Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman 9/10

9/10 – Unique book to time management.  Avoid the efficiency trap and productivity hacks.  Embrace our limits and figure out what you really want to accomplish. Be present.

Part I – Choosing to Choose

Chapter 1: The Limit-Embracing Life

• Our troubled relationship with time arises largely from this same effort to avoid the painful constraints of reality.
• After all, it’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that touch choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do.
• And so, rather than face our limitations, we engage in avoidance strategies, in an effort to carry on feeling limitless. We push ourselves harder, chasing fantasies of the perfect work-life balance.
• The more you believe you might succeed in “fitting everything in,” the more commitments you naturally take on, and the less you feel the need to ask whether each new commitment is truly worth a portion of your time – and so your days inevitably fill with more activities you don’t especially value.
• Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default – or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all.

Chapter 2: The Efficiency Trap

• Efficiency trap – the process of “getting through your email” actually generates more email.
• Rendering yourself more efficient – either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder – won’t generally result in the feeling of having enough time because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits.  Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.
• Once you stop believing that it might somehow be possible to avoid hard choices about time, it gets easier to make better ones.  You begin to grasp that when there’s too much to do, and there always will be, the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of this limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.
• If you never stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically begin to fill not just with more things, but with more trivial or tedious things, because they’re never had to clear the hurdle of being judged more important than something else.
• Resist the urge to consume more and more experiences.
• You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.

Chapter 3 – Facing Finitude

• Spend each day “as if” it was your last. It always might be.  Don’t depend upon a single moment of the future.
• Rather than taking ownership of our lives [finitude], we seek out distractions or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind.
• If you actually could get everything done, you’d never have to choose among mutually exclusive possibilities.
• It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives.
• After the sudden and premature death of his friend David, he would find himself stuck in traffic, not clenching his fists in agitation, as per usual, but wondering: “What would David have given to be caught in this traffic jam?”
• Turn your attention instead to the fact that you’re in a position to have an irritating experience in the first place (you’re still alive).

Chapter 4 – Becoming a Better Procrastinator

• So 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 Art of Neglect
  • Principle 1 – Work on your most important project for the first half hour of each day, and to protect your time by scheduling “meetings” with yourself, marking them in your calendar so that other commitments cant intrude.
    • If you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it
  • Principle 2 – Limit the number of things that you allow yourself to work on at any given time. No more than three items.  Once you’ve selected those tasks, all other incoming demands on your time must wait until one of those three items have been completed, thereby freeing up a slot. 
    • A happy consequence – I found myself effortlessly breaking down my projects into manageable chunks. 
  • Principle 3- Avoid second tier priorities at all costs because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to you to form the core of your life yet seductive enough to distract you from the ones that matter most.
    • Learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you only have one life.
• 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.
• To refuse to settle – to spend a decade restlessly scouring online dating networks for the perfect person – is also a case of settling, because you’re opting to use up a decade of your limited time in a different sort of less-than-ideal situation.
• You must settle upon something that will be the object of your striving, in order for that striving to count as striving; you can’t be an ultra-successful lawyer or artist or politician without first “settling” on law, or art or politics, and therefore deciding to forgo the potential regards of other careers.
• In consciously making a commitment, they’re closing off their fantasies of infinite possibility in favor of what I described as the “joy of missing out”: the recognition that the renunciation of alternatives is what makes their choice a meaningful one in the first place.
• When people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result.

Chapter 5 – The Watermelon Problem

• Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. 
• So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life.
• Involuntary attention: “attention economy”: a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about.
• The attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling – instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful. It distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face. These distorted judgments also influence how we allocate our offline time.

Chapter 6 – The Intimate Interrupter

• The intimate interrupter:  that “self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels,” promising an easier life if only you’d redirect your attention away from the meaningful but challenging task at hand, to whatever’s unfolding one browser tab away.
• Boredom comes when it demands that you face your finitude.  You’re obligated to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to that reality that this is it.
• No wonder we seek out distractions online, where it feels as though no limits apply.
• The way to find peaceful absorption in a difficult project, or a boring Sunday afternoon, isn’t to chase feelings of peace or absorption, but to acknowledge the inevitability of discomfort, and to turn more of your attention to the reality of your situation than railing against it.

Part II – Beyond Control

Chapter 7 – We Never Really Have Time

• Worry is the repetitious experience of a mind, attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future. 
• But the struggle for control over the future is a stark example of our refusal to acknowledge our built-in limitations when it comes to time, because it’s a fight the worrier obviously won’t win.  You can never be truly certain of your future.
• You can’t know that things will turn out all right.  The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one, which means you have permission to stop engaging in it.
• Whatever you value most about your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you couldn’t possibly have planned for.
• But planning is an essential tool for constructing a meaningful life, and for exercising our responsibilities toward other people.
• All a plan is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

Chapter 8 – You Are Here

• The future-focused attitude, “’when I finally” mind” (e.g., when I finally get my workload under control/find the right romantic partner”, then I can relax and the life I was always meant to be living can begin”
• They’re attempting to achieve that sense of security means they’ll never feel fulfilled, because they’re treating the present solely as a path to some superior future state – and so the present moment won’t ever feel so satisfying in itself.
• Treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it. And indeed there’ a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time.”
• Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now – that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order.
• The problem is that in the effort to be present in the moment, that it obscures the experience itself.  It’s likes trying too hard to go to fall asleep and therefore failing.  You’re too busy self-consciously wondering whether you’re being present enough or not.

