Four Thousand Weeks
Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It by Oliver Burkeman
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
We have four thousand weeks to live, so our lives essentially come down to time management.
However, all current productivity advice is about us controlling and mastering it instead of confronting its finiteness.
If we accept and confront some of the fundamental truths about our lives and time then we will find more happiness and joy in those four thousand weeks.
🎨 Impressions
Often, productivity advice is all about maximising our time, doing more, and being efficient for the sake of it. This was a refreshing alternative view that focused on confronting our limitations, realising that being distracted is evolutionary human and realising that we can settle.
How I Discovered It
This was recommended from Adam Grant's summer reading list. I have read Oliver Burkeman's other book: The Antidote to Positive Thinking too. Check out my summary here.
Who Should Read It?
If you are interested in making the most of your four thousand weeks on the planet, want to understand how the use of 'time' has shifted, want productivity advice that seems human - this is the book.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
“We’re obsessed with our overfilled inboxes and lengthening to-do lists, haunted by the guilty feeling that we ought to be getting more done, or different things done.
It’s somehow vastly more aggravating to wait two minutes for the microwave than two hours for the oven—or ten seconds for a slow-loading web page versus three days to receive the same information by mail.
The more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.
📒 Summary + Notes
The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.
Time management is therefore everybody's major concern. Yet the modern discipline known as time management—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 cooking all your dinners for the week in one big batch on Sundays.
Knowing Our Time is Short
We’re obsessed with our overfilled inboxes and lengthening to-do lists, haunted by the guilty feeling that we ought to be getting more done, or different things done.
Recently, as the gig economy has grown, busyness has been rebranded as “hustle”—relentless work not as a burden to be endured but as an exhilarating lifestyle choice, worth boasting about on social media. In reality, though, it’s the same old problem, pushed to an extreme: the pressure to fit ever-increasing quantities of activity into a stubbornly non-increasing quantity of daily time.
Or perhaps your problem isn’t being too busy but insufficiently busy, languishing in a dull job, or not employed at all. That’s still a situation made far more distressing by the shortness of life, because you’re using up your limited time.
Many other complaints, when you stop to think about them, are essentially complaints about our limited time. Take the daily battle against online distraction, and the alarming sense that our attention spans have shriveled.
A Change in Time Management Approach
For years now, we’ve been deluged with advice on living the fully optimized life, in books with titles such as Extreme Productivity and The 4-Hour Workweek and Smarter Faster Better, plus websites full of “life hacks” for whittling seconds off everyday chores.
There are numerous apps and wearable devices for maximizing the payoffs from your workday, your workouts, and even your sleep, plus meal replacement drinks to eliminate time wasted eating dinner. And the chief selling point of a thousand other products and services, from kitchen appliances to online banking, is that they’ll help you achieve the widely championed goal of squeezing the most from your time.
The Truth About Time
The truth about time: the more you struggle to control it, to make it conform to your agenda, the further it slips from your control.
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, life accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient. It’s somehow vastly more aggravating to wait two minutes for the microwave than two hours for the oven—or ten seconds for a slow-loading web page versus three days to receive the same information by mail.
And this feeling of wrongness is only exacerbated by our attempts to become more productive, which seem to have the effect of pushing the genuinely important stuff ever further over the horizon. Our days are spent trying to “get through” tasks, in order to get them “out of the way,” with the result that we live mentally in the future, waiting for when we’ll finally get around to what really matters—and worrying, in the meantime, that we don’t measure up, that we might lack the drive or stamina to keep pace with the speed at which life now seems to move.
The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency, many of us spend our lives preparing ourselves and our children to be means to inscrutable ends that are utterly not our own. Our struggle to stay on top of everything may serve someone’s interests; working longer hours—and using any extra income to buy more consumer goods—turns us into better cogs in the economic machine. But it doesn’t result in peace of mind, or lead us to spend more of our finite time on those people and things we really care about.
Embrace the Limit
The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.
Our troubled relationship with time arises largely from this same effort to avoid the painful constraints of reality. And most of our strategies for becoming more productive make things worse, because they’re really just ways of furthering the avoidance. After all, it’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that tough choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do. It’s also painful to accept your limited control over the time you do get: maybe you simply lack the stamina or talent or other resources to perform well in all the roles you feel you should.
