Sublime

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.

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. Whenever you encounter some potential new item for your to-do list or your social calendar, you’ll be strongly biased in favor of accepting it, because you’ll as

A large proportion of them don’t. They make matters worse. Most productivity experts act merely as enablers of our time troubles, by offering ways to keep on believing it might be possible to get everything done.

what “matters” is subjective, so you’ve no grounds for assuming that there will be time for everything that you, or your employer, or your culture happens to deem important. But the other exasperating issue is that if you succeed in fitting more in, you’ll find the goalposts start to shift:

You needn’t embrace the specific practice of listing out your goals (I don’t, personally) to appreciate the underlying point, which is that in a world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones—the fairly interesting job opportunity, the semi-enjoyable friendship—on which a finite life can come to grief. It’s a self-help cliché that

By trying too hard to make the most of his time, he misses his life.

A life spent focused on achieving security with respect to time, when in fact such security is unattainable, can only ever end up feeling provisional – as if the point of your having been born still lies in the future, just over the horizon, and your life in all its fullness can begin as soon as you’ve put it, in Arnold Bennett’s phrase, ‘into prop

we naturally tend to make decisions about our daily use of time that prioritise anxiety-avoidance instead. Procrastination, distraction, commitment-phobia, clearing the decks and taking on too many projects at once are all ways of trying to maintain the illusion that you’re in charge of things. In a subtler way, so too is compulsive worrying, which

It’s alarming to face the prospect that you might never truly feel as though you know what you’re doing, in work, marriage, parenting, or anything else. But it’s liberating, too, because it removes a central reason for feeling self-conscious or inhibited about your performance in those domains in the present moment: if the feeling of total authorit