Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“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.

getting back personal authority, what does that mean? It’s that I have to discern what is right for me, as judged from the responses within me, and then have the courage to live that in the world outside of me.

And yet precisely because I was being forced to confront reality in this way—to see that I was always neglecting most tasks, in order to work on anything at all, and that working on everything at once simply wasn’t an option—the result was a powerful sense of undistracted calm, and a lot more productivity than in my days as a productivity obsessive

The Latin word for business, negotium, translates literally as “not-leisure,” reflecting the view that work was a deviation from the highest human calling.

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.

Dispiriting as this might sound at first, it contains a liberating message: if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.

We treat everything we’re doing—life itself, in other words—as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else.

Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful. We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after

time is also a “network good,” one that derives its value from how many other people have access to it, too, and how well their portion is coordinated with yours.