And so, rather than face our limitations, we engage in avoidance strategies, in an effort to carry on feeling limitless. We push ourselves harder, chasing fantasies of the perfect work-life balance; or we implement time management systems that promise to make time for everything, so that tough choices won’t be required.
Or we procrastinate, which is another means of maintaining the feeling of omnipotent control over life—because you needn’t risk the upsetting experience of failing at an intimidating project, if you never even start it. We fill our minds with busyness and distraction to numb ourselves emotionally.
Denying reality never works, though. It may provide some immediate relief, because it allows you to go on thinking that at some point in the future you might, at last, feel totally in control. But it can’t ever bring the sense that you’re doing enough—that you are enough—because it defines “enough” as a kind of limitless control that no human can attain. Instead, the endless struggle leads to more anxiety and a less fulfilling life. For example, the more you believe you might succeed in “fitting everything in,” the more commitments you naturally take on, and the less you feel the need to ask whether each new commitment is truly worth a portion of your time—and so your days inevitably fill with more activities you don’t especially value. The more you hurry, the more frustrating it is to encounter tasks (or toddlers) that won’t be hurried; the more compulsively you plan for the future, the more anxious you feel about any remaining uncertainties, of which there will always be plenty.
But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.
In practical terms, a limit-embracing attitude to time 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 unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default—or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all.
So long as you continue to respond to impossible demands on your time by trying to persuade yourself that you might one day find some way to do the impossible, you’re implicitly collaborating with those demands. Whereas once you deeply grasp that they are impossible, you’ll be newly empowered to resist them, and to focus instead on building the most meaningful life you can, in whatever situation you’re in.
The Efficiency Trap of Technology
This whole painful irony is especially striking in the case of email, that ingenious twentieth-century invention whereby any random person on the planet can pester you, at any time they like, and at almost no cost to themselves, by means of a digital window that sits inches from your nose, or in your pocket, throughout your working day, and often on weekends, too. The “input” side of this arrangement—the number of emails that you could, in principle, receive—is essentially infinite. But the “output” side—the number of messages you’ll have time to read properly, reply to, or just make a considered decision to delete—is strictly finite. So getting better at processing your email is like getting faster and faster at climbing up an infinitely tall ladder: you’ll feel more rushed, but no matter how quickly you go, you’ll never reach the top.
The more wonderful experiences you succeed in having, the more additional wonderful experiences you start to feel you could have, or ought to have, on top of all those you’ve already had, with the result that the feeling of existential overwhelm gets worse. Perhaps it goes without saying that the internet makes this all much more agonizing, because it promises to help you make better use of your time, while simultaneously exposing you to vastly more potential uses for your time—so that the very tool you’re using to get the most out of life makes you feel as though you’re missing out on even more of it. Facebook, for example, is an extremely efficient way to stay informed about events you might like to attend. But it’s also a guaranteed way to hear about more events you’d like to attend than anyone possibly could attend. OkCupid is an efficient way of finding people to date, but also of being constantly reminded about all the other, potentially more alluring people you might be dating instead. Email is an unparalleled tool for responding rapidly to a large volume of messages—but then again, if it weren’t for email, you wouldn’t be receiving all those messages in the first place. The technologies we use to stay on top of everything always fail us in the end, because they increase the size of everything we are trying to get on top of.
The worst aspect of the trap, though, is that it’s also a matter of quality. The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things. Adopt an ultra-ambitious time management system that promises to take care of your entire to-do list, and you probably won’t even get around to the most important items on that list. Eg: Dedicate your retirement to seeing as much of the world as you possibly can, and you probably won’t even get to see the most interesting parts.
You may tell yourself that such tasks needed my full focus, which meant waiting until I had a good chunk of free time and fewer small-but-urgent tasks tugging at my attention. And so, instead, like the dutiful and efficient worker I was, I’d put my energy into clearing the decks, cranking through the smaller stuff to get it out of the way—only to discover that doing so took the whole day, that the decks filled up again overnight anyway, and that the moment for responding to the New Delhi email or for researching the milestone article never arrived. One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.
