Four Thousand Weeks

Not knowing what’s coming next – which is the situation you’re always in, with regard to the future – presents an ideal opportunity for choosing curiosity (wondering what might happen next) over worry (hoping that a certain specific thing will happen next, and fearing it might not) whenever you can.

What would you do differently with your time, today, if you knew in your bones that salvation was never coming – that your standards had been unreachable all along, and that you’ll therefore never manage to make time for all you hoped you might?

There is a sort of cruelty, Iddo Landau points out, in holding yourself to standards nobody could ever reach (and which many of us would never dream of demanding of other people).7 The more humane approach is to drop such efforts as completely as you can. Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the r

but perhaps the simplest is to 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

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fuelled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible – the quest to become the optimised, infinitely capable, e

This is a perspective from which you can finally ask the most fundamental question of time management: what would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count?

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.

One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.

I still think it’s the single best antidote to the feeling of time pressure, a splendidly liberating first step on the path of embracing your limits: 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.