Four Thousand Weeks

We would be forced to acknowledge that there are hard choices to be made: which balls to let drop, which people to disappoint, which cherished ambitions to abandon, which roles to fail at.

Maybe you can’t keep your current job while also seeing enough of your children; maybe making sufficient time in the week for your creative calling means you’ll never have an especially tidy home, or get quite as much exercise as you should,

For a start, 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.

if you succeed in fitting more in, you’ll find the goalposts start to shift: more things will begin to seem important, meaningful, or obligatory.

when housewives first got access to ‘labour-saving’ devices like washing machines and vacuum cleaners, no time was saved at all, because society’s standards of cleanliness simply rose to offset the benefits;

the choice you can make is to stop believing you’ll ever solve the challenge of busyness by cramming more in, because that just makes matters worse.

once you stop investing in the idea that you might one day achieve peace of mind that way, it becomes easier to find peace of mind in the present, in the midst of overwhelming demands, because you’re no longer making your peace of mind dependent on dealing with all the demands.

when there’s too much to do, and there always will be, the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of the limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.

stuffing your life with pleasurable activities so often proves less satisfying than you’d expect.

internet makes this all much more agonising, because it promises to help you make better use of your time, while simultaneously exposing you to vastly more potential uses for your time

the efficiency trap were a simple matter of quantity: you have too much to do, so you try to fit more in, but the ironic result is that you end up with more to do.

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.

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’ve never had to clear the hurdle of being judged more important than something else.

The more efficient you get, the more you become ‘a limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations’, in the words of the management expert Jim Benson.8

the long message from an old friend and research for the major article I'd been planning for months would get ignored, because I told myself that such tasks needed my full focus.

instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what’s truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further, with emails and errands and other to-dos, many of which you may never get round to at all.

it isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort

You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.

each moment of decision becomes an opportunity to select from an enticing menu of possibilities, when you might easily never have been presented with the menu to begin with. And it stops making sense to pity yourself for having been cheated of all the other options.

making a choice – picking one item from the menu – far from representing some kind of defeat, becomes an affirmation. It’s a positive commitment to spend a given portion of time doing this instead of that – actually, instead of an infinite number of other ‘thats’ – because this, you’ve decided, is what counts the most right now.