Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals - Oliver Burkeman

Living your life may mean letting balls drop, disappointing others, abandoning certain ambitions, and failing at certain roles. Those sacrifices might be ok if you feel you're actively making those choices, and you'll happy with the consequences. If a messy office means spending more time with the kids, that might be ok. When we're afraid of what other people might think, we're no longer living for ourselves. 

We tend to complete easy tasks to get them off our plate, but often those tasks are the least valuable. If we're not careful, we spend much of our time doing easy, meaningless activities. 

We don't have time. We are time. (Heidegger)

Most of our daily activities are distractions from living our life. We tend to squander time when we think we have a lot of it. Instead, face the reality that you may truly not be around tomorrow or next week, and if that's the case, how would you live today. 

If we are alive today, it's a gift. We don't have to do things, we get to do them. That means any choice you make to spend your time is a win. Stop wasting time deliberating about what you want to do or evaluating your current choice against potential choices, just do the thing in front of you.

When you procrastinate, analyze whether it's because you recognize you can't get everything done and have decided to neglect some tasks or if you are paralyzed because you feel like you can do it all or because you're scared that you won't do a good-enough job. If the latter, then relax because it's highly likely that you won't meet your ideal, so you might as well start.

To dive into something meaningfully, you need to commit. Stay on the bus. We're all settling, even when we think we're not settling. People tend to be happier when they make irreversible decisions - "When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there’s only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of your choice."

What you pay attention to becomes your reality. Attention is life. When you don't pay attention to what's important, you may miss out on the life you want. We become distracted when we try to run away from the reality that we have limited time and may never reach the imaginary vision we have for ourselves. Instead, live your life as it comes. To stop becoming distracted, "stop expecting things to be otherwise." We will likely not do everything we want to do, and that's ok. Pay full attention to what's happening as opposed to wishing something else was happening or that we have more control in the process. Accepting this constraint will likely free you from constraint.

Our plans to use time as we wish are typically interrupted by the unexpected. That is more the norm than the exception. Stop planning so much or in such detail. When we try too hard to make the most of our time, we end up missing out on life.

“Do not rule over imaginary kingdoms of endlessly proliferating possibilities.”

To live your life more effectively, don't mind what happens. Imagining what should have been or could have been wastes time you can use to live your life. Stop focusing on using your time well because it'll make each day feel like a drag and you're focused on assessing whether your time is being used well instead of living your life. Don't treat "the present solely as a path to some superior future state" because it robs you of the satisfaction of the present. Your present experiences are the most valuable experience you can have.

"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... Throw yourself into life now."

Also not about being just fully present to extract the most out of the present experience. Don't try to get something out of the experience. Just be in the experience. Take on leisure activities for its own sake (good hobbies should feel a bit embarrassing because you're not doing it for external approval). Don't try to use the time to do something - just spend the time because it's there to spend.

We are addicted to speed.

Practice patience - "meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up but from letting them take the time they take." Don't force your pre-determined plans for success, just respond to what's happening. We can't dictate how fast things will go, so stop trying.

• Develop a taste of having problems - you will never be in a situation where there are no problems to be solved so stop rushing to try to reach this impossible end state. Just deal with each problem as it comes up.
• Embrace radical incrementalism - don't strive to do too much on any individual day, but do a little bit every day of what's most important to you. Be willing to stop when your daily time is up even if you feel you can do more. Stop being impatient about not finishing.
• Sync your time with others - life is more than what you want to do with your time. You need to give up control so you can spend time with others. Join groups and give up some of your time flexibility by committing to spending time with people you care about.
• Recognize that what we do with our lives doesn't matter so do whatever you want - the universe, and other people, can care less about how you spend your time. No such thing as a "life well spent."

Everyone is winging it, all the time, so stop waiting until you're perfect and "ready." Embrace your limits by giving up hope and just do "the next and most necessary thing" and see your life take shape in your rearview mirror.

"giving up hope doesn’t kill you, as Jensen points out, is that in a certain sense it does kill you. It kills the fear-driven, control-chasing, ego-dominated version of you—the one who cares intensely about what others think of you, about not disappointing anyone or stepping too far out of line, in case the people in charge find some way to punish you for it later."

Questions to ask yourself:

1. "Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?"
2. Ask of every significant decision in life, "Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?"
   • Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.
3. "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?"
4. "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?"
   • Live your life, not someone else's; you don't need approval or validation from anyone else but you

Practical tips:

• Be slower to respond to requests or emails - usually, issues end up resolving themselves. Just make sure you're not taking so long that the other side feels like you're ignoring them.
• Instead of trying to clear the decks, choose a few important things and just work on those while leaving the other random to-dos undone; Practice putting up with the discomfort that there are so many loose ends.
  • Do your most valued activity first, as opposed to getting to it once your most urgent ones are done.
  • Don't work on too many things at once - just one or two so you can get it done.
  • Keep two to-do lists - one open and one closed; don't add a new task until one is completed
• Stop trying to bring the future under control with your present actions. Stop only doing things that set you up for a future that may never come. You do need to balance short-term and long-term, but make sure you're not mortgaging the present for the future.
• Set time boundaries for your work - only 50 minutes a day
• Strategically underachieve in a few areas that don't matter
• When bored or in times of uncertainty, get curious about what's happening around you (wonder what will happen next as opposed to hoping for a certain outcome to happen next)
• Practice not doing - when you keep taking action, you're likely to make some poor choices or hurrying things that can't be hurried