Accepting our mortality helps us let go of busyness and focus on what’s most important to us in order to live a happier, more meaningful life.

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly finite. If you’re lucky and you live to 80, you will have lived about 4,000 weeks. This truth,...

When it comes to the challenge of using your 4,000 weeks well, 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, such as attempting to hurry activities that can’t be rushed or f...

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 seems slower to them, the routinization of older people’s lives means that time seems to...

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...

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

When faced with a chal...

Part of that embrace of limitation involves facing the anxiety that comes with acknowledging mortality. When we recognize the shortness of life — and accept the fact that some things have to be left unaccomplished, whether we like it or not — we are freer to focus on what matters.

Rather ...

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 rew...

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 gra...

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 rep...

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 serializin...

Time management, broadly defined, should be everyone’s chief concern. Yet the modern discipline of time management (or productivity) is depressingly narrow-minded, focused on devising the perfect morning routine or trying to crank through as many tasks as possible, while investing all your en...