HN everyone
Nope, just emotional to varying degrees. If you think that people don't ever have emotional responses to things or are always able to separate those emotional responses from their interpretations of things, I am really curious what life experiences led you to that conclusion. It differs drastically from my interactions with people.
I actually suspect we're misinterpreting each other.
I'll start doing things, forget I accomplished them, realize I'm halfway into the month and then panic profusely when I don't remember what exactly I've done.
For example, starting this January I have been working on my front-end and design skills, since I feel weak in that area. I looked for relevant books, got through several ("Design of everyday things", "About Face", "HTML&CSS" by Jon Duckett, and finishing up "CSS Secrets" by Lea Verou), created some very neat things in pure CSS, and I'm getting better at it by the day.
Objectively speaking, I've gotten through a lot of things in the last 3 weeks, but it doesn't feel that way. My intuition tells me, quite unhealthily, that I got nothing done. I think the list of accomplishments I'm keeping is the only thing that keeps me sane against the overzealous (and scatterbrained) project manager that lives in my head.
I worries me a bit.
That said, I think self-reflection is fantastic. Maybe you feel like you're always running in place? Write down what you've been doing for the past few weeks/months/years, figure out what you think has been valuable or not as valuable, and adjust going forward.
This practice has been super-helpful for me also as a morale boost going into negotiations about compensation. It gives me both moral courage that I have been valuable as well as specific details that I can bring up to demonstrate how I've provided value to the company.
In all of this, though, beware that we tend to undervalue the contributions of others just as much as others undervalue our own contributions. Even for the smartest/most productive of us, our own accomplishments still stand on the shoulders of others'.