Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

(link) by Oliver Burkeman

This book is a shorter one that I binge listened to while on a road trip. It isn’t your typical productivity book where they tell you how to “hack” your life to find every second that should be spent “doing” things. I found the message in it to be one that gave me a good reminder that life is short and we need to be careful about where and how we spend our time. The same applies to the work we do. We only give our employer so many hours of the day, it is our responsibility to make sure that we spend those hours wisely so that the value they gain is worth it.

“what you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.”

“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen. But you know what? That’s excellent news.”

“The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.”

“The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”

Key Thoughts

• Accepting the shortness of life is both a positive and negative realization. Spending too much time pondering it can bring anxiety and worry. Not spending time pondering it allows for wasting too much of it and not appreciating it.
• Todays world is filled with tools, gadgets, and things to make our lives easier. But do they? What do we gain by using the dishwasher over hand washing if we are just going to spend that time doom scrolling through social media apps. But spending that time being “productive” is just as bad, it brings on stress and other issues.
• List all the things you want to do with your life. Choose the top 5. Accept that you will probably never do any of the bottom 15. Take those off your list completely rather than sitting and worrying about never accomplishing them.
• Becoming better at procrastinating is a concept that I never considered as a goal in life. But they had a great point. Making sure to drop the things that aren’t bringing joy and value to you and your life is something that is worth doing.
• Working remotely takes away some of the human interaction that is necessary
• Questions to ponder
  1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
  2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
  3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be
  4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
  5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?

A few tools for embracing our finiteness

1. Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity. Keep two to-do lists, one “open” and one “closed.” The open list is for everything that’s on your plate and will doubtless be nightmarishly long. Fortunately, it’s not your job to tackle it: instead, feed tasks from the open list to the closed one—that is, a list with a fixed number of entries, ten at most. The rule is that you can’t add a new task until one’s completed.
   2. Establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work. Train yourself to get incrementally better at tolerating that anxiety, by consciously postponing everything you possibly can, except for one thing.
2. Focus on one big project at a time.
3. Strategic underachievement—that is, nominating in advance whole areas of life in which you won’t expect excellence of yourself—is that you focus that time and energy more effectively
4. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete.
5. Keep a “done list,” which starts empty first thing in the morning, and which you then gradually fill with whatever you accomplish through the day.
6. Reduce phone distractions as possible—first by removing social media apps, even email if you dare, and then by switching the screen from colour to grayscale. Choose devices with only one purpose, such as the Kindle ereader, on which it’s tedious and awkward to do anything but read
7. Pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have. Experience life with twice the usual intensity. When presented with a challenging or boring moment, try deliberately adopting an attitude of curiosity.
8. Act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off until later.
9. Do Nothing” meditation, for which the instructions are to simply set a timer, probably only for five or ten minutes at first; sit down in a chair; and then stop trying to do anything. Nothing is harder to do than nothing.