaccessible tools, unnecessary distractions and other people’s expectations—expectations that I wasn’t always able to escape.

Today?

Today, I’d like to say openly to that second category:

No, thank you. I don’t need that.

My creative space deserves to be protected.

And so does everyone else’s.

Enough Scarcity

When I think back to my younger self, I can’t help feeling a little sad.

I lived in a constant state of scarcity: of time, attention and space.

I worked through the night because that was when the house finally became quiet enough to concentrate. I fought for every bar of music, every sentence, every line of code, because tomorrow there wouldn’t be time. Tomorrow the chaos would return. I had to finish today if I wanted anything to exist at all.

And somehow I mistook all of that for artistic struggle.

For necessary effort.

For the discipline I believed I somehow lacked.

The saddest part is that it stole space from the one struggle that truly mattered: the struggle with the work itself.

I openly admit that I stopped composing not only because accessible digital tools for music notation simply weren’t there. I also stopped because constantly fighting my way through that jungle of chaos eventually became overwhelming. Somewhere along the way, it almost completely smothered the creative spark.

So What Is the Conclusion?

It isn’t that effort has no value. Quite the opposite.

It’s simply that not every kind of effort is the same.

Today, after years of experience, I deliberately remove whatever drowns out or damages creative work—whenever I can.

We can’t eliminate everything. Let’s be realistic. But there are certainly things we can eliminate: inaccessible applications, endless notifications, perhaps software that insists on showing me advertisements before I’ve even started working.

Whenever something tries to wedge itself between me and the creative process, I increasingly find myself saying:

No, thank you. I don’t need you.

Because my composition, my article, my code—or whatever creative work I’m doing—deserves that protection.

The genuine struggle with creative material gives me wings. Fighting windmills never has.

Creative work does require effort. That much is true. But it’s equally important to recognise which kind of effort is genuinely necessary.

Perhaps it took me many years to grow into that understanding. Or perhaps I simply grew up surrounded by the myth of hard work—a myth that is often exactly that: a story repeated so often that we stop questioning it.

“Things have to be hard.”

But does every burden truly belong to me?

After all these years, I’m no longer convinced that it does.