Chapter 9 – Rediscovering Rest

• Enjoying leisure begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future.
• In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth.
• The important thing awe can do as individuals, in order to enter the experience of genuine rest, is simply to stop expecting it to feel good, at least in the first instances.  This discomfort isn’t a sign that you shouldn’t be doing it though. It’s a sign that you definitely should.
• We might seek to incorporate into our daily lives more things we do for their own sake alone – to spend some of our time, that is, on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself (hobbies).
  • Hobby should probably feel a little embarrassing; that’s a good sign you’re doing it for its own sake, rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome.
  • Hobbies should also be fine (and perhaps preferrable) to be mediocre at them.

Chapter 10 – The Impatience Spiral

• Since the beginning of the modern era, people have been responding not with satisfaction at all time saved, but with increasing agitation that they can’t make things move faster still (warming up microwave dinner from 60 to 30 seconds).
• We grow anxious about not keeping up – so to quell the anxiety, to try to achieve the feeling that our lives are under control, we move faster. But this only generates an addictive spiral. We push ourselves harder to get rid of anxiety, but the result is actually more anxiety, because the faster we go, the clearer it becomes that we’ll never succeed in getting ourselves or the rest of the world to move as fast as we feel is necessary.
• When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed.  You begin to acquire…patience.

Chapter 11 – Staying on the Bus

• The capacity to resist the urge to hurry – to allow things to take the time the take – is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.
• If you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself.
• Three Principles of Patience
  • Develop a taste for having problems.
    • A life devoid of all problems would contain nothing worth doing, and would therefore, be meaningless.
  • Embrace radical incrementalism.
    • It was precisely the students impatient desire to hasten their work beyond its appropriate pace, to race on to the point of completion, that was impending their progress.
    • Stopping helps strength the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus sustain your productivity over an entire career.
  • Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.
    • Minkkinen advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction – perhaps you start working on platinum studies of nudes – and you begin to accumulate a portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to the owner of a gallery. But you’re dismayed to be told that your pictures aren’t as original as you thought, because they look like knockoffs of the work of the photographer Irving Penn; Penn’s bus, it turns out, had been on the same route as yours. Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years following somebody else’s path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to specialize. But a few stops later, the same thing happens you’re informed that your new body of work seems derivative, too. Back you go to the bus station. But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognized as being truly your own. What’s the solution? “It’s simple,” Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.” A little farther out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage – the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.
    • Yet if you always pursue the unconventional in this way, you deny yourself the possibility of experiencing those other, richer forms of uniqueness that are reserved for those with the patience to travel the well-trodden path first.
• To experience the profound mutual understanding of the long-married couple, you have to stay married to one person.

Chapter 12 – The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad

• Having all the time in the world isn’t much use if you’re forced to experience it all on your own.  To do countless important things with time (socialize, go on dates, raise children), has to be synchronized with other people.
• More freedom to choose when and where you work makes it harder to forge connections through your job, as well as less likely you’ll be free to socialize when your friend are.
• For one thing, you can make the kinds of commitments to remove that flexibility from your schedule in exchange for the rewards of community, by joining sports teams, campaign groups, or religious organizations.

Chapter 13 – Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

• 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?
• What you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much – and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.
• Overvaluing your existence gives rise to an unrealistic definition of what it would mean to use your finite time well.  It sets the bar much too high. It suggests that in order to count as having been “well spent,” your life needs to involve deeply impressive accomplishments, or that it should have a lasting impact on future generations.
• Once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a “life well spent”, you’re free to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time.

Chapter 14 – The Master of Time

• You have to accept that there will always be too much work to do; that you can’t avoid tough choices.
• In exchange for accepting all that, you get to actually be here.  You get to spend your finite time focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now, in this moment.

Ask the following questions of your own life. It doesn’t matter if answers aren’t immediately forthcoming. The point is to live the questions.

1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
   • Does this choice diminish me or enlarge me? 
   • Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.
2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
   • Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.
3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
   • There’s no point in waiting to live until you’ve achieved validation from someone or something else.
   • Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront the personality, the strength and weaknesses, the talents and enthusiasm you find yourself with, here and now, and follow where they lead.
4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
   • If the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all – to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of caution.
5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition? (e.g., parenting, community-building)

• How to live: quietly do the next and most necessary thing. If you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate. Do the next right thing.

10 Tools for Embracing Your Finitude

1. 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.
   • Feed tasks from the open list to the closed one – that is, a list with a fixed number of entries, ten at most.
   • Establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work (e.g., leave work at 5:00pm)
2. Focus on one big project at a time and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next.
3. Decided in advance what to fail at
   • Replace the high-pressure quest for work-life balance with a conscious form of imbalance, backed by your confidence that the roles in which you’re underperforming right now will get their moment in the spotlight soon.
4. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete (keep a done list)
5. Consolidate your caring – pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics.
6. Embrace boring and simple-purpose technology (e.g., kindle to read)
7. Seek out novelty in the mundane
   • Find more novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.
   • Childhood involves plentiful novel experiences, so we remember it as having lasted forever; but as we get older, life gets routinized – we stick to the same places of residence, the same few relationships, and jobs – and the novelty tapers off.
8. Adopt an attitude of curiosity when presented with a challenging or boring moment.
9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity.
   • Whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind, act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off.
10. Practice doing nothing.