Four Thousand Weeks

the core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done – that’s never going to happen – but how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.

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.

If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time, in the hope that there’ll be some left over at the end, you’ll be disappointed.

‘If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week,’ as she puts it, ‘there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.’

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.

The point isn’t to force yourself to finish absolutely everything you start, but rather to banish the bad habit of keeping an ever-proliferating number of half-finished projects on the back burner.)

Buffett’s advice is different: he tells the man to make a list of the top twenty-five things he wants out of life and then to arrange them in order, from the most important to the least. The top five, Buffett says, should be those around which he organises his time. But contrary to what the pilot might have been expecting to hear, the remaining twenty, Buffett allegedly explains, aren’t the second-tier priorities to which he should turn when he gets the chance. Far from it. In fact, they’re the ones he should actively avoid at all costs – because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to him to form the core of his life yet seductive enough to distract him from the ones that matter most.

You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.’

The limitations we’re trying to avoid when we engage in this self-defeating sort of procrastination frequently don’t have anything to do with how much we’ll be able to get done in the time available; usually, it’s a matter of worrying that we won’t have the talent to produce work of sufficient quality, or that others won’t respond to it as we’d like them to, or that in some other way things won’t turn out as we want.

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.

The qualities that make someone a dependable source of excitement are generally the opposite of those that make him or her a dependable source of stability. Seeking both in one real human isn’t much less absurd than dreaming of a partner who’s both six and five feet tall.

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.

it’s worth mentioning because it illustrates an elephant-in-the-room problem with everything I’ve been arguing so far about time and time management. That problem is distraction.

it hardly matters how committed you are to making the best use of your limited time if, day after day, your attention gets wrenched away by things on which you never wanted to focus.

Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.

it would be highly undesirable to be able to do exactly as you wished with your attention.

when you can’t predict whether or not refreshing the screen will bring new posts to read, the uncertainty makes you more likely to keep trying, again and again and again, just as you would on a slot machine.

The unsettling possibility is that if you’re convinced that none of this is a problem for you – that social media hasn’t turned you into an angrier, less empathetic, more anxious or more numbed-out version of yourself – that might be because it has.

each time you open a social media app, there are ‘a thousand people on the other side of the screen’ paid to keep you there – and so it’s unrealistic to expect users to resist the assault on their time and attention by means of willpower alone.

the more he concentrated on the sensations of intense cold, giving his attention over to them as completely as he could, the less agonising he found them – whereas once his ‘attention wandered, the suffering became unbearable’.