2024-01-15
LIFE MGMT
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Four Thousand Weeks
by Oliver Burkeman
Publisher Note:
The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.
Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks.
Troy Note:
I've read SO MANY books on this subject matter that I tend to pass them over but something about this one made me take it home with me. You can tell by the number of dog-eared pages that I did not regret the decision and I'm not one to finish a book I don't enjoy.
Passage(s) of Note:
"If you really thought life would never end, then nothing could ever genuinely matter, because you'd never be faced with having to decide whether or not to use a portion of your precious life on something," Hagglund writes, "I could never take my life to be at stake, and I would never be seized by the need to do anything with my time." Eternity would e deathly dull, because whenever you found yourself wondering whether or not do any given thing and any given day, the answer would always be: Who cares? After all, there's always tomorrow, and the next day and the one after that...
... "a plan is just a thought." We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It's an expression of your current thoughts about how you'd ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. |
