Time Management for Mortals
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Quick Recap
This book is your slap in the face of reality, the reality that you will die. Accepting that and the limitations that come with it leads to a life of intention. A life where we can use our 4,000 weeks to experience what we were born to do. What that limited time lacks in quantity will be made up for in quality, if we can learn to be present through it all.
Background:
I first heard of this book while listening to the Life Kit on NPR podcast. I was coming out of the depths of my first postpartum journey and getting back into my self-improvement mania when I came across this episode. The idea of time not being something we can own or control sparked my interest and I added his book to my long list of TBR (to be read), here is my take on it.
3 Sentence Summary
We only live 4000 weeks, if were lucky enough to make it to 76.9 years of age.
How we spend those weeks ultimately defines our entire life, a summation of tiny moments for the grand total.
The best use of that time will come from the stark discovery and acceptance of the limitedness of our time and the ability to embrace that you will NOT be able to do everything you want to do.
Key Takeaways
We are working and trying to produce more than ever in human history. In 1930 an economist predicted that with the growth in technology and innovation “no one would have to work more than 15 hours a week”. I think we all know how that has turned out. We are more overworked and busy than ever before.
The moment you get “free” time you just end up filling it with something else to do instead of just enjoying and finding meaning in the stuff we already do, or god forbid do nothing. The first step is accept you will never get everything done and that is a good thing. It adds value to what you do choose to do.
Part 1: The key to time management, choosing to choose
Burkeman exploits the freedom of choice we all have. How choosing to choose and to being intentional with that choice is the ultimate freedom in how we live our life. There is a reference to farming life I found so true. He explains how you can’t rush milking the cows, you cant habit stack or multitask your way through life as a farmer because each task is done when it is needed and when biology deems it necessary. As the author says back then “there was no anxious pressure “to get everything done” either because a farmers work is infinite…there was no racing to some hypothetical moment of completion”.
Which makes you realize there will always be more things to do so long as you are still alive. Accepting you will not get to do them all is the first rule in proper time management. At some point in human history, time and life became separated. Time started being seen as a resource, something you consume. But time and life are one and the same, you don’t own time because time is your life. Just as your life can be taken from you at any given moment so can your time.
You can never say “I have 20 minutes” because you don’t know what life will throw at you in the next few minutes even seconds that could “rob” you of those 20 minutes. In the occasion nothing comes up and you do spend an uninterrupted 20 minutes on what you wanted it becomes the past and again you don’t have the 20 minutes because you have already consumed them. So instead of making ourselves sick with guilt about how we use our time lets choose to let time use us. Let time and in turn life use you for what you were meant to do to “respond to the needs of your place and your moment in history”
He also discusses how productivity and planning have reach new heights of obsession. As a planner myself, I found it interesting the idea that compulsive planning is a way to feel in control about the future because facing the reality of it is simply too difficult to accept. I think this is especially true on days when I overbook myself and try to do too much.
Deciding what to spend our time on is not the problem its deciding what NOT to spend our time on that is hard. So how do you choose to chose what not to spend your time on?
Creative Neglect
The first idea in choosing to choose is that of creative neglect. Creative neglect is the act of intentionally saying no to many of the “opportunities” life throws at us. It is the practice of claiming your time and accepting the consequences. Yes I will journal today which means saying no to other tasks, bye dishes.
Second practice is to limit your work in progress. Only work on one project at a time, many times we take on multiple projects as an escape when one gets tough or we aren’t gaining traction. We give ourselves an illusion of control by jumping to another and never finishing anything important” but as Duckworth states in Grit you have to “stay consistent past the discomfort”. Starting additional projects is even more detrimental because we get the illusion of being productive, since we are doing work, but we don’t get any closer to accomplishing our goals on the original project. Third don’t have middling priorities, actually avoid them like the plague they are DISTRACTIONS. As Brendon Burchard states in High Performance Habits “the main thing is to make the main thing, the main thing” there can only be one main thing.
Good and Bad Procrastination
Here the author explains that we all engage in procrastination whether good or bad. Many times we procrastinate on the things we planned to do as a form to keep hope alive. This is to avoid facing our limitations when we have too much on our plate or have stacked the WRONG things on our plate. If we procrastinate we live in denial because we haven’t yet proven we can’t do it all, were just procrastinating.
Distractions
When we get distracted it is a sign that we are uncomfortable with our finitude. Being 100% present and accepting the current situation is the solution. We seek distraction to avoid and/or overlook the fact that this is what we are spending our precious 4000 weeks on. Especially true when you find yourself in a waiting room, every person in that room is irritated to be made to wait and is looking for a distraction on their phones.
