Learn more about productivity with this collection
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Ten tools for embracing your finitude
- Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity. It’s better to begin from the assumption that tough choices are inevitable and to focus on making them consciously and well.
- Focus on one big project at a time and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next.
- Decide in advance what to fail at. You’ll inevitably end up underachieving at something, simply because your time and energy are finite.
- Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete.
- Consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics.
- Embrace boring and single-purpose technology; choose devices with only one purpose, such as the Kindle e-reader.
- Seek out novelty in the mundane. Pay more attention to every moment, however mundane.
- When presented with a challenging or boring moment, try deliberately adopting an attitude of curiosity.
- Whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind—to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone’s work—act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off until later.
- Practice being ok with doing nothing.
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Parkinson’s law
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” the English humorist and historian Parkinson wrote in 1955.
And it doesn’t apply only to work. It applies to everything that needs doing.
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Hofstadter’s law
It states that any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect.
In other words, even if you know that a given project is likely to overrun, and you adjust your schedule accordingly, it’ll just overrun your new estimated finishing time, too. It...
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Why boredom seems aggressively unpleasant
We tend to think of it merely as a matter of not being particularly interested in whatever it is we’re doing, but in fact, it’s an intense reaction to the uncomfortable reality of confronting your limited control.
You’re obliged to deal with how your experience is unfol...
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I’m not suggesting our troubles with time are somehow all in the mind, or that a simple change of outlook will cause them all to vanish. Time pressure comes largely from forces outside ourselves: from a cutthroat economy; from the loss of the social safety nets and family networks that us...
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Acquire a reputation for doing your work at amazing speed, and you’ll be given more of it.
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Procrastination of some kind is inevitable
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. The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.
- The ...
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There's never "enough time"
The truth is that it’s impossible to become so efficient and organized that you could respond to a limitless number of incoming demands. It’s usually equally impossible to spend what feels like “enough time” on your work and with your children, and on socializing, traveling, or e...
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The paradox of limitation
The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets.
But the more you confront the facts of finitud...
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Consider all the technology intended to help us gain the upper hand over time: by any sane logic, in a world with dishwashers, microwaves, and jet engines, time ought to feel more expansive and abundant, thanks to all the hours freed up. But this is nobody’s actual experience. Instead, li...
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A limit-embracing attitude to time
It means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do—and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing.
- Since hard choices are unavoida...
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The efficiency trap
Rendering yourself more efficient—either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder —won’t generally result in the feeling of having “enough time,” because,
the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far fro...
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The bottomless bucket list
The modern world provides an endless supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do.
The internet makes this all much more difficult because it promise...
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Arguably, time management is all life is. Yet the modern discipline known as time management—like its hipper cousin, productivity—is a depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect morning routine, or on cooki...
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People with a sense of purpose are focused, self-motivated and unable to be deterred or distracted from what they believe is their goal in life. This sense of meaning and purpose informs them of what to focus on and what’s getting in the way.
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Our working memory is what allows us to focus on the information we need to get things done at the moment we’re doing them. It is also in limited supply. You can think of it like our brain’s computer memory. Once it’s used up, nothing more can fit in.
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