Emily

Relax, you’ll never get it all done

Life / /

The problem with most time management systems, says Oliver Burkeman in his amazing book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, is that they don’t work. They tell you that you can get it all done, if only you manage your time just right. With enough preparation and calculation, you can have everything in perfect working order. 

But have you ever noticed how the second you complete your to-do list, it gets filled right back up? You answer an email only to receive another one. You finish vacuuming and now have time to do the dishes. “Productivity is a trap,” Oliver says. “Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.”

The problem is that we think of time as something to master, something separate from ourselves—instead of what it is: the unfolding of one moment to the next, the substance of life. “Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure … and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it,” Oliver says. So we end up filling our time with activities that have some future benefit. It becomes harder to just be, to accept and love the present moment for what it is. “We labor at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life,” said Nietzsche, “because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”

Oliver compares our view of time to an early medieval England peasant’s view: 

“The medieval farmer simply had no reason to adopt such a bizarre idea in the first place. … There was no need to think of time as something abstract and separate from life: you milked the cows when they needed milking and harvested the crops when it was harvest time … There was no anxious pressure to ‘get everything done,’ either, because a farmer’s work is infinite: there will always be another milking and another harvest, forever, so there’s no sense in racing toward some hypothetical moment of completion.”

There will never be some magical day in the future when you will feel completely in control, when everything will be clean and completed, when there will be nothing left to do. We can’t possibly get everything done (in fact, we have to neglect almost everything to get anything done). 

But this is great news.

It means we can stop pushing happiness and contentment into the future. We’re free to relax in the boundless joy of the present moment. “We can enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake,” says Oliver, by “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 [life of its] value.”

Love is a choice

Philosophy / /

Holocaust survivor, Dr. Edith Eva Eger, was a young teenager when she was sent to a Nazi concentration camp. On the day of her arrival, her parents were ushered to the gas chamber by a guard who, later that same day, made her dance for him for his entertainment. In her incredible book The Choice, Dr. Eger—now a world-renowned psychologist—recounts how she was tested by a patient—a fourteen-year-old boy, sent to her by a judge, for car theft. The boy leaned on her desk and said, “I’m going to kill all the Jews.” He said he would also kill anyone who wasn’t white. He went on ranting about the blights to America’s purity.

“I thought I would be sick,” Dr. Eger says. “I struggled not to run from the room. What is the meaning of this? I wanted to shout. I wanted to shake the boy, say, Who do you think you’re talking to? I saw my mother go to the gas chamber. … My whole being trembled with unease, and I struggled with the inclination to wag my finger, shake my fist, make him accountable for his hate—without being accountable for my own. This boy didn’t kill my parents. Withholding my love wouldn’t conquer his prejudice.”

She prayed for the ability to meet him with love—the accepting and unconditional love she gave to all her patients. “I summoned every image I had of unconditional love.” She called to mind a story of one of the Righteous Gentiles, Corrie ten Boom, who was sent with her family to a concentration camp. Corrie’s sister died there, in her arms. Eventually, she was released (due to a clerical error) and a few years later, met with one of the vilest guards at her camp—one of the guards who was responsible for her sister’s death. She could have lashed out at him, spit at him, wished him the worst. Instead, “she prayed for the strength to forgive him, and she took his hands in her own. She says that in that moment, the former prisoner clasping the hands of the former guard, she felt the purest and most profound love.”

“I wondered if it was possible that this racist boy had been sent to me so I could learn about unconditional love,” Dr. Eger remembers thinking. “What opportunity did I have in this moment? What choice could I make right then that could move me in the direction of love?”

She decided to let the boy talk. She listened. She realized they had a lot in common. She had lost her parents, and so had he. “We both thought of ourselves as damaged goods. In letting go of my judgment, in letting go of my desire for him to be or believe anything different, by seeing his vulnerability and his yearning for belonging and love, in allowing myself to get past my own fear and anger in order to accept and love him, I was able to give him something [he] couldn’t [give himself]—an authentic image of his own worth. When he left my office that day, he didn’t know a thing about my history. But he had seen an alternative to hate and prejudice, he was no longer talking about killing, he had shown me his soft smile. And I had taken responsibility that I not perpetuate hostility and blame, that I not bow to hate and say, You are too much for me. … We have the capacity to hate and the capacity to love. Which one we reach for—our inner Hitler or inner ten Boom—is up to us.”

Slow productivity

Creativity / /

“Don’t underestimate the amount of time professional idea-people spend thinking,” says Cal Newport. In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, he argues that we should use a craft-centric instead of a productivity-centric approach to our work. A productivity-centric approach is geared toward checking items off a to-do list; a craft-centric one involves deep thinking and deliberate practice. While the productivity-centric route is much more alluring (redesigning your website is less painful and ambiguous than, say, grappling with a new theory), it’s the craft-centric mindset where you will experience the most growth. And over time, the growth will be profound. “My working habits are simple,” Ernest Hemingway famously said, “long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.”

This craft-centric approach ties in perfectly with the emerging topic of slow productivity (prompted by recent books like How to Do Nothing and Four Thousand Weeks). In this YouTube video, Cal explains the 3 elements of slow-productivity (which I wrote on a notecard and taped to my computer):

1. Do fewer things

2. Work at a natural pace

3. Obsess over quality

“If you seek tranquility, do less,” said Marcus Aurelius. “Doing what’s essential brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better.”

Just that you do something

Life / /

A few weeks ago, my mom bought a frameless glass cabinet on Amazon and I offered to help assemble it. I’m not the best at putting things together, but it looked straightforward enough. Plus, the older my parents get, the more impressed they are by my capabilities. “Let’s see what we got here,” I smiled as I mimed pushing up my sleeves.

I spent the next two hours trying to interpret the instructions. Is this the rubber peg or the neoprene knob? I jumped online to find a YouTube tutorial—or at least a more helpful guide—and got nowhere. I went back to the instructions that came in the box and read them all the way through, hoping to get an idea of where to start by understanding the overall picture. Still nothing. 

I told my parents I was sorry, that I didn’t know where to begin—but Courtney would (my wife can put together anything). So, the following weekend, Court and I went to their house, determined to assemble the cabinet. She looked at the directions and admitted they were vague. But sure enough, an hour later, she had it put together. “How did you know to put that screw there to start?” I asked. “That’s the only thing I could make sense of,” she replied. “If I don’t know what the next step is, I just start doing something. Eventually, it all comes together.”

How to handle insults

Philosophy / /

Situations, circumstances, what other people say and think—these things cannot inherently affect you. You’re made no different by them. By themselves, they’re powerless. They need your interpretation to have any effect.

Ryan Holiday put it like this: if someone sends you a scathing email, but you never see it, it wouldn’t affect you, right? That’s because the power of an external thing, like an email or contentious remark, depends entirely on your awareness of it and your opinion about it.

Epictetus said that your impression of an external thing is a value judgment. So if you blame someone for being rude to you, realize you’re blaming your own judgment.

Whoa.

Epictetus also kept a sense of humor about it. If someone insulted him, he’d say, ‘Well, thank goodness they don’t know about my other faults, or they’d really have something to say!’

When a man collided with Marcus Cato (a senator of the first century BC and Stoic Philosopher, revered as the most ethically wise philosopher since Socrates) in a public bath, he apologized afterward for his insolence. Cato replied that he didn’t remember being bumped. “It is the mark of a great mind,” Seneca said, “to disregard injuries.”

This is similar to another (and perhaps better) technique Epictetus used to handle an insult: he would forget about it—because it didn’t concern him. It concerned the person who said it.

“Choose not to be harmed,” said Marcus Aurelius, “and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed, and you haven’t been.”

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