It’s the first Saturday of fall, and the urge to use it productively is almost automatic. All those tasks postponed and decisions left for after summer come due in that back-to-school buckling-down that happens even long after we’ve graduated. Get up and start checking things off the list! It could all wait until fall until it was fall, and now we’re running late.

Or are we? A few weeks ago, standing waist-deep in a lake as the midday sun convinced us it would warm us completely forever, my friend Randi told me about how she’d managed to stop seeing her days as a list of jobs to be done. Her usual approach, like my own, had been to attack every day with a conqueror’s ambition, accumulating points on some imaginary scoreboard for each item completed. Too often, this is how we receive an unscheduled day.

The answer to the question “What shall I do?” is “What needs to be done?” The drive to accomplish, to finish the work and get in some exercise and move on to chores — it all feels so virtuous. Check, check, check. Randi recently retired after a career teaching.

Her husband, witnessing her default to industry, suggested: “Let the day come to you.” What if she leaned back a little, and allowed the day’s agenda to unfold moment to moment, without needing to achieve a certain level of output? This mentality changed how Randi viewed the unfilled time before her. She stopped imposing so rigid a standard for success on an innocent morning and instead greeted the day with a spacious curiosity. Any philosophy that advocates doing less is attractive.

We’re usually so busy trying to earn the A from a nonexistent teacher, to prove to ourselves and anyone else that we’re not lazy, that we’re earning our keep on Earth. To let the day come to you is to trust that we don’t have to project-manage our lives. The way I picture it, you don’t lean back so far that you sprawl out and take a nap, but you take a beat before deciding what you’re going to do, taking note of your energy and your desires and those of the people around you.

When the day comes to you, you greet it with an open mind: “Why hello, day, what have you got in store? What shall we get up to?” Perhaps a rigorous day of accomplishing, but one undertaken deliberately. Perhaps you’re inclined to sit quietly thinking this morning, and then spring into action later. Maybe it’s a stay-in-and-putter kind of day.

The day might, in fact, come to you with that nap — listen to it. I’ll admit this approach feels a little dangerous. I’m skeptical of advice that seems likely to nurture something too soft in me, the part that if indulged might just crawl under the quilt and sleep until March.

When I say the words “Let the day come to you,” I feel like a parody of a benevolent yoga teacher, as if I’m sprinkling confectioner’s sugar over a freshly frosted cake. I fear frivolity, I fear words that sound good and feel good but leave one feeling sapped of what the French philosopher Henri Bergson called “élan vital,” the creative force in all of us that’s responsible for growth. My fear, I think, is that if I’m not keeping my eyes on the prize, if I’m not punching the punch list, then the things to be done will never be done, and chaos will follow.

But letting the day come to you doesn’t have to mean abandoning the day or relinquishing our healthy diligence. A day is not a horse we have to break. In James Baldwin’s 1968 novel, “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone,” Barbara tells her friend: “Throw everything out of your mind, Leo, eat your supper, read a little, sleep.

The world will still be here when you wake up, and there’ll still be everything left to do.” This same wisdom must be inherent in letting the day come to you. We can throw everything out of our minds, read a little, sleep. We can let the day come to us, let our foot off the gas for an hour or an afternoon without losing our place in the world.