by Oliver Burkeman # Takeaways - ## Quotes - It’s **because our time and attention are so limited, and therefore valuable, that social media companies are incentivized to grab as much of them as they can, by any means necessary—which is why they show users material guaranteed to drive them into a rage**, instead of the more boring and accurate stuff. - **It’s somehow vastly more aggravating to wait two minutes for the microwave than two hours for the oven**—or ten seconds for a slow-loading web page versus three days to receive the same information by mail. - ...when you get tremendously efficient at answering email, all that happens is that you get much more email. - 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 - Our days are spent trying to “get through” tasks, in order to get them “out of the way,” with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get around to what really matters - ...trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. - **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.** - **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. - most of us invest a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves. - we procrastinate, which is another means of maintaining the feeling of omnipotent control over life—because you needn’t risk the upsetting experience of failing at an intimidating project, obviously, if you never even start it. - 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. - meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up but from letting them take the time they take, surrendering to what in German has been called **Eigenzeit, or the time inherent to a process itself.** - Once you stop believing that it might somehow be possible to avoid hard choices about time, it gets easier to make better ones. - The more wonderful experiences you succeed in having, the more additional wonderful experiences you start to feel you could have, or ought to have, on top of all those you’ve already had, with the result that the feeling of existential overwhelm gets worse. - the internet promises to help you make better use of your time, while simultaneously exposing you to vastly more potential uses for your time—so that the very tool you’re using to get the most out of life makes you feel as though you’re missing out on even more of it. - The more efficient you get, the more you become “a limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations,” in the words of the management expert Jim Benson. - One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most. - What’s needed is not the counterproductive strategy of trying to make yourself more efficient, but rather a willingness to resist such urges—to ==**learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in. To approach your days in this fashion means, instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what’s truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further**==, with emails and errands and other to-dos, many of which you may never get around to at all. - 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. - 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. #social_fitness - it isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort—which is to say, the inconvenience. When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning. - As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life—but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever. #everythingeverywhereallatonce - it’s not merely a matter of spending each day “as if” it were your last, as the cliché has it. The point is that it always actually might be. - why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born? - **when you turn your attention instead to the fact that you’re** in a position to have an irritating experience in the first place**, matters are liable to look very different indeed. All at once, **it can seem amazing to be there at all, having any experience, in a way that’s overwhelmingly more important than the fact that the experience happens to be an annoying one.** - the point isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to **choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on, in order to focus on what matters most.** - The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things. - The real problem of time management today, though, isn’t that we’re bad at prioritizing the big rocks. It’s that there are too many big rocks—and most of them are never making it anywhere near that jar. - there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time. - Elizabeth Gilbert points out that **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.” -