Part 2: Beyond Control
So much of our time is out of our control. This is a hard truth for a passionate planner like me to accept, but as Burkeman notes the real problem isn’t planning it’s our marriage to the plan and the idea that it will occur because we said so. That’s the problem “a plan is just a thought…all it could ever possibly be – is a present- moment of intent”. Looking at my plans from this lens of intent versus execution and judging the result based on whether I am living my values, not whether the plan I wrote down happened or not, has been key to managing my time and keeping my sanity. I will never give up planning my days because that is how I am intentional with my time, how I try and at times fail and others succeed, to best live my 4,000 weeks.
Time Management and Parenting
There are many references to how our perspective of time and time management is altered as we enter parenthood “Everything worth doing requires cooperating with others “the more you hurry the more frustrating it is to encounter tasks (or toddlers) that wont be hurried”
I have never experienced a bigger obsession with time than watching a clock tick by as I tried to sleep train a baby. One minute of your child’s cries can seem like an eternity. Yet parenting has been the one event in my life that has forced me and truly rewarded me for slowing down, way down even if it is usually against my will.
I still recall running into a post about a mom who was always hurrying her toddler. Until one day she heard her toddler manically hurrying her little sister. It hit her like a ton of bricks how much she was robbing her children of their childhood by rushing. Furthermore, Burkeman discusses how as a society we have started “rating” parenting strategies based on the consequences those strategies will produce in the adult child. What he calls causal catastrophe. The idea that the “right or wrong way to parent is dependent on the kind of adults it produces.” He acknowledges that when you do this “you are removing childhood from existing by making it a training ground for adulthood.” Instead of letting kids just be kids and parents be parents we have become obsessed with parenting to produce a desired result 20 years down the line.
Resting
Have you ever noticed how slow time goes when you are still? Just putting our bodies at rest slows down time. Which is why rest is such a critical piece of time management. The ultimate hack in our hectic days is the idea that we can slow down time by the simple abstinence from consuming it to produce an outcome. Enjoying a lazy hour for its own sake entails first accepting the fact that this is it. That your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness. When we force ourselves to be productive at all hours we are “draining the four thousands weeks of their value”. Sometimes doing nothing is everything, because “today, at least, there might be nothing more you need to do in order to justify your existence.”
If you only see time as a tool to get to some future goal then you are stripping the present moment of its meaning and over time depriving your entire life of meaning. The present moment is the only one you get, life is the sum of every moment. Stop seeing time as a tool to accomplish but rather as the gift it is. Spend your time on the activity for the gift/experience doing the activity itself brings right now.
Develop patience
Learn to sit with it. It being any problem, situation, emotion, feeling, etc. This strengthens your patience muscle which helps you stay present. You can further develop patience by:
- Get a taste for having a problem. Stop jumping into solution space.
- Embrace radical incrementalism. The idea to work for a set time and STOP when that time is up. It helps build trust that you will return to the project again and that whatever time you gave was enough for today. This is especially hard when you are in flow. But it is a form of discipline.
- Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality. When you find yourself doing something unoriginal or unfulfilling don’t start from scratch but “stay on the bus.” See if you can get to the far side of it to where your unique contribution can come back.
And for those days when your children are truly testing your patience and moving slower than a sloth.
Remember that the more time you have the more lonely you get. Burkeman states “grasp the truth that power over your time isn’t something best hoarded entirely for yourself…that your time can be too much your own”
Favorite Quotes on Time Management
“When people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to”
“Most of us invest a lot of time and energy…in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves.”
“Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time….to make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you”
“The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things”
“Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you paid attention”
“Reading is the sort of activity that largely pirates according to its own schedule. You cant hurry it very much before the experience begins to lose its meaning”
Taking Action
These are some of the things I am trying based on this book:
Journal Prompts for Time Management:
- Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
- Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
- 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?
- In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what your doing?
- How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?
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?
10 Tools for Embracing Finitude
- Keep 2 to-do lists one open and one closed that only has 10 items at any given time. Nothing moves to the closed list until something leaves.
- Work on only 1 project at a time.
- Proactively choose what to fail at to focus on something else.
- Keep a “done” list to show you what you’ve already accomplished.
- Consolidate your caring – what charity will you focus on.
- Turn your screens black and white.
- Pay attention to every moment especially boring ones. It will slow down time (that’s why childhood feels eternal everything was new).
- Adopt an attitude of curiosity in your relationships to legitimate get to know a person.
- Practice instantaneous generosity. If you are going to do something nice for someone don’t think about it just do it, act on the impulse.
- Practice doing nothing.
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