What’s On My Bookshelf | Eight Ways to Make This Your Best Year Ever
4000 Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman
We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans yet practically no time at all to put them into action...Stop trying so hard...It’s ok to give up on what’s impossible in the first place.
One: Accept the limitations of a life-span that’s way too short.
The key to begin resolving this problem is to work with the facts of our finitude rather than against them. I am aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.
Two: Don’t expect greater productivity/efficiency to make the problem better.
Time feels like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones; and becoming more productive just seems to cause the belt to speed up. Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed.
Three: Stand firm in the face of FOMO.
Missing out on something, indeed on almost everything, is basically guaranteed...our every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could've spent that time but didn’t.
Every choice is a renunciation. (Rolheiser)
Four: Make up your mind that it’s ok to “settle.”
When people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they're usually much happier as a result.The undodgeable reality of a finite human life is that you are going to have to choose.
Five: Practice gratitude; it’s the antidote for discontentment.
Wouldn't it make more sense to speak not of having to make such choices, but of getting to make them? Each moment of decision becomes an opportunity to select from an enticing menu of possibilities, when you might easily never have been presented with the menu to begin with.
The wealthiest person is not the one who has the most. It’s the one who is satisfied with the least. ( Chinese fortune cookie)
Six: Wherever you are, be there.
It turns out to be perilously easy to...focus exclusively on where you're headed at the expense of focusing on where you are – with the result that you find yourself living mentally in the future, locating the real value of your life at some point that you haven't yet reached and...never will.
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Enjoy every sandwich. (Warren Zevon)
Seven: Get to your highest priorities first.
Eight: Practice leisure and rest for their own sake.
In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive...A good hobby probably should feel a little embarrassing. That's a sign you're doing it for its own sake rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome. It's fine and perhaps preferable to be mediocre at them. Freedom to pursue the futile. And the freedom to suck without caring.