Frequently, the effect of convenience isn’t just that a given activity starts to feel less valuable, but that we stop engaging in certain valuable activities altogether, in favor of more convenient ones. Because you can stay home, order food on Seamless, and watch sitcoms on Netflix, you find yourself doing so—though you might be perfectly well aware that you’d have had a better time had you kept your appointment to meet friends in the city or tried to make an interesting new recipe. “I prefer to brew my coffee,” the law professor Tim Wu writes in an essay on the pitfalls of convenience culture, “but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I ‘prefer.’” Meanwhile, those aspects of life that resist being made to run more smoothly start to seem repellent. “When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone,” Wu points out, “waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating.” As convenience colonizes everyday life, activities gradually sort themselves into two types: the kind that are now far more convenient, but that feel empty or out of sync with our true preferences; and the kind that now seem intensely annoying because of how inconvenient they remain.
Facing Finitude
Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born? Surely only somebody who’d failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as such a given—as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.
Becoming a Better Procrastinator
Procrastination of some kind is inevitable: indeed, at any given moment, you’ll be procrastinating on almost everything, and by the end of your life, you’ll have gotten around to doing virtually none of the things you theoretically could have done. So 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.
Thinking in terms of “paying yourself first” transforms these one-off tips into a philosophy of life, at the core of which lies this simple insight: 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.
Choosing the Top 5
Buffett’s advice is: 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 organizes 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.
Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living, there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given. That ship has sailed—and what a relief.
The Art of Settling
Everyone seems to agree that if you embark on a relationship when you secretly suspect you could find someone better, you’re guilty of settling, because you’re opting to use up a portion of your life with a less-than-ideal partner. But since time is finite, the decision to refuse to settle—to spend a decade restlessly scouring online dating networks for the perfect person—is also a case of settling, because you’re opting to use up a decade of your limited time in a different sort of less-than-ideal situation.
We tend to contrast a life of settling with a life of what he labels “striving,” or living life to the fullest. But this is a mistake, too, and not just because settling is unavoidable but also because living life to the fullest requires settling. “You must settle, in a relatively enduring way, upon something that will be the object of your striving, in order for that striving to count as striving,” he writes: you can’t become an ultrasuccessful lawyer or artist or politician without first “settling” on law, or art, or politics, and therefore deciding to forgo the potential rewards of other careers. If you flit between them all, you’ll succeed in none of them. Likewise, there’s no possibility of a romantic relationship being truly fulfilling unless you’re willing, at least for a while, to settle for that specific relationship, with all its imperfections—which means spurning the seductive lure of an infinite number of superior imaginary alternatives.
This is also why it can be so unexpectedly calming to take actions you’d been fearing or delaying—to finally hand in your notice at work, become a parent, address a festering family issue, or close on a house purchase. 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.
Distractions and Interruptions
It’s worth pausing to notice how exceptionally strange this is. Why, exactly, are we rendered so uncomfortable by concentrating on things that matter—the things we thought we wanted to do with our lives—that we’d rather flee into distractions, which, by definition, are what we don’t want to be doing with our lives? Certain specific tasks might be so unpleasant or intimidating that a preference for avoiding them wouldn’t be very remarkable. But the more common issue is one of boredom, which often arises without explanation. Suddenly, the thing you’d resolved to do, because it mattered to you to do it, feels so staggeringly tedious that you can’t bear to focus on it for one moment more.
The solution to this mystery, dramatic though it might sound, is that whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude—with the human predicament of having limited time, and more especially, in the case of distraction, limited control over that time, which makes it impossible to feel certain about how things will turn out.
When you try to focus on something you deem important, you’re forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much.
This also makes it easier to see why the strategies generally recommended for defeating distraction—digital detoxes, personal rules about when you’ll allow yourself to check your inbox, and so forth—rarely work, or at least not for long. They involve limiting your access to the things you use to assuage your urge toward distraction, and in the case of the most addictive forms of technology, that’s surely a sensible idea. But they don’t address the urge itself. Even if you quit Facebook, or ban yourself from social media during the workday, or exile yourself to a cabin in the mountains, you’ll probably still find it unpleasantly constraining to focus on what matters, so you’ll find some way to relieve the pain by distracting yourself: by daydreaming, taking an unnecessary nap, or—the preferred option of the productivity geek—redesigning your to-do list and reorganizing your desk.
The overarching point is that what we think of as “distractions” aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.
