## New highlights added January 17, 2024 at 3:54 PM > In practical terms, three rules of thumb are especially useful for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life. The first is to develop a taste for having problems ([Location 2115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2115)) --- Title: Four Thousand Weeks Author: Oliver Burkeman Tags: readwise, books date: 2024-01-30 --- # Four Thousand Weeks  Author:: Oliver Burkeman ## AI-Generated Summary None ## Highlights > Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks. ([Location 35](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=35)) > The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder. ([Location 54](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=54)) > The problem isn’t exactly that these techniques and products don’t work. It’s that they do work—in the sense that you’ll get more done, race to more meetings, ferry your kids to more after-school activities, generate more profit for your employer—and yet, paradoxically, you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result. ([Location 105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=105)) > I successfully implemented the system known as Inbox Zero, but I soon discovered that when you get tremendously efficient at answering email, all that happens is that you get much more email. ([Location 119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=119)) > On Getting the Wrong Things Done ([Location 137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=137)) > Four Thousand Weeks is yet another book about making the best use of time. But it is written in the belief that time management as we know it has failed miserably, and that we need to stop pretending otherwise. ([Location 159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=159)) > 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. ([Location 162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=162)) > 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. ([Location 165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=165)) ### Part I Choosing to Choose #### 1. The Limit-Embracing Life > There was no anxious pressure to “get everything done,” either, because a farmer’s work is infinite: there will always be another milking and another harvest, forever, so there’s no sense in racing toward some hypothetical moment of completion. Historians call this way of living “task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline, the approach that has become second nature for us today. ([Location 216](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=216)) > “The clock does not stop, of course,” Eberle writes, “but we do not hear it ticking.” ([Location 233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=233)) > From thinking about time in the abstract, it’s natural to start treating it as a resource, something to be bought and sold and used as efficiently as possible, like coal or iron or any other raw material. ([Location 257](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=257)) > Marilynne Robinson’s “joyless urgency” and the constant feeling that you ought to be getting more done. The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you. ([Location 293](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=293)) > as long as I was always just on the cusp of mastering my time, I could avoid the thought that what life was really demanding from me might involve surrendering the craving for mastery and diving into the unknown instead. In my case, that turned out to mean committing to a long-term relationship and, later, making the decision with my wife to try to start a family—two things I’d notably failed to get done with any number of systems for getting things done. It had been more comforting to imagine that I might eventually “optimize” myself into the kind of person who could confront such decisions without fear, feeling totally in charge of the process. I didn’t want to accept that this was never going to happen—that fear was part of the deal, and that experiencing it wouldn’t destroy me. ([Location 324](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=324)) > It also means resisting the seductive temptation to “keep your options open”—which is really just another way of trying to feel in control—in favor of deliberately making big, daunting, irreversible commitments, which you can’t know in advance will turn out for the best, but which reliably prove more fulfilling in the end. And it means standing firm in the face of FOMO, the “fear of missing out,” because you come to realize that missing out on something—indeed, on almost everything—is basically guaranteed. Which isn’t actually a problem anyway, it turns out, because “missing out” is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place. Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time, but didn’t—and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you. ([Location 375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=375)) > Richard Bach: “You teach best what you most need to learn.” ([Location 383](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=383)) ### 2. The Efficiency Trap > Let’s begin with busyness. It isn’t our only time problem, and it isn’t everyone’s problem. But it’s a uniquely vivid illustration of the effort we invest in fighting against our built-in limitations, thanks to how normal it has become to feel as though you absolutely must do more than you can do. ([Location 414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=414)) > Instead, in an attempt to avoid these unpleasant truths, we deploy the strategy that dominates most conventional advice on how to deal with busyness: we tell ourselves we’ll just have to find a way to do more—to try to address our busyness, you could say, by making ourselves busier still. ([Location 439](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=439)) > But the other exasperating issue is that if you succeed in fitting more in, you’ll find the goalposts start to shift: more things will begin to seem important, meaningful, or obligatory. Acquire a reputation for doing your work at amazing speed, and you’ll be given more of it. ([Location 469](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=469)) > Get around to launching the side business you’ve dreamed of for years, and if it succeeds, it won’t be long before you’re no longer satisfied with keeping it small. ([Location 474](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=474)) > The “input” side of this arrangement—the number of emails that you could, in principle, receive—is essentially infinite. But the “output” side—the number of messages you’ll have time to read properly, reply to, or just make a considered decision to delete—is strictly finite. ([Location 484](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=484)) > Think of it as “existential overwhelm”: the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do. ([Location 516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=516)) > So the retiree ticking exotic destinations off a bucket list and the hedonist stuffing her weekends full of fun are arguably just as overwhelmed as the