Time Management for Mortals
1250849357
Oliver Burkeman
Notes
the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.
It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up.
…your days inevitably fill with more activities you don’t especially value.
…the problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important—or just for enough of what feels important—is that you definitely never will.
The alternative approach is to fix a hard upper limit on the number of things that you allow yourself to work on at any given time. In their book Personal Kanban, which explores this strategy in detail, the management experts Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry suggest no more than three items. Once you’ve selected those tasks, all other incoming demands on your time must wait until one of the three items has been completed, thereby freeing up a slot…You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.”
Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future,
…patience is a way of psychologically accommodating yourself to a lack of power, an attitude intended to help you to resign yourself to your lowly position, in theoretical hopes of better days to come.
…what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less…Stephen Cope, “it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life.”
Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.
“But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.”