The way to find peaceful absorption in a difficult project, or a boring Sunday afternoon, isn’t to chase feelings of peace or absorption, but to acknowledge the inevitability of discomfort, and to turn more of your attention to the reality of your situation than to railing against it.
There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you’ll never be liberated. You don’t get to dictate the course of events. And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.
The Future is Uncontrollable
In reality you never even get a single week, in the sense of being able to guarantee that it will arrive, or that you’ll be in a position to use it precisely as you wish. Instead, you just find yourself in each moment as it comes, already thrown into this time and place, with all the limitations that entails, and unable to feel certain about what might happen next. Because the assumption that time is something we can possess or control is the unspoken premise of almost all our thinking about the future, our planning and goal-setting and worrying. So it’s a constant source of anxiety and agitation, because our expectations are forever running up against the stubborn reality that time isn’t in our possession and can’t be under our control.
Rediscovering Rest
There’s nothing unusual about its demands for more days off or shorter working hours; such proposals are increasingly common. But they are almost always justified on the grounds that a well-rested worker is a more productive worker—and it was precisely this rationale that the group had been set up to question. Why, its members wanted to know, should vacations by the ocean, or meals with friends, or lazy mornings in bed need defending in terms of improved performance at work?
We actually have more leisure time than we did in previous decades. But perhaps one reason we don’t experience life that way is that leisure no longer feels very leisurely. Instead, it too often feels like another item on the to-do list. And like many of our time troubles, research suggests that this problem grows worse the wealthier you get. Rich people are frequently busy working, but they also have more options for how to use any given hour of free time: like anyone else, they could read a novel or take a walk; but they could equally be attending the opera, or planning a ski trip to Courchevel. So they’re more prone to feeling that there are leisure activities they ought to be getting around to but aren’t.
But industrialization, catalyzed by the spread of the clock-time mentality, swept all that away. Factories and mills required the coordinated labor of hundreds of people, paid by the hour, and the result was that leisure became sharply delineated from work. Implicitly, workers were offered a deal: you could do whatever you liked with your time off, so long as it didn’t damage—and preferably enhanced—your usefulness on the job. (So there was a profit motive at play when the upper classes expressed horror at the lower classes’ enthusiasm for drinking gin: coming to work with a hangover, because you’d spent your leisure time getting wasted, was a violation of the deal.)
In one narrow sense, this new situation left working people freer than before, since their leisure was more truly their own than when church and community had dictated almost everything they did with it. But at the same time, a new hierarchy had been established. Work, now, demanded to be seen as the real point of existence; leisure was merely an opportunity for recovery and replenishment, for the purposes of further work. The problem was that for the average mill or factory worker, industrial work wasn’t meaningful to the point of existence: you did it for the money, not for the intrinsic satisfaction. So now the whole of life - work and leisure - was to be valued for the sake of something else, in the future, rather than for itself.
To rest for the sake of rest—to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake—entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value.
Becoming Impatient
Though it’s a hard thing to establish scientifically, we’re almost certainly much more impatient than we used to be. Our decreasing tolerance for delay is reflected in statistics on everything from road rage and the length of politicians’ sound bites to the number of seconds the average web user is prepared to wait for a slow-loading page. (It has been calculated that if Amazon’s front page loaded one second more slowly, the company would lose $1.6 billion in annual sales.)
The modern disease of accelerated living is an addiction to speed.
But as society accelerates, something shifts. In more and more contexts, patience becomes a form of power. In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.
Patience has a terrible reputation. For one thing, the prospect of doing anything that you’ve been told will require patience simply seems unappetizing. More specifically, though, it’s disturbingly passive.
The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad
What kind of freedom do we really want when it comes to time? On the one hand, there’s the culturally celebrated goal of individual time sovereignty—the freedom to set your own schedule, to make your own choices, to be free from other people’s intrusions into your precious four thousand weeks.
On the other hand, there’s the profound sense of meaning that comes from being willing to fall in with the rhythms of the rest of the word: to be free to engage in all the worthwhile collaborative endeavors that require at least some sacrifice of your sole control over what you do and when. Strategies for achieving the first kind of freedom are the sort of thing that fills books of productivity advice: ideal morning routines, strict personal schedules, and tactics for limiting how long you spend answering email each day, plus homilies on the importance of “learning to say no”—all of them functioning as bulwarks against the risk that other people might exert too much influence over how your time gets used. And undoubtedly these have a role to play: we do need to set firm boundaries so that bullying bosses, exploitative employment arrangements or a guilty tendency towards people-pleasing don’t end up dicating the course of every day.
