Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

In the Long Run, We’re All Dead

• The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frentic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.
• 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.
• In the modern world, the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall once pointed out, time feels like an unstoppable conveyer belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones; and becoming ‘more productive’ just seems to cause the belt to speed up.
• This is the maddening truth about time, which most advice on managing it seems to miss. It’s like an obstreperous toddler: the more you struggle to control it, to make it conform to your agenda, the further it slips from your control.
• 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 care most deeply about ourselves.

Part I: Choosing to Choose

The Limit-Embracing Life

• Soon your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time: it stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked or overwhelmed.
• The fundamental problem is that this attitude towards time sets up a rigged game in which it’s impossible ever to feel as though you’re doing well enough. Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time - instead of just being time, you might say - it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally ‘out of the way’. Superficially, this seems like a sensible way to live, especially in a hypercompetitive economic climate, in which it feels as though you must constantly make the most judicious use of your time if you want to stay afloat. (It also reflects the manner in which most of us were brought up: to prioritise future benefits over current enjoyments.) But ultimately it backfires. It wrenches us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning into the future, worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing everything in terms of some later, hoped-for benefit, so that peace of mind never quite arrives. And it makes it all but impossible to experience ‘deep time’, that sense of timeless time which depends on forgetting the abstract yardstick and plunging back into the vividness of reality instead.
• Most of us invest a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves…The details differ from person to person, but the kernel is the same. We recoil from the notion that this is it - that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at. Instead, we mentally fight against the way things are - so that, in the words of the psychotherapist Bruce Tift, ‘we don’t have to consciously participate in what it’s like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality’.
• 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, obviously, if you never even start it. We fill our minds with busyness and distraction to numb ourselves emotionally.
• 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.
• 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.
• ‘Missing out’ is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place. Every decision to use a portion of our time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time, but didn’t - and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you.

The Efficiency Trap

• Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion
• 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, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.