exhausted social worker or corporate lawyer. ([Location 534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=534)) > it remains the case that their fulfillment still seems to depend on their managing to do more than they can do. This helps explain why stuffing your life with pleasurable activities so often proves less satisfying than you’d expect. ([Location 537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=537)) > do. The worst aspect of the trap, though, is that it’s also a matter of quality. The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things. ([Location 555](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=555)) > The reason for this effect is straightforward: the more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time. ([Location 559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=559)) > Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for—and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most. ([Location 588](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=588)) > It’s true that everything runs more smoothly this way. But smoothness, it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it livable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities. ([Location 605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=605)) > Convenience, in other words, makes things easy, but without regard to whether easiness is truly what’s most valuable in any given context. ([Location 611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=611)) ### 3. Facing Finitude > It’s sufficient to take from it the insight that every moment of a human existence is completely shot through with the fact of what Heidegger calls our “finitude.” Our limited time isn’t just one among various things we have to cope with; rather, it’s the thing that defines us, as humans, before we start coping with anything at all. ([Location 687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=687)) > It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives. ([Location 743](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=743)) > In other words, it’s precisely the fact that I could have chosen a different and perhaps equally valuable way to spend this afternoon that bestows meaning on the choice I did make. ([Location 815](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=815)) > the “joy of missing out,” by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the “fear of missing out.” It is the thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything. ([Location 819](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=819)) ### 4. Becoming a Better Procrastinator > The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things. ([Location 836](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=836)) > Principle number one is to pay yourself first when it comes to time. ([Location 854](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=854)) > work on your most important project for the first hour of each day, and to protect your time by scheduling “meetings” with yourself, marking them in your calendar so that other commitments can’t intrude. ([Location 874](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=874)) > The second principle is to limit your work in progress. ([Location 878](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=878)) > no more than three items. ([Location 885](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=885)) > Another happy consequence was that I found myself effortlessly breaking down my projects into manageable chunks, a strategy I’d long agreed with in theory but never properly implemented. ([Location 894](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=894)) > The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities. ([Location 899](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=899)) > But as the writer Elizabeth Gilbert points out, it’s all too easy to assume that this merely entails finding the courage to decline various tedious things you never wanted to do in the first place. In fact, she explains, “it’s much harder than that. 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.” ([Location 911](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=911)) > a similar refusal to face the truth about finitude can keep people mired in a miserably tentative mode of existence for years on end. ([Location 942](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=942)) > He was indecisive in love, and in much else, because he yearned to live more than one life: ([Location 962](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=962)) > The Inevitability of Settling ([Location 990](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=990)) > Goodin observes, we tend to contrast a life of settling with a life of what he labels “striving,” or living life to the fullest. But this is a mistake, too, and not just because settling is unavoidable but also because living life to the fullest requires settling. ([Location 1002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1002)) > If you flit between them all, you’ll succeed in none of them. ([Location 1007](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1007)) > when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result. ([Location 1029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1029)) > they’re closing off their fantasies of infinite possibility in favor of what I described, in the previous chapter, as the “joy of missing out”: the recognition that the renunciation of alternatives is what makes their choice a meaningful one in the first place. ([Location 1041](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1041)) ### 5. The Watermelon Problem > to describe attention as a “resource” is to subtly misconstrue its centrality in our lives. Most other resources on which we rely as individuals—such as food, money, and electricity—are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. ([Location 1074](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1074)) > The proper response to this situation, we’re often told today, is to render ourselves indistractible in the face of interruptions: to learn the secrets of “relentless focus”—usually involving meditation, web-blocking apps, expensive noise-canceling headphones, and more meditation—so as to win the attentional struggle once and for all. But this is a trap. When you aim for this degree of control over your attention, you’re making the mistake of addressing one truth about human limitation—your limited time, and the consequent need to use it well—by denying another truth about human limitation, which is that achieving total sovereignty over your attention is almost certainly impossible. ([Location 1089](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1089)) > You might also be aware that all this is delivered by means of “persuasive design”—an umbrella term for an armory of psychological techniques borrowed directly from the designers of casino slot machines, for the express purpose of encouraging compulsive behavior. One example among hundreds is the ubiquitous drag-down-to-refresh gesture, which keeps people scrolling by exploiting a phenomenon known as “variable rewards”: when you can’t predict whether or not refreshing the screen will bring new posts to read, the uncertainty makes you more likely to keep trying, again and again and again, just as you would on a slot machine. ([Location 1126](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1126)) ### 6. The Intimate Interrupter > This is why boredom can feel so surprisingly, aggressively unpleasant: we tend to think of it merely as a matter of not being particularly interested in whatever it is we’re doing, but in fact it’s an intense reaction to the deeply uncomfortable experience of confronting your limited control. ([Location 1251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1251)) > You’re obliged to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to the reality that this is it. ([Location 1256](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1256)) > what we think of as “distractions” aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation. ([Location 1269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1269)) ### 7. We Never Really Have Time > The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter is famous, among other reasons, for coining “Hofstadter’s law,” which states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, “even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” In other words, even if you know that a given project is likely to overrun, and you adjust your schedule accordingly, it’ll just overrun your new estimated finishing time, too. ([Location 1298](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1298)) > Really, no matter how far ahead you plan, you never get to relax in the certainty that everything’s going to go the way you’d like. ([Location 1336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1336)) > Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again—as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster. The fuel behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn out fine: ([Location 1341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1341)) > Likewise, and despite everything I’ve been saying, nobody ever really gets four thousand weeks in which to live—not only because you might end up with fewer than that, but because in reality you never even get a single week, in the sense of being able to guarantee that it will arrive, or that you’ll be in a position to use it precisely as you wish. Instead, you just find yourself in each moment as it comes, already thrown into this time and place, with all the limitations that entails, and unable to feel certain about what might happen next. ([Location 1358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1358)) > a surprisingly effective antidote to anxiety can be to simply realize that this demand for reassurance from the future is one that will definitely never be satisfied—no matter how much you plan or fret, or how much extra time you leave to get to the airport. You can’t know that things will turn out all right. The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one—which means you have permission to stop engaging in it. ([Location 1372](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1372)) > These truths about the uncontrollability of the past and the unknowability of the future explain why so many spiritual traditions seem to converge on the same advice: that we should aspire to confine our attentions to the only portion of time that really is any of our business—this one, here in the present. ([Location 1400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1400)) > The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. ([Location 1429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1429)) ### 8. You Are Here #### You Are Here > This future-focused attitude often takes the form of what I once heard described as the “‘when-I-finally’ mind,” as in: “When I finally get my workload under control/get my candidate elected/find the right romantic partner/sort out my psychological issues, then I can relax, and the life I was always meant to be living can begin.” The person mired in this mentality believes that the reason she doesn’t feel fulfilled and happy is that she hasn’t yet managed to accomplish certain specific things; when she does so, she imagines, she’ll feel in charge of her life and be the master of her time. Yet in fact the way she’s attempting to achieve that sense of security means she’ll never feel fulfilled, ([Location 1452](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1452)) > John Maynard Keynes saw the truth at the bottom of all this, which is that our fixation on what he called “purposiveness”—on using time well for future purposes, or on “personal productivity,” he might have said, had he been writing today—is ultimately motivated by the desire not to die. “The ‘purposive’ man,” Keynes wrote, “is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his actions by pushing his interests in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor in truth the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. ([Location 1576](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1576)) ### 9. Rediscovering Rest ##### Rediscovering Rest > Enjoying leisure for its own sake—which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure—comes to feel as though it’s somehow not quite enough. It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. ([Location 1656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1656)) > Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better worker (“Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” reads the headline on one hugely popular New York Times piece). ([Location 1658](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1658)) > Pathological Productivity ([Location 1726](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1726)) > Rules for Rest ([Location 1768](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1768)) > it was members of religious communities who first understood a crucial fact about rest, which is that it isn’t simply what occurs by default whenever you take a break from work. You need ways to make it likely that rest will actually happen. ([Location 1770](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1770)) > Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work. The inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking. You cannot downshift casually and easily, the way you might slip into bed at the end of a long day. ([Location 1781](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1781)) > The rules did not exist to torture the faithful. They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit as well as social sanction. ([Location 1784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1784)) Note: Grafana's Global Shutdown Days > Now, though, the pressures all push us in the other direction: the shops are open all day, every day (and all night, online). And thanks to digital technology, it’s all too easy to keep on working at home. ([Location 1804](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1804)) ### 10. The Impatience Spiral > (It has been calculated that if Amazon’s front page loaded one second more slowly, the company would lose $1.6 billion in annual sales.) ([Location 1924](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1924)) > Yet since the beginning of the modern era of acceleration, people have been responding not with satisfaction at all the time saved but with increasing agitation that they can’t make things move faster still. ([Location 1928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1928)) > Once most people believe that one ought to be able to answer forty emails in the space of an hour, your continued employment may become dependent on being able to do so, regardless of your feelings on the matter. ([Location 1939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1939)) > Over the last decade or so, more and more people have begun to report an overpowering feeling, whenever they pick up a book, that gets labeled “restlessness” or “distraction”—but which is actually best understood as a form of impatience, a revulsion at the fact that the act of reading takes longer than they’d like. ([Location 1942](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=1942)) ### 11. Staying on the Bus > In all such cases, 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. But as society accelerates, something shifts. In more and more contexts, patience becomes a form of power. In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future. ([Location 2031](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2031)) > if you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself ([Location 2103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2103)) > Three Principles of Patience ([Location 2114](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2114)) > In practical terms, three rules of thumb are especially useful for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life. The first is to develop a taste for having problems ([Location 2115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2115)) > The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism. ([Location 2126](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2126)) Note: Robert Boice > the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day. ([Location 2127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2127)) > One critical aspect of the radical incrementalist approach, which runs counter to much mainstream advice on productivity, is thus to be willing to stop when your daily time is up, even when you’re bursting with energy and feel as though you could get much more done. ([Location 2138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2138)) > Why? Because as Boice explained, the urge to push onward beyond that point “includes a big component of impatience about not being finished, about not being productive enough, about never again finding such an ideal time” for work. Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus to sustain your productivity over an entire career. ([Location 2140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2140)) > The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality. ([Location 2143](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2143)) > nothing you produce ever gets recognized as being truly your own. What’s the solution? “It’s simple,” Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.” ([Location 2154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2154)) ### 12. The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad > But “digital nomad” is a misnomer—and an instructive one. Traditional nomads aren’t solitary wanderers who just happen to lack laptops; they’re intensely group-focused people who, if anything, have less personal freedom than members of settled tribes, since their survival depends on their working together successfully. And in their more candid moments, digital nomads will admit that the chief problem with their lifestyle is the acute loneliness. ([Location 2216](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2216)) > every gain in personal temporal freedom entails a corresponding loss in how easy it is to coordinate your time with other people’s. The digital nomad’s lifestyle lacks the shared rhythms required for deep relationships to take root. ([Location 2226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2226)) > the more Swedes who were off work simultaneously, the happier people got. They derived psychological benefits not merely from vacation time, but from having the same vacation time as other people. ([Location 2234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2234)) > what people need isn’t greater individual control over their schedules but rather what he calls “the social regulation of time”: greater outside pressure to use their time in particular ways. That means more willingness to fall in with the rhythms of community; ([Location 2246](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2246)) > the fika, the daily moment when everyone in a given workplace gets up from their desks to gather for coffee and cake. ([Location 2252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2252)) > something intangible but important happens at the fika. The usual divisions get set aside; people mingle without regard for age, or class, or status within the office, discussing both work-related and nonwork matters: for half an hour or so, communication and conviviality take precedence over hierarchy and bureaucracy. ([Location 2255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2255)) > In daily life, as well, we fall into synchrony all the time, usually without realizing it: at the theater, applause gradually organizes itself into a rhythm; and if you walk down the street alongside a friend, or even a stranger, you’ll soon find your paces starting to match. This subliminal urge toward coordinated action is so powerful that even sworn rivals can’t resist it. ([Location 2306](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2306)) > We live less and less of our lives in the same temporal grooves as one another. The unbridled reign of this individualist ethos, fueled by the demands of the market economy, has overwhelmed our traditional ways of organizing time, meaning that the hours in which we rest, work, and socialize are becoming ever more uncoordinated. ([Location 2343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2343)) > For the least privileged, the dominance of this kind of freedom translates into no freedom at all: it means unpredictable gig-economy jobs and “on-demand scheduling,” ([Location 2347](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2347)) > But even for those of us who genuinely do have much more personal control over when we work than previous generations ever did, the result is that work seeps through life like water, filling every cranny with more to-dos, a phenomenon that seemed to only intensify during the coronavirus lockdown. ([Location 2351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2351)) > And if, like me, you possess the productivity geek’s natural inclination toward control-freakery when it comes to your time, you can experiment with what it feels like to not try to exert an iron grip on your timetable: to sometimes let the rhythms of family life and friendships and