Relax, you’ll never get it all done

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.”

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