10 ways to get the most out of your time on this planet

1. Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity

2. Serialize

3. Decide in advance what to fail at

4. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just what’s left to do

5. Consolidate your caring

6. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology

7. Seek out novelty in the mundane

8. Be a researcher in relationships

9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity

10. Practice doing nothing

We all need to make tough choices about what we can realistically get done, so that we can prioritize the activities that matter most, instead of reacting to a constant barrage of demands.

One way is to keep 2 to-do lists — one for everything on your plate, and one for the 10 or fewer things that you’re currently working on. The rule is not to move any further items from the first list onto the second until you’ve freed up a slot by finishing one of the 10 items.

A related strategy is to set a pre-established time boundary for certain types of daily work and to make sure you stop when time’s up.

Focus only on one big project at a time. Though it’s alluring to try to alleviate the anxiety of having too many responsibilities or ambitions by getting started on them all at once, you’ll make little progress that way. Multitasking rarely works well — and you’ll soon find that serializing helps you to complete more projects anyway, thereby helping relieve your anxiety.

You’ll inevitably underachieve at something, simply because your time and energy are finite. But strategic underachievement — nominating in advance the areas of your life in which you won’t expect excellence — helps you focus your time and energy more effectively.

To live this way is to replace the high-pressure quest for work-life balance with something more reasonable — a deliberate kind of imbalance.

Since the quest to get everything done is interminable by definition, it’s easy to grow despondent and self-reproachful when you can’t get through your whole to-do list. One counter-strategy is to keep a “done list,” which starts empty first thing in the morning, but which you can gradually fill in throughout the day as you get things done. It’s a cheering reminder that you could have spent the day doing nothing remotely constructive … yet you didn’t.

Social media is a giant machine for getting you to spend your time caring about the wrong things — and too many of them at once. We’re exposed to an unending stream of atrocities and injustices, each of which might have a legitimate claim on our time and our charitable donations, but which add up to something no human could ever effectively address comprehensively.

Once you grasp that fact fully, it’s good to consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics — and devote your spare time only to those specific causes. Focus your capacity for care, so you don’t burn out.

Digital distractions allow us to escape to a realm where painful human limitations don’t seem to apply — scrolling idly around online, you need never feel bored or constrained in your freedom of action, which isn’t the case when it comes to doing work that matters.

Combat this by making your devices as boring as possible, removing social media apps, email,...

It’s also helpful to choose devices with only one purpose, such as the Kindle reader. Otherwise, temptations will be only a swipe away, and you’ll feel the urge to check your screens anytime you’re bored or facing a challenge in your work.

Time seems to speed up as we age, likely because our brains encode the passage of years based on how much information we process in any given interval. While children have many novel experiences and time therefore seems slower to them, the routinization of older people’s lives means that time seems to pass at an ever-increasing rate.

The standard advice is to combat this by cramming more novel experiences into your life, but it’s not always practical.

An alternative is to pay more attention to every moment, however mundane — to find novelty by plunging more deeply into your present life.

The desire to feel in control of our limited time causes numerous problems in relationships, resulting not only in controlling behavior, but also the inability to listen, boredom, and missing out on the richness of experiences with others.

When faced with a challenging or boring moment, try being curious about the person you’re with, rather than controlling.

Curiosity is a stance well-suited to the inherent unpredictability of life with others, because it can be satisfied by their behaving in ways you like or dislike — whereas if you demand a certain result instead, you’ll often be frustrated.

Whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind, give in to it right away rather than putting it off. Don’t wait to figure out if the recipient deserves your generosity or if you really have the time to be generous right now (with all of the work you have left to do!). Just do it. The rewards are immediate, too, because generous action reliably makes you feel much happier.

The capacity to do nothing is indispensable, because if you can’t bear the discomfort of not acting, you’re far more likely to make poor choices with your time, e.g. hurrying activities that can’t be rushed or feeling you ought to being “productive,” regardless if the tasks in question really matter.

Doing nothing means resisting the urge to manipulate your experience or the people and things in the world around you, and to let things be as they are. By increasing your ability to do nothing, you will gradually regain your autonomy and make better choices with your brief allotment of life.