collective action take precedence over your perfect morning routine or your system for scheduling your week. You can grasp the truth that power over your time isn’t something best hoarded entirely for yourself: that your time can be too much your own. ([Location 2373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2373)) ### 13. Cosmic Insignificance Therapy > Which is why it’s useful to begin this last stage of our journey with a blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth: that 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. ([Location 2442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2442)) > You might think of it as “cosmic insignificance therapy”: When things all seem too much, what better solace than a reminder that they are, provided you’re willing to zoom out a bit, indistinguishable from nothing at all? ([Location 2464](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2464)) > Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. ([Location 2507](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2507)) ### 14. The Human Disease > You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that no experience, least of all close relationships with other human beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well—and that from a cosmic viewpoint, when it’s all over, it won’t have counted for very much anyway. And in exchange for accepting all that? You get to actually be here. You get to have some real purchase on life. You get to spend your finite time focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now, in this moment. ([Location 2556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2556)) > 1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort? ([Location 2578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2578)) > Pursuing the life projects that matter to you the most will almost always entail not feeling fully in control of your time, immune to the painful assaults of reality, or confident about the future. ([Location 2579](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2579)) > 2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet? ([Location 2593](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2593)) > 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? ([Location 2609](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2609)) > Once you’ve earned your right to exist, you tell yourself, life will stop feeling so uncertain and out of control. ([Location 2613](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2613)) > 4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing? ([Location 2632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2632)) > 5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition? ([Location 2649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2649)) > A final common manifestation of the desire for time mastery arises from the unspoken assumption described in chapter 8 as the causal catastrophe: the idea that the true value of how we spend our time is always and only to be judged by the results. ([Location 2651](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2651)) Note: Some things are worth doing even when unfinished. > His sole advice for walking such a path was to “quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what that is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.” ([Location 2671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2671)) > And the life you will see incrementally taking shape, in the rearview mirror, will be one that meets the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your weeks well: not how many people you helped, or how much you got done; but that working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got around to doing—and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing—whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for. ([Location 2680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2680)) > 1. Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity. ([Location 2756](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2756)) > Any strategy for limiting your work in progress will help here (here), but perhaps the simplest is to keep two to-do lists, one “open” and one “closed.” ([Location 2760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2760)) > A complementary strategy is to establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work. ([Location 2766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2766)) > 2. Serialize, serialize, serialize. ([Location 2772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2772)) > Following the same logic, focus on one big project at a time (or at most, one work project and one nonwork project) and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next. ([Location 2773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2773)) > 3. Decide in advance what to fail at. ([Location 2781](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2781)) > But the great benefit of 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. ([Location 2782](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2782)) > even in these essential domains, there’s scope to fail on a cyclical basis: to aim to do the bare minimum at work for the next two months, for example, while you focus on your children, or let your fitness goals temporarily lapse while you apply yourself to election canvassing. Then switch your energies to whatever you were neglecting. ([Location 2789](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2789)) > 4. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete. ([Location 2794](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2794)) > 5. Consolidate your caring. ([Location 2805](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2805)) > Once you grasp the mechanisms operating here, it becomes easier to consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics: to decide that your spare time, for the next couple of years, will be spent lobbying for prison reform and helping at a local food pantry—not because fires in the Amazon or the fate of refugees don’t matter, but because you understand that to make a difference, you must focus your finite capacity for care. ([Location 2812](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2812)) > 6. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology. ([Location 2816](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2816)) > 7. Seek out novelty in the mundane. ([Location 2826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2826)) > 8. Be a “researcher” in relationships. ([Location 2842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2842)) > 9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity. ([Location 2855](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2855)) > whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind—to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone’s work—act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off until later. ([Location 2856](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2856)) > 10. Practice doing nothing. ([Location 2865](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08FGV64B1&location=2865))