Beauty in Insignificance
No wonder it comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance: it’s the feeling of realizing that you’d been holding yourself, all this time, to standards you couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet. And this realization isn’t merely calming but liberating, because once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a “life well spent,” you’re freed to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time. You’re freed, too, to consider the possibility that many of the things you’re already doing with it are more meaningful than you’d supposed—and that until now, you’d subconsciously been devaluing them, on the grounds that they weren’t “significant” enough.
Rephrasing Time
The reason time feels like such a struggle is that we’re constantly attempting to master it—to lever ourselves into a position of dominance and control over our unfolding lives so that we might finally feel safe and secure, and no longer so vulnerable to events.
But the deeper truth behind all this is the suggestion that we don’t get or have time at all—that instead we are time. We’ll never get the upper hand in our relationship with the moments of our lives because we are nothing but those moments. To “master” them would first entail getting outside of them, splitting off from them. But where would we go? “Time is the substance I am made of,” writes Jorge Luis Borges. “Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” There’s no scrambling up to the safety of the riverbank when the river is you. And so insecurity and vulnerability are the default state—because in each of the moments that you inescapably are, anything could happen, from an urgent email that scuppers your plans for the morning to a bereavement that shakes your world to its foundations.
Entering space and time completely, which may be as far as any of us ever get—means admitting defeat. It means letting your illusions die. You have to accept that there will always be too much to do; that you can’t avoid tough choices or make the world run at your preferred speed; that no experience, least of all close relationships with other human beings, can ever be guaranteed in advance to turn out painlessly and well—and that from a cosmic viewpoint, when it’s all over, it won’t have counted for very much anyway.
And in exchange for accepting all that? You get to actually be here. You get to have some real purchase on life. You get to spend your finite time focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now, in this moment. Maybe it’s worth spelling out that none of this is an argument against long-term endeavors like marriage or parenting, building organizations or reforming political systems, and certainly not against tackling the climate crisis; these are among the things that matter most. But it’s an argument that even those things can only ever matter now, in each moment of the work involved, whether or not they’ve yet reached what the rest of the world defines as fruition. Because now is all you ever get.
To start to make the most of your finite time:
Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be
In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?
Fortunately, precisely because that’s all you can do, it’s also all that you ever have to do. If you can face the truth about time in this way—if you can step more fully into the condition of being a limited human—you will reach the greatest heights of productivity, accomplishment, service, and fulfillment that were ever in the cards for you to begin with. And the life you will see incrementally taking shape, in the rearview mirror, will be one that meets the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your weeks well: not how many people you helped, or how much you got done; but that working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got around to doing—and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing—whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.
Final Remark
The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.
A few tools for embracing our finiteness
Adopt a “fixed volume” approach to productivity. Keep two to-do lists, one “open” and one “closed.” The open list is for everything that’s on your plate and will doubtless be nightmarishly long. Fortunately, it’s not your job to tackle it: instead, feed tasks from the open list to the closed one—that is, a list with a fixed number of entries, ten at most. The rule is that you can’t add a new task until one’s completed.
2. Establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work. Train yourself to get incrementally better at tolerating that anxiety, by consciously postponing everything you possibly can, except for one thing.
Focus on one big project at a time.
Strategic underachievement—that is, nominating in advance whole areas of life in which you won’t expect excellence of yourself—is that you focus that time and energy more effectively
Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete.
Keep a “done list,” which starts empty first thing in the morning, and which you then gradually fill with whatever you accomplish through the day.
Reduce phone distractions as possible—first by removing social media apps, even email if you dare, and then by switching the screen from colour to grayscale. Choose devices with only one purpose, such as the Kindle ereader, on which it’s tedious and awkward to do anything but read
Pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have. Experience life with twice the usual intensity. When presented with a challenging or boring moment, try deliberately adopting an attitude of curiosity.
Act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off until later.
Do Nothing” meditation, for which the instructions are to simply set a timer, probably only for five or ten minutes at first; sit down in a chair; and then stop trying to do anything. Nothing is harder to do than nothing.
